The power of informal play

Every year, Premier League academies destroy tens of thousands of dreams. If a boy is recruited by a Premier League academy before the age of nine, they have fewer than a one in 200 chance of going on to play for the club’s first team. And so, for 99.5% of the academy intake, the thousands of hours training are ultimately only the route to heartache.

It would be comforting, perhaps, to think that there was a strong correlation between how much time children spent in an academy and their prospects of stardom. But this idea has been debunked. A comprehensive analysis of Premier League academies compared two groups of academy graduates: players offered three-year scholarships aged 16; and players released by their clubs at 16. These two groups had accumulated an identical numbers of hours in the academies. There was no evidence that the players offered scholarships had trained more diligently.

But the two groups did differ in one important way, which had nothing to do with what happened within the academy grounds. Players offered scholarships had done an average of nine hours each week of informal football play—street football with their friends in streets and parks, which they fit in alongside their time in the academy. Those not offered contracts engaged in such informal play for only five hours a week. This was the only notable difference in the development histories of the two groups.

These findings—that the salient differences between elite and near-elite footballers lie outside the training ground—have been replicated in similar studies. Most striking was a comparison between the 2014 Germany squad that won the men’s World Cup and two groups of other German players - those that played in the nation’s top domestic league, the Bundesliga, but did not play for the national team; and players from the fourth to six tiers. It showed that the future World Cup winners had actually played less formal football all the way up to the age of 22. But they had played significantly more unstructured football in their teens. The future world champions learned more of their football themselves, rather than following instructions from coaches.

A glance at England’s exhilarating crop of young players born in 2000 or after attests to the value of informal play. Phil Foden—hailed by Man City’s manager Pep Guardiola as the most talented player he has ever worked with—still sometimes plays street football in Stockport. Street football is also a common thread throughout south London, English football’s biggest talent hotspot today. Some 14 per cent of English players in the 2016 Premier League season came from a 10-mile area in South London, with international players Jadon Sancho, Joe Gomez and Aaron Wan-Bissaka among those to emerge from the area.

South London is functioning as England’s very own version of the Parisian banlieues, which underpinned France’s triumph in the men’s World Cup in 2018. France are the current men’s world champions and have reached the final in five of the last 11 editions of the World Cup or European Championships. This success has been built around Ile-de-France, the greater Paris region. The inner-city itself produces little elite talent, but the city’s suburbs, mostly filled with dreary concrete blocks—have produced an extraordinary array of players, including eight of France’s victorious 23-man squad in 2018.

Earlier this year, I travelled to Sarcelles—a classic banlieue, 16 minutes on the RER train north from the Gare du Nord—to research my new book The Best: How Elite Athletes are Made, co-written with Professor Mark Williams, a leading sports scientist and expert on how children develop into leading athletes.

Sarcelles is a community of 60,000 commonly known for its grey tower blocks, a history of riots and football. The area has produced a regular array of fine players, with Manchester City winger Riyad Mahrez the current standard-bearer. AAS Sarcelles, the local football club, is a fulcrum of the community: on weekends its two pitches routinely host three or four games in the same day, across everything from U-11s to over-55s. The competitiveness of the club is such that Mahrez, famously thin as a child, did not reach the first team for his age group until he was 17. Instead, most of his early games of football were on the streets—between park benches by tower blocks. Locals call these games ballon sur bitume—concrete football.

Like games in South London, or the famous Brazilian games of street or beach football—pelada and futsal—there is a magic to these games which accelerates players’ learning. These games are akin to more extreme versions of football—with players having to navigate their way out of tight spaces and develop brilliant control, but getting more overall time on the ball over a match because of the smaller number of players. Maths is, perhaps, the most obvious benefit. As such matches are generally four or five-a-side, this translates into a child having over twice as much time on the ball overall than in an equivalent 11-a-side game: twice as many opportunities to make mistakes.

The very imperfection of such games makes them the perfect nursery grounds to learn the sport. Street sport is a world of unpredictable, eclectic challenges. The rules, surfaces, pitch sizes, number of players and a player’s individual position all constantly change, which can turbocharge learning. “The absence of direct instruction in street sport allows athletes the opportunity to seek out and perceive unexpected and possibly better alternative solutions to problems,” explained Daniel Memmert, a skill acquisition specialist from the Sports University in Cologne.

It is a view that Mahrez endorses. “Our parents aren’t that strict and so they let us play,” Mahrez recalled. “Playing all day every day really helps you improve your dribbling and technique. I think that’s why the best technical players come from the streets.”

Street sport also exposes the limitations of the education that many academies have traditionally given players. If structured coaching accounts for too high a proportion of a child’s exposure to a sport, it can hinder development and players’ ability to work through problems themselves, research has found. Children who play more unstructured football have been shown to possess superior game intelligence—essentially, the ability to anticipate and recognise situations during a game and make correct decisions under pressure.

‘‘Everyone just expresses themselves and that’s how people learn their skills,” explained Sancho, who grew up playing football on concrete courts and in cages. “Street football means you fear no one because you have nothing to lose and you are just being yourself.” This less didactic environment creates players who can think for themselves with elan and creativity: a feature of many of the current generation of young players hailing from south London, like those from the banlieues, is their dribbling ability and daring with the ball.

And while school teams and academies have traditionally structured matches around a player’s age group, in street football only a player’s availability determines whether he plays. This means that players—even those who are the biggest and strongest for their age-group—are exposed to playing with older players. Younger players can seldom out-run older players, so they must out-think them instead.

This replicates another remarkable finding about the antecedents of athletic greatness: the advantage enjoyed by younger siblings. Across countries and sports, only children have less chance of becoming elite athletes. Younger siblings have a significantly greater chance of becoming elite athletes than children without older siblings. An Australian and Canadian study of athletes in 33 different sports found that elite athletes had 1.04 older siblings; a control group of non-elite athletes had 0.6 older siblings. Even among athletes who become professional, those with older siblings have more chance of reaching the very top. Batsmen who played Test cricket for England between 2004 and 2019 had 1.2 older siblings, compared with 0.4 for county-level batsmen.

Having elder siblings appears especially important in many women’s sports: all but one of the England squad who lifted the Women’s Cricket World Cup at Lord’s in 2017 had at least one older brother who played cricket. Similarly, of the English women’s football squad who reached the semi-final of the 2019 World Cup, 52 per cent had an elder brother. These statistics point to how, with participation and investment in team sports historically lower among females, having at least one elder brother increases a girl’s chances of seriously participating in sport. And the challenge of playing with older brothers often accelerates skill development, the academic Melissa Hopwood has noted: “For girls with older brothers there is likely going to be a greater physical discrepancy between the two siblings so the girls have to smarten up and toughen up.”

The path to sporting greatness is far too rocky, multifaceted and individual to ever be reduced to a simple formula. And yet the way in which hours of informal play or having elder siblings are predictive of who will rise to the top—but the number of hours in formal training are not—points to a fundamental truth. Letting children simply play, away from the prying eyes of parents and coaches, can imbue them with perhaps an athlete’s most essential trait: to be able to think for themselves when it matters most.

Tim Wigmore is a sports writer for the Daily Telegraph. His latest book is The Best: How Elite Athletes are Made