Nine years old.

Think about that age.

Primary school.

Baby teeth.

Parents packing the bag.

Kids losing water bottles.

Some still needing Mum or Dad when they wake up frightened at night.

English professional football looks at them and starts making decisions about talent.

The Premier League calls U9 to U11 the Foundation Phase. Its academy system begins formally at U9 and is governed by detailed Youth Development Rules.

Football has normalised this.

I haven’t.

I think it has gone too far.

Not because I am against coaching children.

Quite the opposite.

Give children brilliant coaches.

Give them good pitches.

Give them futsal.

Give them small-sided games.

Give them thousands of touches of the football.

What I question is why any of that requires us to turn a nine-year-old into a professional football prospect.

There is a difference between developing a child and building an academy asset.

Football has blurred the line.

My Kid Plays For City

I know families with children in academy football.

It can become a full-time job.

Training.

Driving.

Matches.

More driving.

Weekends gone.

School arrangements.

Meals in the car.

Sibling childcare.

Family plans shifted.

Then another motorway journey home because a ten-year-old has academy training.

The child joins the academy.

Before long, the family joins it too.

Then come four words that change the psychology of the whole house.

My kid plays for City.

Or United.

Liverpool.

Chelsea.

Arsenal.

The badge changes everything.

Grandparents tell people.

Teachers know.

Parents at school know.

The child knows.

This isn’t just football anymore.

There is status attached to it.

Expectation.

Pride.

Fear.

A future nobody can possibly know yet.

The parents aren’t doing anything wrong.

They are human.

If Manchester City tells you your nine-year-old is exceptional, it takes a remarkable parent not to wonder where it might lead.

England.

The Premier League.

A professional contract.

The Etihad.

The adults’ imagination can be ten years ahead.

The child is still nine.

The Clubs Will Tell You Why

Academies have an obvious defence.

They will tell you that the technical difference between a child developed in elite academy football from nine and a talented grassroots player arriving at fourteen can be enormous.

I believe them.

Of course it can.

Take one talented nine-year-old.

Give him elite coaches.

More training.

Better pitches.

Better teammates.

Better opposition.

Teach him scanning.

First touch.

Body position.

Receiving under pressure.

Passing angles.

Movement.

1v1s.

Decision-making.

Repeat it for five years.

Take another talented child and give him one session a week with someone’s dad doing his best after finishing work.

Compare them at fourteen.

Guess who looks better.

Then professional football says:

See. We needed him at nine.

No.

You have proved that good coaching works.

You have not proved that Manchester City needed to control his football development from nine.

Those are not the same argument.

Coaching Is Not Ownership

This distinction matters.

I have no problem with Manchester City coaching a ten-year-old.

Let United coach him.

Let Blackburn coach him.

Let good grassroots coaches work with him.

Let him play futsal.

Let him visit regional technical centres.

Give him specialist sessions.

Expose him to better opposition.

Raise the standard around him.

What I question is why the child needs an exclusive institutional identity attached to a professional football club before he has even reached secondary school.

Academy registration matters because once registered, players and families enter a regulated relationship with their club. Current Premier League guidance even restricts registered academy players from approaching or communicating with another academy except where the Youth Development Rules permit it.

That is not simply coaching.

That is a controlled talent market.

For nine-year-olds.

The Premier League itself describes the Foundation Phase as focusing on ball mastery, 1v1 ability, confidence and developing a love of the game.

Good.

Then protect the love.

Because love of football doesn’t require exclusivity.

The Arms Race

Here is what I think really drives the age down.

Fear.

If Manchester City decided tomorrow that it would not recruit children until fourteen while Manchester United continued taking players at nine, City would fear giving United five years’ access to Manchester’s best young footballers.

So City won’t stop.

United won’t stop.

Liverpool won’t stop.

Chelsea won’t stop.

Nobody wants to blink first.

The logic becomes:

If we don’t take him, somebody else will.

That makes perfect competitive sense.

It does not make it good policy.

What is good for Manchester City’s academy recruitment department and what is good for English football are not automatically the same thing.

Sometimes they may be opposites.

Football needs somebody capable of seeing beyond the next player another club might steal.

Best At Being Nine

Talent identification at nine is a snapshot of a moving human being.

The body changes.

The brain changes.

Confidence changes.

Personality changes.

Motivation changes.

Children grow at different rates.

Some mature early.

Some mature late.

Research in academy football has repeatedly found selection biases connected with relative age and biological maturation. That should make anyone cautious about attaching powerful labels to children very early.

Yet football does it anyway.

Academy player.

Grassroots player.

Elite.

Released.

Not retained.

At nine.

Maybe sometimes we’re not identifying who will become the best footballer.

Maybe we’re identifying who happens to be best at being nine.

Football should have enough humility to know the difference.

And Then We Release Them

Football loves the signing picture.

Tracksuit.

Badge.

Proud parents.

Big smile.

Nobody posts the release meeting.

For the academy, it is talent management.

For the kid, it can be an earthquake.

For three years he hasn’t simply been Charlie.

He has been:

Charlie who plays for Liverpool.

His parents drove him.

His grandparents told everybody.

His mates knew.

His school knew.

He knew.

Then an adult decides:

We are continuing without you.

The Premier League openly acknowledges that the majority of young people passing through academy football will not become professional players and operates player-care and transition support around that reality.

Good.

But perhaps football should ask a harder question.

Why manufacture such a powerful professional identity so young in the first place?

Count The Parents’ Investment

Professional football likes talking about what it invests in academies.

Count the parents too.

Petrol.

Hours.

Lost weekends.

Annual leave.

Food on the road.

Time away from siblings.

One parent driving north.

Another parent taking the daughter somewhere else.

Holidays rearranged around fixtures.

Everybody adapting because one child has become the footballer.

That labour rarely appears on an academy spreadsheet.

Neither does the emotional investment.

And the more a family sacrifices, the harder walking away becomes.

We’ve done this for four years.

He can’t miss tonight.

What if they question his commitment?

What if another player gets ahead?

What if this is his chance?

Opportunity starts becoming obligation.

A child can still love football inside that world.

But it is no longer simple.

They Are Children, Not Assets

I understand why clubs do this.

Academy directors need talent.

Owners want pathways.

Sporting directors want homegrown players.

Everyone dreams of producing the next Phil Foden.

But somewhere football has to say:

He is a child before he is a player.

Because if earlier access is always better, where does the logic stop?

Nine?

Why?

Why not eight?

Seven?

Five?

Get him before somebody else gets him.

Scout nursery.

Study his expected goals against the sandpit.

Ridiculous?

Of course.

But that’s the direction of travel when competitive advantage becomes the only test.

Somebody has to draw a line.

I think football has drawn it far too young.

The World Cup Problem

There is also an awkward fact for anyone claiming professional academy football must begin extremely early.

Researchers examined 815 players who appeared at the 2022 World Cup.

The median age at which those players entered a professional academy was 13.2 years.

England had the youngest median entry age among the countries studied at 8.4 years.

The researchers concluded that entering a professional academy before twelve was not a prerequisite for reaching a World Cup.

That matters.

Because the World Cup was not populated by technically backward players who had missed some magical U9 development window.

It contained the best footballers on earth.

So when somebody tells me:

If we don’t take them at nine, they’ll be miles behind at fourteen.

I have a simple answer.

They may be behind your academy fourteen-year-old.

That doesn’t mean they cannot catch him.

It doesn’t mean they cannot overtake him.

And it doesn’t establish that football needed to professionalise five years of their childhood to produce an elite adult player.

Give Childhood Back To Grassroots Football

I would change the model.

Below fourteen, drastically reduce professional academy exclusivity.

Not coaching.

Exclusivity.

Build regional technical centres.

Fund elite coaching.

Invest heavily in grassroots coaches.

Use professional academy expertise.

Create futsal programmes.

Run festivals.

Give talented children access to higher-level sessions.

Let them play against strong players.

Then send them back to their communities.

Let them play with their mates.

Let them try centre-forward.

Goalkeeper.

Centre-half.

Let them score ten.

Let them lose ten.

Let them attempt stupid overhead kicks.

Let them have a bad game without wondering whether somebody with a clipboard has just ended their future.

Re-route the EPPP Money

And no, this doesn’t need to become another football proposal that ends with somebody begging Premier League clubs for charity.

The money is already in elite youth development.

The Premier League says more than £2 billion has been invested through EPPP in Premier League and EFL academies over the last decade, while around £22 million a year is invested in workforce development.

So change where part of the money goes.

Under a reformed EPPP, I would create an independently governed Regional Technical Fund.

For U9-U13 football, establish an audited baseline for each academy’s existing Foundation Phase expenditure.

Then require, for example, 50 per cent of that Foundation Phase-equivalent investment to move into independent regional development provision.

That 50 per cent is my proposal.

Not current policy.

The club still pays.

The child still receives elite coaching.

The coach still gets employed.

The facility still gets used.

What disappears is the club’s ability to turn access to that development into early ownership of the player.

The money follows development, not recruitment.

Clubs could nominate coaches and share methodology.

They could not control selection.

They could not brand the programme as their private talent pool.

They could not receive priority access to the children attending it.

Every eligible professional club contributes.

Every talented child in the region has a route in.

Independent governance protects access.

Professional football funds the standard.

The clubs provide the capital.

Football protects the childhood.

That is reform.

Not charity.

Plug The Shadow Market

There is an obvious problem.

The clubs will try to get around it.

Not necessarily because they are evil.

Because competitive organisations respond to incentives.

Ban formal academy recruitment below fourteen while leaving loopholes everywhere else and somebody will create:

development centres

partner schools

preferred grassroots clubs

private clinics

invitation-only programmes

consultant scouting networks

commercial academy partners

Call it anything you like.

If the same club is identifying the children, collecting their data, controlling their coaching and obtaining privileged access later, you haven’t abolished early recruitment.

You’ve changed the headed paper.

So the regulation has to follow control and influence, not branding.

Any professional club, owner, academy employee or connected organisation operating an undisclosed recruitment pipeline for U14 players should be treated exactly as if the club had recruited those children directly.

That means mandatory disclosure of partner organisations.

No preferential future-registration agreements.

No private player databases accessible only to one professional club.

No financial inducements to grassroots clubs in exchange for priority access.

No academy employee quietly running the “independent” programme on Friday evening.

No clever lawyer putting a different company name above the door.

And there need to be consequences.

Academy-registration bans.

Fines that actually hurt.

Loss of development funding.

For systematic or repeated breaches, academy-category sanctions.

The Premier League already has enforcement mechanisms under its Youth Development Rules. In 2024, Brighton accepted a breach that resulted in a suspended six-month restriction on registering certain academy players, alongside a £20,000 fine and costs.

So enforcement isn’t some impossible new concept.

Make the rules clear.

Audit relationships.

Protect whistleblowers.

Follow the money.

And punish circumvention.

Otherwise the shiny new regional system will last about six months before everybody discovers that Manchester Elite Future Stars Community Development Centre Ltd mysteriously sends all its best fourteen-year-olds to Manchester City.

Football people are inventive.

Write rules accordingly.

Keep The Pool Alive

This is where I think reform could actually produce more elite players, not fewer.

Every early selection creates an early non-selection.

Every badge creates an outside.

Thousands of children who miss the first cut receive less elite attention.

Some are late developers.

Some grow.

Some become quicker.

Some become stronger.

Some discover obsession later.

Some develop confidence.

Some suddenly understand the game.

Some were simply born at the wrong end of the year.

English football should not be obsessed with identifying the winner earlier.

It should be obsessed with keeping the potential winner pool alive for longer.

Imagine thousands more technically developed thirteen-year-olds entering adolescence without having been branded successes or failures by a professional club.

Then let the academies scout them.

Now you’re identifying from a deeper pool.

That could be better talent development than the current system.

Fourteen Is Still Young

Let’s not pretend fourteen gives you certainty.

It doesn’t.

The brain is still developing.

The body is still developing.

Personality is still forming.

Football will still get players wrong.

But there is an enormous difference between fourteen and nine.

A fourteen-year-old understands considerably more about commitment.

About sacrifice.

About competition.

About consequences.

About whether he even wants this life.

At nine, adults are largely choosing the environment for him.

That matters.

Let Them Play

There are brilliant academy coaches.

Brilliant academy staff.

People who care enormously about children.

This isn’t an attack on them.

It is an attack on a system whose incentives push everyone towards the same conclusion:

Find him earlier.

Get him registered.

Develop him before somebody else does.

Protect your investment.

Beat the club down the road.

That logic makes sense for an individual club.

Somebody else has to think about football.

And somebody has to think about the nine-year-old sitting in the back of a car late at night on a school night wearing a Premier League academy tracksuit.

He doesn’t need a career.

He needs a childhood.

Give him brilliant coaching.

Give him great facilities.

Give him competition.

Give him opportunities.

Give him the ball.

Then give him room to grow.

Professional football will still be there at fourteen.

And if an academy cannot develop a genuinely exceptional fourteen-year-old because it didn’t control him from nine, perhaps football has been asking the wrong question all along.

The question isn’t:

How young can we identify them?

It is:

How long can we develop all of them before we start deciding which children are allowed to dream?

Let the kids play.