0.06 per cent.
It’s a number so small, it’s hard to comprehend.
But that is the chance of a young boy becoming a professional footballer in this country.
Only six in every 10,000 make the grade.
Those odds are similar to the likelihood of being dealt four aces in poker. Or finding a pearl in an oyster shell. Or becoming an astronaut and travelling into space.
In an exclusive interview for Sky Sports News’ Chasing the Dream documentary, Trent Alexander-Arnold said: “You have more chance of winning the lottery than making it as a professional footballer.”
1.65m boys play our national sport. Less than one per cent of them make it into the academy of a professional club.
Of those, fewer than one-in-ten (nine per cent) go on to make a single appearance at the professional level. In the Premier League, the numbers are smaller still: just 1.5 per cent of academy graduates will play one match in the top division.
Armed with those facts, we embarked on what became the largest, most comprehensive investigation ever carried out by Sky Sports News.
The original idea came from Tony Pulis, who approached us with his own experiences, and plenty of questions.
After more than 400 games as a player and more than 1,000 matches under this belt as a manager, he’d always had concerns about the welfare of young academy footballers and the overall ‘failure’ rate.
Former West Brom and Stoke City boss Tony Pulis has expressed concerns over player welfare
Now, with two grandsons in the system, he wanted to know what football as an industry was doing to promote and support both those that make it, and those that do not.
What started off as a plan for a 15-minute mini-documentary, quickly snowballed. The more we spoke to people involved with academy football in England, the more stories we discovered and the more issues were uncovered. Whenever we answered one question, it seemed to lead to another that needed addressing.
Over a nine-month period, we carried out exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in the game. Legendary managers such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti and Harry Redknapp.
Chasing the Dream: The Elite Managers
Sunday 24th November 7:30pm
Elite-level players, including Alexander-Arnold, Kyle Walker, Levi Colwill, Ollie Watkins, Jordan Pickford, Tyrone Mings and many, many more.
England’s Kyle Walker spoke to Sky Sports News about his own experiences throughout his early footballing career
We also heard some heart-wrenching stories from young boys and their families who didn’t quite make the grade.
The series includes the first-ever TV interviews with the mother of Matthew Langton who took his own life after being released by Mansfield; with Lewis Reed, who came very close to suicide as he tried to cope with rejection at Ipswich and… (truncated)
