Sport & Fitness

‘When I joined Queens Park Rangers at 13,’ recalls former goalkeeper Peter Hucker, ‘I was living in east London. Training was in Greenford, at the far end of the Central Line. After school, I’d head to the tube station and do the hour-and-a-half journey. Three or four of us lived out my way, so the club laid on a minibus to ferry us back home afterwards.’

Hucker, who played for QPR in the 1982 FA Cup final and who now runs a football school in Wanstead and coaches at several professional London clubs, is only talking about 30 years ago. Yet the scenario he describes is unimaginable in the modern game. Gone is the notion of football as the archetypal working-class sport. Not only is the prawn-sandwich brigade occupying the best seats in every ground, they’ve become parents of the next generation of players. Football’s middle-class revolution extends down to the nine-year-olds living out their dreams. Feature continues

‘When I was young,’ says Hucker, ‘kids honed their talent in the street. Tell me the last time you saw kids playing football in the street. Almost all football is organised now, which means people have to pay for it. This means clubs are missing out on talent. Although we try to make junior football as affordable as possible, if kids can’t pay, they don’t play.’

Most pro clubs now operate a network of development centres feeding into an academy. ‘If you’re in the academy, you have to be able to get there,’ explains Hucker. ‘The permitted travelling time is an hour-and-a-half. This means you need parents who are able to ferry their children around. Go to an academy game on a Saturday morning and look in the car park – you’d think it was the first team’s car park sometimes.’

It’s a view corroborated by sports writer Jim White in his book about junior football, ‘You’ll Win Nothing with Kids’. Interviewing former Manchester United star Brian McClair, now the club’s academy director, White notes: ‘The best footballers might be found in the poorest backgrounds, but the system [McClair] presides over insists that those who make it to the top aren’t from there. Ted Beckham was a self-employed electrician; his son might not have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but there was plenty of cutlery rattling around in his kitchen. Most of the parents watching training did not look as though they were worrying where the next meal was coming from. They were well dressed, with 4x4s out in the car park.’

Nor is it the case that East End boys still sign for West Ham, west London boys for Chelsea and north London kids for Arsenal or Spurs. The search for new talent is worldwide. ‘Kids are brought into academies from places like Sweden,’ says Hucker, who also bemoans the decline of that most egalitarian route to footballing glory, the school team. ‘Schools football is dead. Kids used to progress from the school team to the district and on to the county, and everything was paid for. Now the academies take all the cream.’

The situation is similar in other sports. Gifted young cricketers in the age-group squads at Essex are required to attend weekly training in Chelmsford – an 80-mile round trip on a midweek evening for a child living in Leyton or Limehouse with no viable public transport alternatives to a parent’s car. Those picked to play for the county must buy their own kit. It’s perhaps no surprise that 35 per cent of professional cricketers are privately educated.

Tennis is one sport that is working hard to break down barriers. First came the Westway and Islington indoor tennis centres, high-quality facilities in urban areas with preferential pricing for locals. The ‘city tennis club’ concept has since been rolled out by the Lawn Tennis Association, with Clissold Park Junior Tennis Club (now called Hackney City Tennis Club) as the pilot in 2001 and Burgess Park in Southwark among more recent schemes.

The Hackney database now has more than 1,400 juniors and 400 adults, while two of Hackney’s under-ten boys have won six Grand
Prix tournaments between them this year. When Lucas Taylor from Hackney reached the final of the Solihull International in July, he was following in famous footsteps: Andy Murray is a three-times champion.