The true extent of the cost of Wembley Stadium is now coming to light. The latest victim in this tortuous saga is the future of the game in England, namely the Centre For Excellence in Burton. Originally conceived as the equivalent of Clarefontaine, this was supposed to be the nerve centre for developing youth football in the country, a conveyor belt of talent if you like. To see what a success it could have been, you only have to look at the French model and French squads over the past decade to see the positive impact that could have been made.
Instead the money spent on the “Wembley White Elephant” as Howard Wilkinson recently described it, has eaten into cashflows even further and the FA have announced that they will “not make any further financial commitment or take any further risk on the project“, effectively pulling the plug on the scheme. They prefer to couch with such ideas as “finding a partner” or “the FA is seeking the most appropriate strategy to make best use of its significant investment“. The former had been achieved with Umbro agreeing to be the Centre’s main sponsor. The latter is a euphemism for “can we recover our costs if we sell this?”. All this after spending £25m thus far, some five years after the project oiginally started. It has been forever dogged by controvesy with cash being the key issue from the FA’s perspective. Alas there were other influences at work, most potently those representing the professional game within the FA. It has never been made totally clear how this Centre would have sat comfortably within the structure of Academies attached to professional clubs. And therein explains the demise of the project - too many vested interests.
Typically of the English game, no-one with any power chose to stand firm and seek to find a solution. Yet there must be one as the French made it work without detrimental effect on French clubs. For sure, they lost players who opted to play in pastures new but that was down to money being generated internally. Those graduates of Clarefontaine were attached to clubs but they still commanded considerable fees. Look at Nicolas Anelka’s transfer history. Whilst French clubs have not been the beneficiaries of all of the fees he has commanded, they have had some return. The Premiership clubs have never been happy, fearing their influence over the players would be undermined. But they have missed the point - this was for English players, youngsters who could save them money or generate huge sums in the future. It would have helped develop the technique of young players, something that youth players from these shores have been trailing in the wake of the rest of the world for decades.
The clubs are the vested interests in the game, they care not for the national game as a whole merely for their particular element of the “product”. Whilst the money is coming through from commercial and broadcast channels, they are happy. Players are graduating from their academies, forming the next generation. Alas for England, the top clubs seem content to focus their energies on the cream of the crop be they based in Baghdad, Barcelona or Brussels. Those from Birmingham or other towns in England are diminishing in numbers, seemingly to become the minority not the majority. This is not the path the future of the national team was supposed to take. The Golden Generation were supposed to signal the start of a bright future but rather like their performances in recent major tournaments, that flame gets dimmer with each passing year. Perhaps they believe that the clubs no longer have a responsibility to the game as a whole but only to the Premiership?
But more concerning is that the Guardians of the Game do not see this, do not want to see this nor do they want to do anything about it. This is after all, the same FA who commissioned the Burns Report which gave them a good starting point for Corporate Governance yet they do nothing about it, the recommendations stalled in committees and smoke-filled rooms. This is the same FA who under a previous regime moved into an expensive lease for swanky new offices in Soho, who now have a CEO who does not want to work in Soho but in the West End. It is reassuring to see that their priorities on the future of the game are in the right order.
