Dear WSC
It’s hard to say which of the many depressing scenes from Channel 4’s Football Dreams documentary carried the most negative message for the future of the English game. Was it the sight of the Chelsea YTS kids spending their days scrubbing boots and cleaning toilets instead of playing football? Or the tin-pot sergeant-major’s approach favoured by coach Graham Rix, so reminiscent of bullying school teachers? Or perhaps it was the lack of self-confidence and immaturity of the boys themselves, reduced to mumbling self-pity by Rix’s ranting? It seems to me that the responsibility of the club towards YTS trainees is two-fold. First, to equip the players who are taken on as professionals with the skills to cope with the game at the highest level. Second, to give the ones who will be rejected the best possible chance to make a different career for themselves. It would be nice to think that the kids received some practical training in something useful (as they are compelled to do in other countries, such as Germany). But in essence the two jobs come down to the same thing: teaching the youngsters to think and act for themselves, whether on or off the football pitch. It seemed that at Chelsea all they were trained for was to follow orders, and the more ridiculous the orders were, the more slavishly they were enforced. True, the programme was made a year ago. Perhaps since then Ruud Gullit has encouraged a more enlightened regime, which encourages the trainees to question their coaches and develop their own judgment as he did himself in Holland. But if this is how things are done at the club which has been most receptive to continental influences and systems of play which depend on a certain degree of intelligence, then what on earth are the rest of them like?
Colin Sullivan, Lincoln
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