Friday 20 May 2016 16:24, UK
Fletcher Moss Rangers have produced a host of Manchester United stars. So shouldn't they get help? Adam Bate talks to the club's development officer Dave Horrocks to discuss the struggles of a grass-roots success story and an alternative vision for the future...
Dave Horrocks cried tears of pride when Marcus Rashford burst onto the scene for Manchester United. The development officer at Fletcher Moss Rangers, Rashford's boyhood club, was understandably proud, but he wasn't shocked. And that's not just because of the forward's extraordinary talent. It's because Horrocks has seen it before.
This one club in Didsbury has also been a home away from home for Cameron Borthwick-Jackson and Tyler Blackett. Before them there was Danny Welbeck and Wes Brown. And that's just those at Manchester United. In total, Horrocks reckons there are 73 youngsters who've been taken on by professional clubs at home and abroad.
"I don't want to sound blasé," he tells Sky Sports, "but, no, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised because of the talent that's out there in the big wide world. There are a lot of kids out there and because of the organisations they're with, they're not being put in the shop window correctly."
That's precisely what Fletcher Moss Rangers do. "On the back of our signing-on forms for the parents, we have a one liner that says development is winning," he adds. "We are not interested in the scores or winning games. Development is the win." While Horrocks feels the club is about far more than its stars, their recent successes speak volumes.
Professional scouts have become a familiar sight at the club. Rochdale even wanted to take their entire Under-13 team after one friendly game. "We played them off the park," says Horrocks. In the end there was a compromise. At the end of the season, they took six of the players - and the coach.
There's a determination not to "jump into bed with any one organisation" for the honourable reason "that all kids can be assessed fairly by everyone", but the pressures are still there. Five years ago, one Premier League club threatened to "flood all of the games with scouts" and take the lot anyway unless they agreed to affiliate with them.
"They will bully us until the FA realises that these kids come from somewhere before they get to the academies," says Horrocks. It's a recurring frustration. Here's a grass-roots coach doing a much-needed role in development but he's hardly acknowledged as being part of the process by those in power.
There's the memory of Trevor Brooking glazing over when discussing their conflicting definitions of grass roots. "People who are in influential positions such as Trevor Brooking have forgotten where they came from when they were first kicking a football," he says. "It worries me. I realise how English football has got itself into the state it has got itself into."
It's a disconnect that's a particularly sensitive issue right now for Fletcher Moss Rangers as they try to find the investment that will help the club to continue. After all, it's not a cheap business running 20 teams and the facilities are far from ideal. "At the moment our facility serves a purpose but it's not fit for purpose," explains Horrocks.
"It's a communal changing room and from there, there's the ladies showers, the gents showers, the ladies toilets and the gents toilets. We have an adult disabled team that's men and women so that particular group of players can't get changed at the same and we can't have any children or ladies walking through to go to the toilet. It's a matter of decency."
Plans are afoot but the quest for investment hasn't been easy. "It's been a frightening time," he admits. "When the figures came out it put the fear of God into me. I was almost in tears because I was thinking that there's no way we can do this. I felt I was banging my head against the wall because I was thinking, 'Where are we going to find this money?'"
It's particularly sad when Fletcher Moss is so obviously at the heart of its community. The aim is to galvanise a group of stakeholders that includes local residents and schools in order to construct some facilities that will serve a wide range of people. For Horrocks, the importance of that can hardly be overstated.
"Although we are in a ward that is termed an affluent area in Didsbury, so we can't get any council funding, the kids who come to us and use the facility are not from this area," he says. "They come from all the deprived areas of Manchester. Blackley, Chorlton, Whalley Range, Fallowfield, Moss Side, Withington, you name it and we've got them.
"These are often single-parent families with two or three kids who don't have two pennies to rub together. They come to us without any football boots and we have a recycling system whereby we give the kids the boots and when they grow out of them they give them us back. We are very conscious of maintaining that community identity.
"The kids pay £2 a week to train and £2 to play. But if you go up the road it's different. We played a team last month and in the car park you had a Rolls Royce and a 'baby' Bentley. At that club, those kids are paying £150 a month. And yet, I don't know of one player who has come from those clubs and gone on to be signed by a club."
There are those who argue that Fletcher Moss is just a stopping point for these youngsters on their way to the big time; that their talent would emerge regardless. But engaging these children is half of the battle and the club is clearly doing something right - something that others are not.
"The kids who come to us have a bit more about them and are a bit hungrier to want to win," he adds. "When there's a bit of talent, those things shine through." So what price can be put on the role played by the club that harnesses that talent before allowing it to flourish? Horrocks thinks it's a question worth asking.
"We are trying to open up a national debate," he says. "I've had emails from quite a lot of clubs around the country. We went up to Wallsend to meet the officials there because there are quite a lot of similarities. We know we're not the only club because we know that all the players came from somewhere, so there are others in the same debate.
"What should be forthcoming to clubs for players going into one of the richest businesses in the world in the Premier League?" One newspaper recently reported that Fletcher Moss were asking Manchester United for £2m in investment but that's a figure Horrocks rejects. What he would propose is something altogether more modest but far more widespread.
"We are interested to know whether we could alter the FIFA solidarity rule," he says. "When a player moves from one football association to another, the club that he started with is entitled to compensation. It happened with Fraser Forster. When he went from Newcastle to Celtic, Wallsend were entitled to five per cent of the fee as he was over 12 years old.
"This is a regulation that's been in place since academies were only taking players in at 12. Now they are taking kids as early as nine years old. We are trying to open the debate so that the rule doesn't only include transfers from outside football associations but within them. Could we get the FA and FIFA to change those regulations?
"If you were to say that a player who goes from Fletcher Moss Rangers or any other grass-roots club to an academy as a nine-year-old, in that first year, if the grass-roots club is paid £500 for argument's sake but then paid £500 for the second year and consecutive years, If he moved to another league club academy or school of excellence then they could take on that expense. It could go up to £1000 when he became a scholar and so on.
"By doing that, every year that he is in the system there would be a recompense. We are not talking about millions of pounds but when I look and see that there are 73 players around the world that have been in our system, we wouldn't need to be asking people to sponsor our trophies. The money would be there."
The current system isn't broke. Rashford's emergence proves that. But perhaps it is flawed, particularly when a club like Fletcher Moss Rangers isn't obviously sustainable. "I've been with the club for a long time," concludes Horrocks. "And I feel like someone somewhere is missing a trick." Given their development successes, it's difficult to disagree.