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Nov 21, 2020

A professional opinion on the academy system, player profiling, the impact of Covid-19, technology and releasing players.

As professional footballers go, Andy Awford is a firm fans favourite and widely respected as a former player and manager.  In more recent times he has established himself as a successful academy manager at a Championship club, Luton Town FC, where we caught up with him over Zoom on his day off.  This tells you all you need to know about his work ethic; not only doing interview duties but also wading his way through the latest official guidance about managing the Covid-19 risk for the academy.

Andy, what’s the future of the football academy system and is the Elite Player Performance Plan working for the industry and the club?

“Overall, it’s been a good thing and helped to bring a clear criteria, structure and requirements that clubs need to achieve.  It has improved resources, the quality of pitches and facilities.  It’s evolving and improving yearly, even monthly, and in my opinion for the better, so long as it continues to do that for the benefit of all academies regardless of category status.

Yes, you could pick it apart and say this needs to change and that could be better but it’s a definite improvement from the first iteration.  Take the audit process.  In my opinion it wasn’t great to start with.  It was far too regimented; it didn’t allow clubs to be experimental at times.  Now there is a new process that facilitates a degree of flexibility.  Yes, you need to meet your safeguarding and compliance aspects to achieve the standard, but the programme of work can be adapted to better suit the needs of the club.

As for the future, we are waiting to see what the impact of Brexit will be and how that might affect players from abroad joining the club but everyone is constantly looking to see how you can improve your club.  Right now we have an application submitted, which requires huge investment to move from category three to two.  It’s a big change for the club, for our staff and parents to get used to.  If you speak to fellow academy managers at the top of the Premier League or those down at League Two, they are all trying to improve all the time and all trying to find that diamond of a player that breaks into the first team or one that can be sold for millions to improve the finances of the club and fund the academy for the next few years.

What I do see and hope to see more of is collaboration across the community of football academies which has been brilliant in recent times.  More clubs are now willing to share ideas and options generally when academy managers do get together, more often on Zoom these days, to discuss issues as a whole or in groups and, we come up with ideas that we take back to the clubs to get buy in.  Not everything is shared as some matters are private to Luton Town but as an academy you are always looking and always learning how to improve and it's this curiosity which helps the academy system to continue to improve.”
How is the academy system delivering value to clubs as opposed to buying in players?

"The context of the question is based upon the return-on-investment gamble that clubs take every time they spend millions, if not tens of millions of pounds, on players who may or may not live up to performance expectations."
Awford draws upon his own experience as a first team manager.  “It’s difficult as a manager.  Not all, but most first team managers recognise they are probably just 10 games away from getting the sack.

Whilst it's great to have “one of your own” make the first team, you are usually up against time.  Some clubs want a quick a fix, others are happy to wait.  It’s an economic, balancing act where you draw upon the mix of players you can afford from players bought in, loan players and academy graduates.

It has been great to watch the progress of one of our academy graduates, James Justin, who made the first team.  He has been with Luton Town since the age of eight.  Justin was recently sold to Leicester FC for an undisclosed fee and was also named in the England U21 squad.  If we can get one of those through every so many years, that makes it all worthwhile for everybody at the club; from the U7s manager to the first team coach and the Chief Executive.  It is recognised that we are not going to get every single player through the system, of course we are not, so therefore certain players have to be brought in at first team level.

In terms of value, it goes much deeper than putting players into the first team.  I would also stretch this to the value we put into the local community around the club and the whole town of Luton and ensuring the club is firmly embedded into it.”
What type of player are clubs trying to produce and how do they differ from 10 years ago?

“At Luton, where we have gone through the leagues very quickly, when I first started we were a division two club having just come out of the conference, so we are now a Championship club and this is our second year, so we are now trying to be an established Championship club.

If you forget the physical aspects for a moment, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that between the Premier League and League Two, there is a level isn't there, a standard of player.  That’s no disrespect to players playing at any level.  Trying to get a player on the pitch in League Two is one thing. Trying to get a player on the pitch in the Championship, Premiership and the Champions League is a totally different thing as well.  It will be different from club to club too.

We try to do it our way.  For me it's no good trying to get our boys to play like anyone else, it has to be our way.
We’ve got to produce players for Luton because we play a certain way; there is a certain culture and a certain environment and certain attributes needed to go and play at Kenilworth Road.  So, we have to give players every opportunity to thrive and drive towards that.

The game itself is far quicker than it was 10-12 years ago.  Players run faster; players run for longer. The stats will tell you that.  Sports science is now more prevalent than ever, providing data for managers, coaches and physios to backup what our eyes tell us.  Eyes tell no lies; they tell me if a player runs around or not, we are not dependent on data; it’s part of the decision-making mix.

Each club has its own way of doing things which is determined by its football philosophy with input from the first team manager and their coaching staff.  The challenge is to set the requirements and ensure it’s aligned all the way through the age groups and coaching staff otherwise it creates confusion amongst players.  We are trying to achieve that.
Is there a broad player profile that fits a professional club’s requirements?

“We have player profiles at our club and our recruitment is based on them.  If I take a full-back for example, we might have a requirement of 10 attributes in 10 areas.  With respect, those players who score 10 out of 10 probably won’t be in category 2 or 3 academies they will already be at Tottenham, Arsenal or Chelsea aged 14.  But if a young U14 player here has 8 out 10 them, we’ll give them a right good go.

I don’t think player profiles are standard across all clubs.  All our players are technically very good and as they mature, they develop their tactical awareness.  Physically you just don’t know.  It is difficult to tell.  We do the tests and maturation, and you can look at the parents standing on the side-line, but you just don’t know for certain how they will turn out.  We have late developers and we have some right big monsters within the same age group.  There isn't one standard type of player.  The one thing all academies want is great players!  That is pretty standard.  But you can't get the finished article aged 10, 11 and 12, you’ve got to add on the layers as they go through the system.”

Academy matches – How are teams playing?  What is the style of football they aspire to?  Is it Tiki Taka, direct or something else?

“Personally, for me, winning does matter.  I hear the phrase in academy football that ‘winning doesn’t matter.’  Well, it does to me.  If it doesn’t matter, don’t count the goals, don’t have a referee.  The first thing that gets asked at school on Monday after he has played for us is, ‘What was the score?’  So, it does matter, they want to win.  However, you have to have a balance.  If you don’t win but your best player makes it into the first team, that’s the academy winning isn't it?  Before the start of every game, we want to win.  From the U7s to the U21s you will never hear a coach say, we aren't bothered about winning today.  Of course, we are.

The style thing is about each club having its own football philosophy - a style of play and coaching philosophy, and they will vary from club to club and each must choose the manager and coaches accordingly.  Let's say my style is to play and play and play and then you put me into another club that wasn’t bothered about that style, it would cause confusion.  It has to be consistent right the way through the age groups, so when players go onto the pitch they know exactly what is expected of them.  Whatever style you choose, the coaches have to buy into that and execute the club philosophy and style.  Coaches can't teach their own football philosophy.  We are not perfect at Luton but we do seem to have that established quite well as some of the staff have been here for quite a while and they know what to deliver.  But that takes time, it's not something that is just thrown together quickly."

Data and Analytics, how influential is it?  How is it helping you now?
“It's there now, it would be wrong not to use it.  You could throw me a player name in the Austrian Premier League and our data team could go and find data on him.  It would be wrong not to use it but I still like to go and watch players play.  You get more of a smell and a taste of it.  I like to watch them warm up, watch the game, get a bit of research on him as a person.  You can have all the data and numbers on him such as, how he passes forward, how far they’ve run, how many minutes he has played etc which is great, but I personally wouldn’t want to sign him on just data.  I prefer to watch, have them in, if circumstances allow, and do it that way but data can be used positively.

We have in the past recruited players without data when we had less resources but now we have made massive progress.  We are different from where we were seven years ago but just suppose our academy scouts spotted an under 18 lad at a local club on our doorstep.  We would go and watch, watch, watch and if we decided to bring him in and trial him and he does really well and we did all our research on him and got the okay from technical staff, I would still ask the powers that be, if we could sign him?

However, if it was a Tottenham player about to be released, the data would all be there.  We would be foolish not to use data because you might find something that changes your decision.”
The elephant in the room is Covid-19, how is that impacting academy football?

“It's different.  So different.  We went into lockdown in March.  We returned our 18-21s to training in July and schoolboys started to train again in September on a reduced programme.  At Luton our training ground is compact and close which is brilliant but now we have to train much further apart.  We have to stay in different bubbles.  I don’t go near the first team building at the moment, I'm not allowed to.  That’s just common sense.  No parents are allowed in to watch their children train or watch matches at our facilities and when we travel, we have to comply with other club rules which is typically based on a large document and the same applies when teams visit us.

Age groups remain in their bubbles, staff can't change to other age group bubbles and we have had to stop playing players up in other age groups at a time when, ideally, we need to stretch them, improve them and test them.
We have the daily questionnaire and temperature testing to spot and minimise the risk of Covid transmission.  All this has been done so we can put on a games programme.  This is something the pro-licence training doesn’t teach you, so we are implementing the latest guidelines and learning as we go.  It’s occasionally nice to have a football conversation instead of one about Covid-19 but we have to apply the rules strictly and take this pandemic seriously.  I make no apology for that; we are responsible for the safety of more than 140+ kids and their families whilst they are in with us.”

If we lockdown again, how will you make decisions about players as we near the end of the year?  It's an important time for the U16s?

“Well, we will do what we did last time as we approached the end of last season for other age groups.
 We still had to make decisions.  Some decisions were already made on some boys in all honesty, so some were carried through.  All clubs were offered the chance to extend contracts when the return happened whether the boys were 9 years old or 18 years old, so we did that on a few.

We have been in communication with the League and the FA to extend contracts where we feel players haven't had enough time because of the conditions we have been working under as result of Covid –19.  Decision time for the U16s is normally December 31st but because of Covid-19, we have been given the opportunity to extend this to March 1st.

The yes decisions are the easy ones, and the no’s are difficult at the best of times, but decisions have to be made because the boys will be taking exams and leaving school soon.  But we do all we can with the football authorities to give the boys as much football time possible under the circumstances we find ourselves operating under.”

Many thanks to Andy Awford and Luton Town FC for the interview. If you are a football academy professional we would love to interview you too.  See our contact form page and register your interest.

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