A large amount of the kids taken into academies are from very modest to say the least, to actively very poor backgrounds. If they are being offered thousands a week just to be YTS, and at elite level it really is that ballpark, it’s almost impossible for them to turn it down. All you need is one pro contract, even for three years and even if you never get near a first team squad, and you’re talking the best part of 10k a week at a big PL side. Sometimes it’s even more. To put into perspective, 10k a week for three years is £1.5m in earnings. That’s hard to turn down for anybody, but especially for any player from an exceptionally working class background. Any player from the north east is from the poorest area of England, so if you’re a local lad playing for someone like Sunderland and suddenly a Liverpool comes knocking, there’s a huge chance that you’re going to be in a position where turning down the chance to go there even at 14/15 years old cannot be considered. Some of them probably live in houses that aren’t even worth 100k, and clubs like Liverpool can afford to pay any mortgage off that their parents might have, or if they’re from a council estate they can provide their family with their own, decent home almost overnight.
People like to romanticise the notion of football and the idea of playing it safe and doing what’s best to get on the pitch at the weekend, making smart choices and playing the long game etc, but the harsh reality is that the majority of football is nothing but a meat market based on the rich buying and trading in predominantly poor and underprivileged kids. Kids who quite often have not much else in their life bar a football and a pair of boots that they dream of using to get out of where they’re from. Kids who also spend most of their youth watching their mates being rejected, released and sent back to the environment they so badly wanted to get away from. This is also why even when these kids make it and go on to be sought after players at whatever level they break through at, they almost always go where the money is no matter what. They don’t owe anybody anything bar trying their best when they play, and have seen first hand how brutal and cut throat the game is, and how willingly and coldly some of their friends have been tossed aside and sometimes never recovered as a result.
In a nutshell, it’s all about money and getting what’s on offer while it’s there, and getting as far away as possible from the life they’ve known. There are very, very, very few footballers from anything approaching a middle class background, let alone higher. It would be like someone who is starving being told to turn down the steak dinners with all the trimmings because they’re on to a good thing with the crisps and Mars bars. It’s fanciful in the extreme. And as for the Gavin Whyte comment someone made about him turning down Leeds for Oxford, he did no such thing. We made an actual offer and they didn’t - if they bid for him like we did rather than scout and consider him, he wouldn’t be here. Just the same as Sykes was joining Port Vale until we snuck in and offered a bit more money as well as a place in a squad one division above them.
