The Academy Beat: A Day In The Life Of A Youth Manager
There are mornings when an academy manager drives through the gates of a football training ground and, for a few seconds at least, the day remains unspoiled.
The pitches are cut. The buildings are quiet. Somewhere, kit is being laid out, breakfast is being eaten, and a young footballer is thinking about nothing more complicated than whether he will play at the weekend.
From the outside, an academy can look like football in its purest form. Children chasing the dream. Coaches teaching the game. The next great player somewhere in the crowd, waiting to reveal himself.
Then the academy manager gets out of his car.
“I don’t think any weeks are the same,” Jon Pepper says. “I think the only thing that’s probably the same is you drive in and you drive out. And that’s it, really.”
Pepper knows the job from almost every angle. He began coaching as a teenager after a road accident effectively ended his own hopes of becoming a professional player.
He worked at Chesterfield, Bradford City and Nottingham Forest, drove minibuses, delivered education programmes and served as a child protection officer. Later, as an auditor for Double Pass, the organisation initially tasked with independently assessing academies under the Elite Player Performance Plan, he spent five-day stretches inside clubs, interviewing everyone from young players to Sir Alex Ferguson.
Then, in 2016, Pepper became Burnley’s academy manager.
The club he joined had a Category Three academy. Four years later, Burnley had attained Category One status, the highest grade in the English system.
The transformation required new facilities, more staff, better games and a different idea of what the academy was supposed to be. It also offered Pepper a lesson in the peculiar reality of the academy manager’s job, a role he now occupies at Sheffield Wednesday.
The football is almost the easy part.
No rest for the wicked
Monday morning might begin with a multidisciplinary meeting. The coaches are there. Sports science and medical staff are involved. Education and welfare issues must be considered. The week ahead is opened up and examined.
Who is playing? Who is injured? Which player needs his training load managed? Who is arriving on trial? Is anyone struggling with his education? Is there a problem with accommodation? Has a welfare concern arisen?
The meeting shapes everything that follows.
“The Monday afternoon, the under-23s might be playing, so you might catch that game,” Pepper says. “You might be in an education meeting. You might then go into a recruitment meeting in the afternoon. You might catch some of the day-release players coming in, training.”
Another day could bring a finance meeting. There are budgets to discuss and staffing structures to consider. A sports scientist needs five minutes. The medical department has an update. The league might have called a meeting. A support officer could be visiting. The weekend games programme needs arranging. A trialist is arriving. Another player is being watched.
Then Saturday comes. Then Sunday. There are more games.
“It is a really varied role,” Pepper says, “which is all-consuming.”
This is the part of academy football that rarely makes the promotional videos. The English academy system has become a vast professional industry since EPPP was introduced in 2012.
Its purpose was to produce more and better homegrown players, but the system built to achieve that aim extends far beyond coaching sessions and matches. Education, elite performance, player care, safeguarding, psychology, medicine, recruitment and data have all become woven into the modern academy.
When Pepper worked at Chesterfield and Bradford, an academy might have had two full-time employees. At Burnley, the full-time staff grew from around a dozen to more than 30 during his time in charge. Include part-time workers and the list ran beyond 100 people.
“You come into the role where you’ve got loads of full-time staff,” he says. “We had over 100 members of staff on our list, which is just crazy, really. It’s just a massive operation.”
The academy manager is responsible for making the operation move in one direction. That can be difficult for people who reach the job through coaching.
A coach spends years studying football. He learns how to construct sessions, communicate ideas and improve players. Then one day he becomes an academy manager and discovers he is running what can amount to a multimillion-pound organisation.
There are budgets. Performance reviews. Strategic plans. Staff disputes. Recruitment decisions. Difficult conversations with parents. Conversations with the board. Pepper calls the transition a “culture shock”.
The modern academy manager needs to know football, but he also needs to understand people. He must manage downwards and sideways. Perhaps most importantly, he must manage upwards.
“I think that’s a key element of your role, managing upwards,” Pepper says. “I think it’s really important to try and get the hierarchy to understand what it’s all about and educating.”
Every academy exists inside a football club with its own anxieties.
Bottom of the barrel
At one club, the board might believe youth development is part of its identity. At another, the academy is an expense on a spreadsheet. Lower down the pyramid, an owner might tell the academy manager that the entire operation needs to pay for itself.
Pepper experienced that at Bradford. The club was putting roughly £250,000 a year into the academy when the chairman told him it needed to become self-sustaining.
“I walked out and thought, I’m a coach, not a businessman,” Pepper remembers. “How am I going to pull this off? I’ve got to try and find a couple of hundred thousand to make us break even.”
The answer arrived in the form of a teenage footballer.
Pepper played Andre Wisdom in Bradford’s under-18 team at 14. Liverpool noticed. Wisdom moved to Merseyside and the compensation helped Bradford meet their target.
This is the cold arithmetic that exists alongside the romance of youth football. Every academy wants to produce a player who walks out at Turf Moor, Anfield or Old Trafford and plays 300 games for the club. But an academy also has to justify its existence.
Sometimes the return is a transfer fee. Sometimes it is the cost of a transfer that never needs to be made.
At Burnley, Pepper recalls analysis estimating that the academy had generated or saved the club around £7 million in one season despite not selling a player. Dwight McNeil was playing regularly in the first team. Burnley had not paid a transfer fee to sign him. His wages were different from those of an established recruit.
“There’s a cost to his wages, there’s a cost to the transfer fee that we didn’t have to pay,” Pepper says. “There’s all that return of having an academy.”
The academy, in Pepper’s view, should not be considered a cost centre. He compares it to the research and development department of a major company. Money is invested because the next product might transform the business.
But there is one unavoidable condition. The product needs somewhere to go.
“You could have the best academy, you could have the best staff, the best programme, but if you never get an opportunity, then you’re going to hit a brick wall.”
The value of pathway
Pathway is one of the great currencies of academy football. The richest clubs can recruit outstanding young players from across the country and beyond. A club such as Burnley had to offer something different.
Geography did not help. Manchester United and Manchester City were nearby. Liverpool and Everton were within reach. Blackburn Rovers had their own academy tradition. Burnley could not simply promise to outspend them all.
So Pepper sold opportunity.
If a talented 16-year-old arrived, Burnley might put him with the under-18s. Progress quickly and he could train with the older group. The first team was closer than it might be at one of the giants.
Burnley also reduced squad sizes.
When Pepper arrived, some age groups contained more than 20 players. One game a week meant young footballers might play half a match. Burnley cut the numbers and expanded the games programme.
“Every player was almost playing two games a week, whereas prior they were getting probably 50 per cent of one game,” Pepper says.
They travelled to Belgium, Holland and Portugal. Players encountered new opponents and new styles. The club’s new training ground changed the way recruits saw Burnley. A player released by one of the Manchester clubs could arrive, look at the pitches, the changing rooms and the classrooms and realise this did not feel like a descent into another world.
Pepper wondered sometimes how much of the improvement was actually coaching.
“We probably didn’t do a lot of coaching,” he says. “We did lots of different activities and lots of games and lots of formats, and they got lots of experiences, so they developed like that.”
The comment cuts against much of football’s obsession with methodology. Academy football is full of curricula, presentations and philosophies. Pepper had seen nine-year-olds sitting in front of screens being taught tactical objectives when some of them still struggled to control a ball.
The system, he believes, has gradually learned. Children should be treated like children.
At Burnley, the youngest players were encouraged to play. Coaches facilitated rather than dominated. There were no endless team talks. Football was supposed to remain fun.
That principle extended beyond the pitch.
Protecting players’ childhoods
Pepper did not want Burnley’s schoolboys training on Saturday mornings. The players were already at the academy during the week and often played on Sundays. Their parents worked. Families needed time together.
“Being an academy parent is a massive commitment,” he says. “We realised that nearly every day of the week they’d be at the academy, even if it’s in the evening, or they’d be there on a Sunday. They’d never have any family time.”
Pepper wanted a child to be able to sleep at a friend’s house on Friday night without thinking about training the following morning.
At 15 or 16, the equation changes. A genuine professional prospect will have to make sacrifices. Friends will live normal teenage lives. The young footballer might need to step away.
But not at nine.
“Let them be children,” Pepper says.
The words sound obvious. Inside an industry designed to identify, measure and accelerate talent, they can become surprisingly difficult to remember.
An academy manager lives with the knowledge that most of the children in his care will eventually be released. This is the fundamental cruelty of the system. Success stories are placed on walls. Debuts are celebrated. The other conversations take place behind closed doors.
Pepper remembers the players he released who went elsewhere and succeeded. He wondered whether Burnley should have waited. Should they have been more patient? Could the club have done something differently?
“You do get an attachment,” he says. “But you also sense a sense of responsibility.”
Player care has become increasingly formalised across academy football. The modern system includes dedicated player-care roles, and players released from the professional development phase are entitled to a three-year commitment of aftercare support.
The framework has moved closer to something Pepper believed was necessary when he was at Burnley: a person whose job includes following the player after the door closes.
Pepper tried to make those calls himself. Then work intervened.
“You realise you’ve probably not spoken to them for a few months and you make another phone call, you speak to the parents,” he says. “Because you’ve got so much on your plate, you probably didn’t do it consistently enough.”
This, perhaps, is the contradiction at the heart of the academy manager’s life. The job asks one person to care deeply about individuals while managing an enormous system. There is always another meeting. Another game. Another parent. Another budget. Another boy.
Pepper understood how easily the job could consume the people doing it because it consumed him. He remembers warning a colleague who left an education role to become an academy manager.
“It will just be all-consuming,” Pepper told him.
Within months, the colleague understood. There were nights when he woke at three or four in the morning with work on his mind.
Pepper had seen the same impulse in younger staff. One employee once told him he had worked 21 consecutive days.
“Who’s telling you to work 21 days on the bounce?” Pepper asked.
Nobody was. The man was young and ambitious. Pepper recognised him immediately because Pepper had once been him. In his twenties, he believed credibility was earned by being present for every hour the training ground was open.
Academy football attracts those people. The obsessive ones. The coaches who spend Sunday evenings planning sessions and analysts who watch one more clip. The people who, like Pepper as a boy, want to wear a tracksuit for a living.
The danger is that the job becomes the life.
Football is life
“You can lose yourself to the industry,” Pepper says. “You can lose yourself to the game.”
He tried to tell his staff that time mattered more than hours. Quality time at work. Quality time at home. The aim was to drive into the training ground with enthusiasm.
“If you’ve not got that enthusiasm, that’s vital,” he says. “If you’re not enjoying the job, let me know why you’re not enjoying it.”
And still the academy manager drives home thinking about the academy.
A player is struggling at school. Another has a hamstring problem. A parent is unhappy. The first team manager needs an update. The board wants to understand the return on its investment.
A 14-year-old is attracting interest from another club. A coach is exhausted. A boy is about to be released.
Somewhere else, another boy is about to make his debut.
That is the moment academy people live for. The first walk on to a professional pitch. The family in the stand. Years of training sessions and car journeys suddenly condensed into the few seconds it takes a fourth official to raise a board.
But Pepper came to believe an academy should be judged by more than the players who survive it.
He remembers former scholars returning to football as staff. A goalkeeper who did not make it becoming a goalkeeping coach. During his auditing years, Pepper met physios who had once been youth-team players at the same club.
“For me, that’s brilliant,” he says. “That’s what academies should be all about.”
The aspiration remains professional football. It has to. Without the dream, the entire structure loses its purpose.
But Pepper wanted the years inside an academy to mean something even when the dream ended.
He wanted players to remember trips to Belgium and Germany and Holland. He wanted them to remember friends and games and coaches who cared about them. He wanted academy football to be part of a childhood rather than the thing that stole it.
“It’s got to be a positive life choice,” Pepper says. “Not something where you give up your childhood. Just be part of your childhood.”
Tomorrow morning, an academy manager will drive through the gates of a training ground. The pitches will be cut. The kit will be waiting. A child somewhere inside the building will still believe he is going to become a professional footballer.
The academy manager knows the numbers.
Then he gets out of the car and goes to work.