He is the stock character in so many footballer autobiographies. The kid who was more talented than the hero of the autobiography, the player who had it all. He may even have driven the star to greater heights but, for whatever reason, he didn’t make it despite his abundant gifts.
He is almost as familiar to us as the complaints handed down from generation to generation about young people and their feckless ways. As the man said, “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today.”
Of course, when the poet Heriod said that back in 750 BCE the young people must have been particularly out of control. The problems of young people and their lack of responsibility has always bothered older generations, even if there is only one thing more worrying than an irresponsible youth and that is a responsible one.
In modern football, there is another cause of anxiety: the young footballer with too much money. Liverpool have decided to cap the salaries of their 17-year-old first season professionals at £40,000 a year, something which is also a policy at Southampton and Spurs.
Most people will welcome this development and feel it was long overdue. Something must be done to put a halt to the culture of players getting too much, too young which would seem to clearly hinder their chances of making it.
After all, where is the drive to succeed if you earn as much as ten grand a week at the age of 17 or 18?
Yet it may be that the thing which is preventing the development of more young players is the same thing which has always prevented the development of more young players: they are young and football is ruthless.
Most players who join academies will fail to make it as far as the first team of the club they join. Many won’t make it in football at all and some will be pleased to make any kind of living from the game. But it has always been that way.
Money may not help, but then being young doesn’t help as there are so many distractions. Even the ones who don’t get distracted sometimes fail as Nick Hornby pointed out when he used the story of Gus Caesar to illustrate the cruelty of talent in Fever Pitch.
“To get where he did,” Hornby wrote, “Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation (the rest of us can only dream about having his kind of skill) and it still wasn’t quite enough.”
And Caesar was one of the lucky ones who went on and played for the first team of the club he joined as a kid. Others may fail because they earn too much money (although £40,000 a year sounds like enough to derail plenty of 17-year-olds) or because they succumb to the pitfalls that have entrapped young people through the generations.
In the past, they would have been said to have spent too much time in the bookies, in the snooker hall or in the pub. Now they are distracted by their own magnificence as it is reflected in their sudden wealth.
If it is harder now for young players, it is not because they have become more feckless or bloated due to riches, it is because they compete against the best in the world rather than simply the best in Britain.
But there is an instinctive desire to blame it on money as it seems logical that a young player who has money won’t be as driven as one who hasn’t money.
But that is the problem with the young: nobody knows what’s going to drive them. Nobody knows what will allow some with talent to throw it all away. Maybe it is because they have too much money or love or drink or simply because they foolishly believe their talent will be enough. Nobody knows what it is about others that allows them to resist every temptation.
The footballer who comes through at his own club like John Terry, Paul Scholes or Jamie Carragher – or even Gus Caesar – has shown an extraordinary level of commitment. They have resisted the temptations most of us succumb to when we are young. And they are told to grow up fast. They can’t coast through a series of dead-end jobs or spend three years finding out who they are in university which is how many of us wash the recklessness out of our system.
Instead they must survive in a ruthless business where survival depends on many factors including luck and ambition which can be as decisive a factor as talent. If there is a pathway, it is narrow and perilous.
Capping wages may help some stay on the right track, while some of Liverpool’s other ideas will surely help. The club want their players to play as much football as they can, believing they will benefit from turning out for their school or local sides, even if that is contrary to FA advice.
Maybe they will succeed in producing more players who don’t get fooled into believing they have made it, but it may be more complicated than that.
When Stephen Ireland joined Aston Villa in 2010, he told the media that he was enjoying things more at his new club than he had at Manchester City and explained why.
“Even the young lads are so polite. I’m actually quite shocked with that. At City they’re not like that. They’re coming in with £10,000 watches on their wrists and walking around as if they have played 200 Premier League games.”
As Ireland spoke about this culture that was being created by the frivolous youth, his convertible Bentley was parked outside the training ground. That’s the problem with money. Sometimes too much is not enough.
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