English Football's Plot Against Small Clubs

Crewe Alexandra’s Dario Gradi has spent over 30 years building what has become one of the most respected youth academies in the nation. He is a living legend in Crewe, a town of 80,000 known primarily for being a large railway junction south of Liverpool and Manchester; the team itself, which plays in England’s third-tier League One, is nicknamed The Railwaymen. It’s the sort of nondescript British locale that somehow looks more endearing in the rain.

Gradi has helped develop dozens of players who would move onto the higher divisions, including Danny Murphy, Seth Johnson, Rob Jones, and Dean Ashton. Both the Crewe Academy and the first team became known for playing with a technical ability far above their station. When I watched the club while living in England in 1997, the fans used to chant, “Brazil, It’s Just Like Watching Brazil,” and it wasn’t entirely meant to be ironic. On April 27, 2013, Crewe achieved one Gradi’s longstanding goals in a game against Walsall by fielding an entire line-up of players who had come through the academy. They won 2-0.

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When I asked Gradi why he turned down countless offers of one sort or another over the years to stay at Crewe, he said, “Well, Crewe just happened to be where I ended up.” His calm personality is such that this comment scans not as an insult to the small town but a compliment.

For teams like the Crewe Academy, keeping and ultimately profiting from the sale of home-grown players is harder than ever. A new youth development model, the Elite Performance Player Plan (EPPP), came into being on October 20, 2011 after a majority of both Premier League and Football League clubs voted in support of its creation. In a telling example of whom the EPPP benefitted, the BBC reported on the day of the vote that the Premier League had threatened to withhold funding to lower clubs unless the new model was adopted.

Most notably, the EPPP established fixed transfer fees for youth academy players under the age of 17. Before its implementation, tribunals were used to determine the amount of money a club must pay to acquire youth players; promising youngsters could sometimes command fees in the millions under the old system. Under the EPPP, there is a strict ceiling for initial payment, and a bonus system that kicks in if the player eventually plays for the first team at the acquiring club. This has allowed wealthy clubs to hoard talented youngsters at an affordable rate, while also decreasing the chances that they will miss out on the next big star to a rival. The flip side of this coin is that smaller clubs don’t make as much money as they used to off young stars.

For Gradi and Crewe, the EPPP creates a new set of challenges and exacerbates some old ones. While he says that on the whole he prefers the old system, he is quick to recognize some advantages to the new one. He’s improved facilities, and has been able to hire more staff with grant money.

Crewe’s superior academy creates a set of issues unique among clubs its size. “There’s a problem with the compensation figures,” Gradi says. “If we wanted to sign a boy of let’s say 15, from a club in a lower league, who’s been there a couple of years, we’d have to come up with something like 50 or 60,000 pounds compensation.

“We’ve actually got a situation where we’re trying to sign a 15-year old boy, he wants to leave and wants to come here, [and] he can’t because we’re not willing to pay,” Gradi continued. “If I was the other club I would want my money, so I could see their point of view, but what it means is the boy is now actually being restricted. He’s now not able to play at a higher level.”

This is less dramatic than the poaching of talent by Premier League clubs, but it highlights a gap in the system that impacts the ability of youth players to improve and move up.

A club like Crewe, which offers the enticement of Gradi’s superior coaching, cannot always afford to take on players who would have previously been a fit for their program. Yet, Gradi understands it cuts both ways. “We sold a player to Liverpool who wanted to leave and go to Liverpool. I think we got something like £200,000 for him,” he says. “Now, we’d rather have kept the player, but he’s an outstanding player and £250,000 to Liverpool is probably more like £250 to us.” This is the type of player Gradi needs to be able to keep, at least once in a while, to make the club go.

Take the example of Nick Powell, a Crewe academy graduate who was signed by Manchester United in 2012. Powell, who Gradi believes has the best “ball-mastery” of any player ever to come through Crewe, was sold at 18, for an initial fee of around £3 million; incentives could eventually push the total to double that. Gradi estimates the club needs to receive between six and seven hundred thousand pounds per year through player sales in order to survive. Since that is difficult to do, it is the Nick Powells who hold the club over until, well, the next Nick Powell comes along. It is still possible, but what was never easy is even more difficult under the new system. Under the EPPP, if Powell had been just a year younger when Manchester United came calling, it could have cost Crewe millions.

Gradi has the built-in advantage of the trust and respect that comes with his decades of success. His sterling reputation and the relationships he builds with his players means that he is often able to keep them long enough to turn them into both better players and more valuable club assets. Gradi wins this loyalty by not treating the players as assets, but as what they are, which is young men with dreams; he earns it by delivering results. As with Powell and Crewe’s other £3 million player, Dean Ashton, Gradi is often able to get his stars to sign on because he can offer top-level coaching, playing time on the first team, and his word that he will bring good offers to them when the time comes.

With Ashton, who went onto play in the Premier League before an ankle injury ended his career, the situation was at its starkest. It was January 2005 and Crewe was sitting eighth in the Championship, its highest position in Gradi’s tenure. A great run of form left them mere points from a possible playoff position and an improbable run at promotion to the Premier League. But when Premier League club Norwich City came calling for Ashton, Gradi felt that fair was fair and that his star should be allowed to move on. Crewe subsequently went 19 games without a win until a 2-1 victory on the last day of the season. But the money from the sale would float the club for years to come, Gradi had kept his word, and Ashton had gotten his chance.

For all the changes the game has seen during Gradi’s time, the influx of money and fame at the top was never appealing to him. While telling the story of throwing then-teenage player Seth Johnson into a playoff game out of position, he chuckled remembering how well the kid had played. “That’s the fun of it, really,” he says. “I look at the Premier League clubs and I’m thinking, ‘Where’s the fun? Where they getting the fun?’” For Gradi, the fun and the sense of accomplishment comes from being an essential beginning for these players, and it far outweighs his issues with the system’s complications.

“The most satisfying thing is the number of people that I’ve helped on their way to success, to a good life,” Gradi says. “James Collins is on the staff here, I gave him his debut and every now and then he’ll look back at it and say what an influence that was. Living in Crewe, being handed that opportunity to come to the academy and move on, make a career out of football, how much he has enjoyed it. Obviously a lot of that is down to me coming to Crewe.”

This is not the most glamorous or remunerative aspect of the sport; Crewe is not London, or a member of the richest tip of the English football pyramid. The 20 teams at the top of the pyramid represent a measly one quarter of one percent of the entire pro soccer picture. The Manchester Citys and Chelseas can amass wealth—both in capital and player talent—unabated. Rich owners can pump more and more into these institutions safe in the knowledge that their place at the table is assured. Four years on from the implementation of EPPP, these clubs gain security by knowing they’re here to stay. Meanwhile, the smaller clubs have no alternative but to trudge on.