U23s & Academy

[gbandit]

I remember Howe praising him at the end of 21/22 season or pre 22/23 but his Scottish loan spell was hampered by injuries. Doesn’t seem like he’s made much progress sadly 

[Guest]

he had a pretty horrible stint of suffering from concussions iirc

[Guest]

https://inews.co.uk/sport/football/newcastle-academy-secret-weapon-ffp-battle-2975380
 

really good read this, academy finally seems to be going places and Steve Harper is the right man to be leading it

[Guest]

Quote

At the bottom of pitch three at Newcastle United’s academy in leafy Little Benton, there is a walkway that leads to an unremarkable gate.

It does not look much but a short walk through it takes you to the adjoining first-team training ground and so, for the 160 young footballers on Newcastle’s books, that gate is loaded with symbolism.

Every week or so, Eddie Howe or one of his coaches will ring Ben Dawson, his counterpart at the Under-21 team, and ask for him to send a few players through the gate. Sometimes they want to take a closer look at a player of promise who is garnering attention but mostly it’s a case of bolstering numbers for first team training.

One of those players was Lewis Miley, the 17-year-old then in the first year of his scholarship. He grabbed the chance and within a few months Miley was proving to be the standout performer in a Champions League game at Paris Saint-Germain. That walk can be life-changing.

“To get through that gate, that is the ultimate aim,” Steve Harper, Newcastle’s academy director, tells i.

“But when we induct the younger ones we don’t say to them ‘That’s what it’s all about’ because we know most of them, statistically speaking, won’t make it through that gate and we don’t want them to leave bitter and twisted for not having become first-team players.

“We want them to leave feeling better for the experience, having enjoyed it, having been taught the right values and behaviours, knowing all about respect, the right things to eat and having the resilience to cope with what the outside world will bring.”

For Harper, that is no throwaway statement. He wants to develop brilliant players but even better people. Earlier in the tour, I’d been greeted at the front door which is overlooked by a painted message that reads in black and white: “Today is your opportunity”. When you leave the building a sign asks pointedly: “Did you make the most of today?”

In some ways it is a good week to visit. The first team’s lingering hopes of ending the club’s 69-year wait for domestic silverware were extinguished in a sobering FA Cup defeat to Manchester City and after the autumn glamour of the Champions League a draining campaign has increasingly played out against a backdrop of festering frustration.

No-one doubts the stated intention of the ownership group to compete for trophies but the size of the task in front of them to catch up to the Premier League’s heavyweights – a challenge exacerbated by suffocating profit and sustainability rules (PSR) – has prompted the first tentative questions about approach. A growing number want to see more tangible proof that the club’s long-term thinking is going to bear fruit.

And so the academy feels like a good place to come. i was granted unprecedented access to the facility and staff last week and witnessed firsthand how significant investment combined with smart ideas has delivered big improvements in a short space of time.

There has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of staff since the 2021 takeover of the club. They now have a full-time nutritionist, psychologist and more coaches, analysts and sports scientists than the academy has ever had before, along with a much-improved budget for recruitment and modernised scouting network.

Standards are undoubtedly rising and a winning culture dedicated to improvement is being developed. You can sense the enthusiasm and energy of the people who work here. When i visits, every office door remains open for conversations.

“We are starting to punch our weight a bit and we know the so-called big six are worried about us, which is a good place to be,” Harper says.

But for all the optimism there are also some considerable challenges that require big, difficult questions to be answered. They know there is a mountain to climb and Harper candidly admits their budget is still dwarfed by Liverpool and Manchester City among others.

“We will need to be the disruptors,” he says.

“The first team will say the same. We have to do it a little bit differently, to do it our way which means staying true to our soul and creating a ‘Newcastle Way’ that is high performance but also incorporates our identity.”

There are practical issues, too. “We’re running out of space on this site,” Harper admits. To prove that he points out the academy recruitment team is housed in a makeshift office in a portable cabin. A smart one, granted, but it is far from ideal.

So do they move to a new, purpose-built, sprawling campus? Or stay on the footprint of the current site, where there are 80-year leases, and buy the pitches at the neighbouring Blue Flames sporting club where the U21s play and turn it into a mini St James’ Park like the junior Etihad that Manchester City have?

Mark Douglas visits Newcastle’s academy in Little Benton (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

All of these questions are pressing because in the world of PSR, the academy has to become a central part of Newcastle’s armoury as they aim to compete with the best. Producing players isn’t just good for Howe’s first team, it’s also good for business because selling academy graduates allows you to bank every penny as profit for PSR purposes.

Additionally money spent on the academy can be written off as infrastructure investment so does not count towards PSR calculations.

“The way the rules and regulations have shifted, it’s become of immense significance to be able to develop your own footballers,” Harper says. He is, however, not much of a fan of another aspect of the financial fair play regulations.

“It’s slightly counterproductive that PSR is encouraging clubs to develop players and then sell them to be able to move through the levels. I’m sure there will be conversations ongoing and that will be addressed at some point.”

In the meantime resources continue to pour in. The club have just refitted the academy gym and are spending £500,000 to build a new classroom this summer which will double as an analysis suite for the growing number of data scientists and analysts working at the academy.

It will be a game changer for the academic programme Newcastle run for their scholars, which is one of the best in the Premier League, but also provide crucial help for the football department.

It is the sort of ingenuity i witnessed spending time here, from the academy director to the club’s head of education. Here are their stories.

Steve Harper – Academy Director

Originally Harper got the gig for ten days.

A fine goalkeeper whose Newcastle career spanned two decades and earned him a place in the club’s hall of fame, he answered an SOS in 2021 to take charge of the club’s academy with the simple remit to “keep the wheels turning”.

It soon became clear a much bigger job was at hand. 

“We were probably 10 to 12 years behind other category one academies and that’s through no fault of anybody,” he says.

“The whole organisation was quite lean. We didn’t have as many people as other clubs but those who were here were working really hard. I always said the potential was there.”

A takeover in 2021 by an ownership group led by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia allowed Newcastle’s academy to move from, in Harper’s words, “survival mode to a performance mentality”.

“(Co-owners) Amanda [Staveley] and Mehrdad [Ghodoussi] were very interested from the outset,” he says.

“We had a lot of consultants in to have a look at what we were doing and how we were doing it and that support has continued. They’re always asking about things, always very complimentary about our work.

“This year we’ve had six Premier League debuts. Yes injuries have forced Eddie’s hand a little bit but for Lewis [Miley] to go and play well over 30 games and not look out of his depth at all is something huge.

“Elliot [Anderson] is in there, Sean [Longstaff] is in there. It’s been a proud season for everybody connected to the academy but now it has to continue, which is the challenge.

“Where we were, where we are now and where we’re heading are three very different things. We were 10 to 12 years behind some other category one academies but now we’re caught up to where we’re probably only two or three years behind. That’s thanks to the support from the board and the excellent team we’ve got here now.”

Harper has been set a target of becoming an established “top six academy”, which mirrors the first team’s goal. It will require smart, forward thinking because their budget – although significantly increased since the takeover – is still multiples less than the £15m the likes of City and Chelsea spend per year.

So here is proof of a new, innovative approach. At the turn of the year, after a meeting of the club’s football board, a “big, strategic” decision was made to drastically reduce the age of the U21 squad. It is one of the most significant changes in philosophy at the club’s academy for decades.

The club moved Cameron Ferguson, Remi Savage, Charlie Wiggett and Josh Scott on in January and promoted a crop of U18s into that group, including U17s Leo Sharhar and Anthony Munda and U18s Dylan Charlton and Alfie Harrison, the promising midfielder signed from Manchester City during the transfer window.

Newcastle academy director Steve Harper speaks to Mark Douglas (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

It is a bold call but one that Newcastle feel will help them recruit and retain the talent they have got.

“Look, I could clog up the U18s and U21s with 21-year-old players and compete at the top of Premier League 2 but that’s running it for me and making it results-driven,” Harper says.

“Instead what will be done here, what will be our USP from now on, is to give opportunities younger. You will notice our U21s team will be 16, 17 and 18 year olds. It will be accelerated learning and they’ll be stretched. There will be some tough experiences along the way, but that is where resilience comes from.”

It also has Howe’s seal of approval. “Recently the U21s lost 7-1 at home to Chelsea and got a real lesson in ruthlessness in the final third,” Harper says.

“He asked about it and I told him they’d had a tough one but we’re not going to clog up the U21s, we’re going to expose these younger players to some tough experiences to build resilience. He just said: ‘I’m 100 per cent behind that’. It’s music to your ears.”

Another recent “game changer” is the club moving to a full-time training model which means they can now recruit nationally from the start of the U15 age group. Before then the club were limited to recruiting players who lived within 90 minutes of the training base – a catchment area that, as Harper wryly points out, covers a good chunk of the North Sea.

Last year was their first year with this new freedom and they signed Sam Alabi from Oldham Athletic, Michael Mills from Port Vale, Sammy Pinnington from Luton Town and Kacey Wooster from Southend United.

“Putting better players around the academy players we have helps raise the level but we’re only in year one of that. Other academies have been doing that for 10 to 12 years,” Harper says.

The talent factory is primed for sustained success (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

The club had a jarring recent reminder of the work still to do with Bobby Clark’s breakthrough at Liverpool. Midfielder Clark, the son of Newcastle hero Lee, was at Newcastle’s academy but chose to leave in 2021. Harper sees that partly as a sign of the times.

“With Brexit everyone is looking at the same group of players so the internal academy recruitment market has got mega competitive and with the rules set up to encourage people to develop their own and sell them on it’s become even more competitive,” Harper says. He is not a fan.

“It’s a sad development and it’s counterproductive. You don’t want a transfer market at U14 or U16 because you want kids learning on their doorstep in the right environment.

“I was in interim charge when Bobby [Clark] left. He was a big fish in a small pond. We did what we did to try and keep Bobby but I can understand why he wanted to leave at that time. He’s gone to an excellent academy at Liverpool under a top drawer academy manager in Alex Inglethorpe and he’s gone on and won the League Cup which wouldn’t have been possible here.

“Unfortunately we do everything we can to mitigate against that but the truth is every academy is losing players because of this internal transfer market and it’s something we do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen.

“We have to put a pathway in place so that it is an attractive proposition to stay at Newcastle and get into the first team. We’ve been able to do that with Lewis, with the six debuts we’ve had and we have a manager in Eddie Howe who has proven what a good coach he is and how highly he values young players. He has an interest in developing them and will give them an opportunity if they’re good enough.”

On a table in Harper’s officer sit a clutch of get well cards, a reminder of a frightening brush with mortality in September last year when he suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage, a rare type of stroke.

He is better now, and – he says – better for it. One of the cards is from Newcastle’s head of people and it has a terrier on the front.

“That’s what they used to call me. I almost wanted to fix everything when I first came in, that is probably what contributed to what happened back in September,” he says.

“Having an enforced eight weeks off did change me. I was a ‘why can’t it be done’ person before but now I can walk past conversations in the corridor without feeling the need to get involved.”

He is too modest to say it but speak to others and they will tell you he has driven a culture reset at Little Benton, a conscious effort to encourage openness, collaboration and fun.

In one of the rooms now there is a dart board, where an ongoing staff-player tournament is taking place. Harper remembers resigning from the academy in 2019 because “there was a dark cloud over the place” but those have been lifted.

A little example. They run a Magpie Club among the players, with a point attached to a competitive training session every day. The winning team collect the point and every six weeks they invite a guest in to speak about their high performance journey and announce the top three players, who win a voucher, and the bottom one, who has to spin a wheel for a light-hearted forfeit.

Harper has tapped his contacts book to get elite athletes like Jonathan Edwards, Lee Westwood, Steve Harmison and Alan Shearer to do the honours.

Businessman Sir Graham Wiley, the multi-millionaire founder of software company Sage, gave a memorable answer when asked what he looks for in an interview.

“He said: ‘I’ve made my mind up in a minute and I spend the rest of the hour deciding if I was right or not’. We tell the lads ‘first impressions are important, every touch leaves a trace’, but having someone who has been fantastically successful in their field in to reinforce the message helps,” Harper says.

Behind Harper is a whiteboard with squares devoted to each of the age groups, from U8s up to the U21s. Each player – who walks through the doors with youthful hopes, dreams and aspiration – is represented by a white magnetic name card. Quietly they’re confident that there are more Miley’s in that pool and there’s particular enthusiasm for the crop of homegrown goalkeepers coming through the ranks.

“Part of me wants to get a TV remote and put it on 30x speed and see what the academy looks like in two or three years’ time because we’re in a really good place now,” he says.

“The infrastructure is there, the set-up is and the people are in place. We’ve come a long way in a short time. If you look two or three years down the line hopefully we will have created something special’.

Jack Ross – Head of Coach Development

Jack Ross is the club’s head of coach development (Photo: Getty)

When Jack Ross does presentations at Newcastle’s training ground, he knows the questions are coming so tries to head them off at the pass with his final slide.

It is a picture of him in his former role as Sunderland first-team manager and has the heading “Forgiveness”. It instantly melts any awkwardness that a former Black Cats boss is now central to operations at Newcastle’s academy.

“I keep telling people [academy director] Steve [Harper] played at Sunderland too! He likes to pretend he didn’t but he did. I’m a nice deflector for him in that sense,” he jokes.

“Mark Atkinson, our head of player development, was in the same role at Sunderland when I was there and Paul Midgeley, our head of Academy recruitment, was at Sunderland when I was there too. So I think I’m the one that takes all the heat for it and they get away with it!”

Ross explains his journey from first-team management to Little Benton to become Newcastle’s head of coach development as a result of his thirst to “see football through a different lens”.

He had taken four years out of the game at the age of 18 to do an economics degree and always wanted to return to academia. He juggles this job with a masters in sports directorship which he will complete over the summer.

Initially employed by the club’s former sporting director Dan Ashworth to review the club’s academy coaching set-up on a consultancy basis – “What could we do better with greater resources post-takeover,” he surmises that initial remit as – he took the role on permanently last year. Ross comes over as smart, savvy and open to new ideas. His appointment feels like a coup.

The role is a relatively new one but Ross sums it up neatly as “maximising the potential of our coaches and creating a domino effect – if we can raise the calibre of the coaches we’ve got a better chance of developing players”.

To do that means a lot of “observing”: watching coaches deliver training sessions, oversee matches, paying attention down to little things like body language, the way messages are imparted and information presented.

Coaches are filmed and mic’d up five or six times a year, a data-led breakdown of their performances then presented to them. There’s a weekly Friday coaching forum to exchange ideas and feedback and chances to observe elsewhere too.

Recent visits include a trip to Red Bull Salzburg, and a delegation of U18 coaches taken to observe and speak to Brendan Rodgers at Celtic. Last week Ross and Atkinson were at a Uefa conference in Geneva.

“The goal is to create an environment where coaches are comfortable being challenged and they challenge us to get better,” Ross explains.

When you walk around the building there are diagrams embossed in black, white and green that detail Newcastle’s “game model”, an overarching playing style put together by current U21s assistant coach Neil Winskill.

It includes words like “Regain, ambush” and phrases like “We press to score” and “intensity is our identity”. It breaks down Newcastle’s aspiration to become a high pressing, forward-thinking, attacking side into an easy to understand diagram to be followed by players at all age groups.

“It’s an incredible detailed, thorough piece of work that sets out brilliantly what Newcastle want to be and what they need to be but my job is to make sure the coaches can put their own spin on it, they don’t feel too handcuffed,” he explains.

There has been a significant coaching restructure on his watch and they’re in the final stages of moving to full-time individual age group leads across the academy. It is a “significant step forward” for the club’s coaching staff, Ross says.

A host of murals celebrating the academy adorn the corridors (Photo: Mark Douglas)

As for Ross himself, he sees his next step as being a sporting director, which is intriguing given the vacancy at St James’ Park.

“I didn’t quit management, I just decided to explore other routes in the game,” he explains.

“Sporting director is an area I want to pursue because ironically I don’t think there’s that many people with my background in the role. That’s surprising and if you do a deeper dive there’s actually not that many who have been managers or players.

“Dan [Ashworth] mentored me and spent a lot of time with me and one of the gaps I had in my CV was academy experience so this has been brilliantly insightful.

“I thought I knew it all in football but far from it. If I was to be a first team manager again there are bits that I would definitely take into it from here, which is the greatest compliment I could pay it.”

Peter Ramage – Assistant Loans Manager

Sometimes you don’t answer the phone.

Peter Ramage is talking about how he manages Newcastle’s army of loan players, in particular the teenagers who have left home for the first time and find themselves in an unfamiliar city or town.

“Some of the lads here haven’t ever really experienced life outside these four walls. They’re having to wash their clothes and cook their meals for the first time so you want to be there to support them,” he says.

“But sometimes they come with a request and you think ‘You have to figure that our yourself’.”

Ramage is one of six in Newcastle’s loan department, second in command to Shola Ameobi, a friend of 25 years and, like him, a former Magpie.

Ameobi is based at the first team training ground and broadly has responsibility for the senior men who are out on loan while Ramage, who has an office at Little Benton, oversees younger players. Every day he watches both the U18s and U21s train “so I know inside out what’s coming through”.

The loan experience is about development but sometimes that means struggle. The broad idea is to send players to a club with a similar style to Newcastle’s but it is also about challenge: a striker scoring freely for the U23s might be sent to a struggling lower division club that isn’t creating many chances to stress test their readiness.

All the players are supported by a physio, sports scientist, analyst and the club’s psychologist. There are weekly calls with players who are out on loan and in the case of Yankuba Minteh, starring at Feyenoord, regular flying visits, the latest scheduled for this week. Last week they were in Volendam to check in on Australia international Garang Kuol.

Ramage himself has just returned from Rome, where he represented Newcastle at the Transferroom forum. It is kind of like football’s equivalent of speed dating, with 500 people from 350 clubs across the globe networking and making connections.

Ever since the takeover Newcastle have been a hot ticket which is both a good thing and bad thing. “It’s tough because everyone wants a piece of us now for understandable reasons, but for us it’s about making sure we work with people who have the right intentions to use us and our players,” Ramage explains.

It is through Transferroom that Newcastle set up Rodrigo Vilca’s move to Serbian SuperLiga side FK Vozdovac and Kuol’s loan to Volendam in the Eredivisie.

The club’s long-term ambition is to build a multi-club network but that is not imminent so in the meantime the goal is to strike more informal relationships. Newcastle are close to finishing a piece of data-led research into which managers and clubs utilise loan players and how they do it. The hope is it will inform their loan strategy moving forward.

“We’re not at a stage where we have people on speed dial, telling them we have X, Y and Z available. But it’s something we’re building towards – a lot more clubs are showing interest in our players after how well [midfielder] Joe White did at Crewe and [goalkeeper] Max Thompson at Northampton,” he says. The club never insist on clauses demanding first-team starts, he adds.

Newcastle loanee Yankuba Minteh plays for Feyenoord in the Eredivisie (Photo: Getty)

PSR regulations mean the loan department has become vital to the club’s business plan, both in terms of developing players for the first team and adding value to those who might end up having careers elsewhere.

“With financial fair play it’s becoming a business – especially as you can bank 100 per cent profit with academy players. It’s also becoming a way of bringing money into the club, especially with FFP and how close we are to the limit,” Ramage says.

There is understandable excitement at the progress on Minteh, whose recent form has created a considerable buzz around the Gambia winger.

“He’s a great kid and he’s taken to it like a duck to water but there’s so much work that has gone on behind the scenes,” Ramage says.

“Feyenoord have been brilliant with him and we visit every four to six weeks. We’re in constant communication with Yankuba, we still treat him as a player who is coming through our academy in terms of reviews, analysis, clips and making sure he’s getting any information the manager wants to get to him.

“It’s been a good experience for us working with Feyenoord because the hope is that going down the line we’ll be bringing in more Yankuba Minteh’s and they’ll be going out to Champions League clubs and top European clubs.”

Things have not gone as well with Kuol, the 19-year-old prodigy who signed for Newcastle to great fanfare a year ago. Managerial upheaval and a change of sporting director has disrupted things and a new boss, Regillio Simons, father of PSG prospect Xavi, wants him to play in an unfamiliar role that he is still learning.

“There’s been a lot of political struggles in the background but he’s learning a new style, a new culture in a top European league,” Ramage explains.

“He’s a great kid but he’s very young, he was probably thrust into the scene with that World Cup appearance in 2022 but we have to remember he’s 19 years old and there’s not many that age playing regular football,” Ramage says.

“There’s still plenty of time for him to develop and develop into – hopefully – a first-team footballer at Newcastle United.”

Julie Smith – Head of Safeguarding and Well-being

In the corner of Julie Smith’s office is a well-worn couch.

Smith is Newcastle’s head of safeguarding and well-being, a dry title that barely scratches the surface of what her all-encompassing role entails. The couch probably sums it up better than words can.

“My office isn’t a football environment so that couch is a safe space for any of the boys to come to me and to talk about whatever they want. As you can see, it’s been well-used,” she says.

Smith recounts a recent case of an U18s player who was deeply unhappy and came into her office to confide that he no longer wanted to play football. His dream was to be a pilot but he felt unable to tell his parents because he believed he was representing their dream for him to play for Newcastle.

When his parents were eventually called it, they were horrified he’d not said anything before. They just wanted him to be happy in whatever he did and he’s now, thanks to Smith’s contact, on Jet2’s trainee pilot scheme.

“The pressure these boys put on themselves is huge and we have to be aware of that,” she says.

“The young boy sent us a video a couple of weeks ago of him having a flying lesson. Someone else had filmed it, he was flying over St James’ Park and he sent the video to me with a caption: ‘I prefer to be flying over it than playing in it’.”

Smith is naturally ebullient and optimistic, pointing to work the academy has done with primary schools in the deprived West End of Newcastle as proof they can make a difference.

The schools sit in the shadow of St James’ Park but few of the pupils could ever dream of affording a ticket to a game. County lines drug gangs are a real problem there. The schools felt the club had become detached from the community so a project to send academy scholars in to talk to the pupils about the values of hard work and aspiration was hatched.

The club provided tickets, signed shirts and signed balls to the schools as prizes. Literacy rates have improved and the scholars enjoy it so much that two former players went on to become teaching assistants after their release.

But she is also acutely aware of how vulnerable some of the boys who pass through the doors are. A big part of her job is education – on things like consent, sexual health and online risks. Some of it sounds terrifying.

“There’s a big thing at the moment around sexploitation and young footballers being targeted by criminal gangs online,” she explains.

“They’re sending pictures as a girl, popping up on their Instagram and luring them into sending explicit pictures. The minute they send it – because they think it’s an attractive girl who is genuinely interested in them – they get back a demand for money.

“They threaten to send the picture and put it over social media, send it to friends, family and the football club. It’s a really high profile issue at the moment.”

Some wise words from the old master, Pele (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

On the back of the troubling rise in popularity of social media influencer Andrew Tate, the club also arranged a seminar on misogyny with a local charity that deals with violence against women and girls.

“It wasn’t as simple as us saying ‘Don’t follow Andrew Tate’ but we said make an educated choice, make your own mind up when you see what he represents. It was very powerful,” she says.

Smith recently set up an alumni club, pinging a WhatsApp to hundreds of former academy players to invite them to enjoy hospitality at Newcastle’s upcoming game against Tottenham Hotspur. It will happen three times a year from now on.

Most are now out of the game and among their number are paramedics, firemen, nurses and lawyers.

Some left on bad terms but Smith wanted them to reconnect with the club and plans to feature their stories on an ‘alumni wall’ at the academy training ground to remind the current generation there is life beyond football.

“We say family is part of everything and we don’t want them to leave and forget they were part of this family,” she says.

Ben Dawson – Under-21s Manager

I sit down with Ben Dawson in the Lewis Miley room at the academy, one of two glass-fronted breakout offices that have recently been added next to the canteen.

It is a Harper idea: the rooms are named after the two most recent academy graduates to make their full Premier League debut. A signed, framed shirt hangs on the wall. The window looks over to the first team pitch.

When the next player comes through they will replace the adjoining jersey and Dawson, the club’s U21s manager, thinks there is enough talent bubbling under to ensure that won’t be too long.

By the time we speak Dawson has done a morning training session in the rain. He’s sat with a bowl of soup rapidly cooling in front of him but is generous with his time, reflecting on a stint at the club that included taking the first team for the Premier League Asia Trophy while Steve Bruce’s appointment was confirmed four years ago.

Now he’s back on familiar ground, leading that tricky stage when development and the need to start preparing for a win-at-all-costs first team environment begins.

“We’ve seen some big strides recently. Our game methodology gives us real consistency from U8 all the way through to U21 and there’s a really good link between the first team and U21s now,” he explains.

Lewis Miley is a famous product of the Newcastle academy (Photo: Getty)

In November he was at the Parc des Princes to see Miley – who joined the club as a mini-Magpie at the age of seven – “boss” a Champions League game.

“We were ten rows back, in among family and friends of first team. You get those moments in this role and that was one of those,” he recalls.

That day there were three other academy players on the bench and more who travelled and trained with the first team. “Two days before that game they were sat in this canteen, so it’s a tremendous motivation to everyone. That’s how close you are to it.”

Dawson believes Newcastle need to spread that message more effectively, having been guilty of too much humility in the past.

“We’re going in the right direction,” he says.

“There’s a lot of things that go on here that are best in class across the country but we don’t necessarily shout about it.

“Some of that is for good reasons, if you shout about it people will steal your ideas. We can be too tentative but we have to publicise the good stuff a bit more.”

Darren Darwent – Head of Education

Miley has two more pieces of work to do to complete his Btec – and it is a measure of both his own flawless attitude and Newcastle’s commitment to the classroom that he will complete that qualification despite his whirlwind season.

“I haven’t bothered him while he’s been training with the first team or away with England,” Newcastle’s head of education Darren Darwent tells i.

“But the week after next I’ll get him down here for a session. He’s got two pieces of work to do and then he’s done but you know he’ll do it. He’s such a nice lad and a great example to the others.”

Miley, like everyone who joins the academy on a full-time contract at 16, works towards a Btec in sports science. That means three three-hour sessions a week – Wednesday mornings, Thursday and Friday afternoons – spent in the classroom.

If they choose to they can add an A-Level but the Btec alone gives them enough Ucas points to go to university, which many do if they don’t win a contract. It also opens the door to American university scholarship programmes, which is another popular route after football.

Education takes place on-site inside a designated classroom (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

At Newcastle, attainment levels are high. They have one of the best academic reputations in the Premier League and deliver all of their lessons from a designated on-site classroom.

“There can be a bit of defeatist attitude at some clubs – I hear quite a lot of the time they say to the boys ‘Just get it out of the way’,” Darwent says.

“They’re trying to be helpful but it’s not because they build up a perception that it doesn’t matter.

“We’ve created an environment from Steve Harper down that we’re respected. Their time with us is like a sixth form or a college, divorce yourself from the football in the three or four hours we get.”

To prove the point he leaves the room at one point, returning with a stack of thick final-year projects his students have produced. They are on seriously weighty topics – transgender issues in sport, the growth of the women’s game, sexism in sport – and are thorough, meticulous pieces of work.

“These lads are no different from any other student really – they might be tired, irritable but it’s just getting that switch that we’re here now, we’re here to work,” Darwent says.

“If people get given a certain target grade, we always make sure they aim to go above their target grade.

“We could easily get them all through on basic passes and no-one would bat an eyelid but that’s not why we do it. Steve wouldn’t want that either. We just want the best for them.”

[r0cafella]

26 minutes ago, Jack27 said:

https://inews.co.uk/sport/football/newcastle-academy-secret-weapon-ffp-battle-2975380
 

really good read this, academy finally seems to be going places and Steve Harper is the right man to be leading it

Thanks for sharing this. 

[Nucasol]

25 minutes ago, Jack27 said:

https://inews.co.uk/sport/football/newcastle-academy-secret-weapon-ffp-battle-2975380
 

really good read this, academy finally seems to be going places and Steve Harper is the right man to be leading it

Great read - only took umbrage with one quote:

 

 

It is the fault of somebody - foremost Mike Ashley and bootlicker in chief Lee Charnley. Those two shits have set us back a decade with their antics.

[Newcastle Fan]

Its definitely the fault of many, there is no reason for us to be behind considering the talents in the area the ability to attract talents from outside. but its nothing that can't be fixed with a proper team looking after it.

[Guest]

TIL about the catchment areas being mainly the North Sea but moving to full time means you can attract talent from U15 onwards from across the country. Needed

[Nucasol]

8 hours ago, Jack27 said:

TIL about the catchment areas being mainly the North Sea but moving to full time means you can attract talent from U15 onwards from across the country. Needed

Can we not sign players from Merman United?

[Lazarus]

1 hour ago, Nucasol said:

Can we not sign players from Merman United?

 

I heard Dogger Bank United have a good academy - maybe we can poach some of their players

[Tsunami]

That’s a long read. Some good noises. Bobby Clark left ‘cos Bruce told Lee there was no money to give Bobby what would have been no more than a going rate contract and Liverpool jumped in. Lee told Bruce where to go and will have nowt to do him. Right falling out.

 

I’m told Bobby would quite like to come back and is a bit homesick. Things might  change given the game time he’s had and his price would be a problem given where our priorities lie.

[Yorkie]

What an absolutely brilliant and optimistic read that was. After a lot of downbeat stories this year, that was a timely reminder that the club is a thousand times better than the festering footballing cesspit it was pre-takeover.

 

I loved all of that but found the 'football adjacent' stuff particularly interesting. Stories like the Greenwood case really amplify the responsibility on clubs to ensure that young footballers are nurtered into becoming decent human beings too. 

[madras]

On 27/03/2024 at 07:51, Jack27 said:

Quote

At the bottom of pitch three at Newcastle United’s academy in leafy Little Benton, there is a walkway that leads to an unremarkable gate.

It does not look much but a short walk through it takes you to the adjoining first-team training ground and so, for the 160 young footballers on Newcastle’s books, that gate is loaded with symbolism.

Every week or so, Eddie Howe or one of his coaches will ring Ben Dawson, his counterpart at the Under-21 team, and ask for him to send a few players through the gate. Sometimes they want to take a closer look at a player of promise who is garnering attention but mostly it’s a case of bolstering numbers for first team training.

One of those players was Lewis Miley, the 17-year-old then in the first year of his scholarship. He grabbed the chance and within a few months Miley was proving to be the standout performer in a Champions League game at Paris Saint-Germain. That walk can be life-changing.

“To get through that gate, that is the ultimate aim,” Steve Harper, Newcastle’s academy director, tells i.

“But when we induct the younger ones we don’t say to them ‘That’s what it’s all about’ because we know most of them, statistically speaking, won’t make it through that gate and we don’t want them to leave bitter and twisted for not having become first-team players.

“We want them to leave feeling better for the experience, having enjoyed it, having been taught the right values and behaviours, knowing all about respect, the right things to eat and having the resilience to cope with what the outside world will bring.”

For Harper, that is no throwaway statement. He wants to develop brilliant players but even better people. Earlier in the tour, I’d been greeted at the front door which is overlooked by a painted message that reads in black and white: “Today is your opportunity”. When you leave the building a sign asks pointedly: “Did you make the most of today?”

In some ways it is a good week to visit. The first team’s lingering hopes of ending the club’s 69-year wait for domestic silverware were extinguished in a sobering FA Cup defeat to Manchester City and after the autumn glamour of the Champions League a draining campaign has increasingly played out against a backdrop of festering frustration.

No-one doubts the stated intention of the ownership group to compete for trophies but the size of the task in front of them to catch up to the Premier League’s heavyweights – a challenge exacerbated by suffocating profit and sustainability rules (PSR) – has prompted the first tentative questions about approach. A growing number want to see more tangible proof that the club’s long-term thinking is going to bear fruit.

And so the academy feels like a good place to come. i was granted unprecedented access to the facility and staff last week and witnessed firsthand how significant investment combined with smart ideas has delivered big improvements in a short space of time.

There has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of staff since the 2021 takeover of the club. They now have a full-time nutritionist, psychologist and more coaches, analysts and sports scientists than the academy has ever had before, along with a much-improved budget for recruitment and modernised scouting network.

Standards are undoubtedly rising and a winning culture dedicated to improvement is being developed. You can sense the enthusiasm and energy of the people who work here. When i visits, every office door remains open for conversations.

“We are starting to punch our weight a bit and we know the so-called big six are worried about us, which is a good place to be,” Harper says.

But for all the optimism there are also some considerable challenges that require big, difficult questions to be answered. They know there is a mountain to climb and Harper candidly admits their budget is still dwarfed by Liverpool and Manchester City among others.

“We will need to be the disruptors,” he says.

“The first team will say the same. We have to do it a little bit differently, to do it our way which means staying true to our soul and creating a ‘Newcastle Way’ that is high performance but also incorporates our identity.”

There are practical issues, too. “We’re running out of space on this site,” Harper admits. To prove that he points out the academy recruitment team is housed in a makeshift office in a portable cabin. A smart one, granted, but it is far from ideal.

So do they move to a new, purpose-built, sprawling campus? Or stay on the footprint of the current site, where there are 80-year leases, and buy the pitches at the neighbouring Blue Flames sporting club where the U21s play and turn it into a mini St James’ Park like the junior Etihad that Manchester City have?

Mark Douglas visits Newcastle’s academy in Little Benton (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

All of these questions are pressing because in the world of PSR, the academy has to become a central part of Newcastle’s armoury as they aim to compete with the best. Producing players isn’t just good for Howe’s first team, it’s also good for business because selling academy graduates allows you to bank every penny as profit for PSR purposes.

Additionally money spent on the academy can be written off as infrastructure investment so does not count towards PSR calculations.

“The way the rules and regulations have shifted, it’s become of immense significance to be able to develop your own footballers,” Harper says. He is, however, not much of a fan of another aspect of the financial fair play regulations.

“It’s slightly counterproductive that PSR is encouraging clubs to develop players and then sell them to be able to move through the levels. I’m sure there will be conversations ongoing and that will be addressed at some point.”

In the meantime resources continue to pour in. The club have just refitted the academy gym and are spending £500,000 to build a new classroom this summer which will double as an analysis suite for the growing number of data scientists and analysts working at the academy.

It will be a game changer for the academic programme Newcastle run for their scholars, which is one of the best in the Premier League, but also provide crucial help for the football department.

It is the sort of ingenuity i witnessed spending time here, from the academy director to the club’s head of education. Here are their stories.

Steve Harper – Academy Director

Originally Harper got the gig for ten days.

A fine goalkeeper whose Newcastle career spanned two decades and earned him a place in the club’s hall of fame, he answered an SOS in 2021 to take charge of the club’s academy with the simple remit to “keep the wheels turning”.

It soon became clear a much bigger job was at hand. 

“We were probably 10 to 12 years behind other category one academies and that’s through no fault of anybody,” he says.

“The whole organisation was quite lean. We didn’t have as many people as other clubs but those who were here were working really hard. I always said the potential was there.”

A takeover in 2021 by an ownership group led by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia allowed Newcastle’s academy to move from, in Harper’s words, “survival mode to a performance mentality”.

“(Co-owners) Amanda [Staveley] and Mehrdad [Ghodoussi] were very interested from the outset,” he says.

“We had a lot of consultants in to have a look at what we were doing and how we were doing it and that support has continued. They’re always asking about things, always very complimentary about our work.

“This year we’ve had six Premier League debuts. Yes injuries have forced Eddie’s hand a little bit but for Lewis [Miley] to go and play well over 30 games and not look out of his depth at all is something huge.

“Elliot [Anderson] is in there, Sean [Longstaff] is in there. It’s been a proud season for everybody connected to the academy but now it has to continue, which is the challenge.

“Where we were, where we are now and where we’re heading are three very different things. We were 10 to 12 years behind some other category one academies but now we’re caught up to where we’re probably only two or three years behind. That’s thanks to the support from the board and the excellent team we’ve got here now.”

Harper has been set a target of becoming an established “top six academy”, which mirrors the first team’s goal. It will require smart, forward thinking because their budget – although significantly increased since the takeover – is still multiples less than the £15m the likes of City and Chelsea spend per year.

So here is proof of a new, innovative approach. At the turn of the year, after a meeting of the club’s football board, a “big, strategic” decision was made to drastically reduce the age of the U21 squad. It is one of the most significant changes in philosophy at the club’s academy for decades.

The club moved Cameron Ferguson, Remi Savage, Charlie Wiggett and Josh Scott on in January and promoted a crop of U18s into that group, including U17s Leo Sharhar and Anthony Munda and U18s Dylan Charlton and Alfie Harrison, the promising midfielder signed from Manchester City during the transfer window.

Newcastle academy director Steve Harper speaks to Mark Douglas (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

It is a bold call but one that Newcastle feel will help them recruit and retain the talent they have got.

“Look, I could clog up the U18s and U21s with 21-year-old players and compete at the top of Premier League 2 but that’s running it for me and making it results-driven,” Harper says.

“Instead what will be done here, what will be our USP from now on, is to give opportunities younger. You will notice our U21s team will be 16, 17 and 18 year olds. It will be accelerated learning and they’ll be stretched. There will be some tough experiences along the way, but that is where resilience comes from.”

It also has Howe’s seal of approval. “Recently the U21s lost 7-1 at home to Chelsea and got a real lesson in ruthlessness in the final third,” Harper says.

“He asked about it and I told him they’d had a tough one but we’re not going to clog up the U21s, we’re going to expose these younger players to some tough experiences to build resilience. He just said: ‘I’m 100 per cent behind that’. It’s music to your ears.”

Another recent “game changer” is the club moving to a full-time training model which means they can now recruit nationally from the start of the U15 age group. Before then the club were limited to recruiting players who lived within 90 minutes of the training base – a catchment area that, as Harper wryly points out, covers a good chunk of the North Sea.

Last year was their first year with this new freedom and they signed Sam Alabi from Oldham Athletic, Michael Mills from Port Vale, Sammy Pinnington from Luton Town and Kacey Wooster from Southend United.

“Putting better players around the academy players we have helps raise the level but we’re only in year one of that. Other academies have been doing that for 10 to 12 years,” Harper says.

The talent factory is primed for sustained success (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

The club had a jarring recent reminder of the work still to do with Bobby Clark’s breakthrough at Liverpool. Midfielder Clark, the son of Newcastle hero Lee, was at Newcastle’s academy but chose to leave in 2021. Harper sees that partly as a sign of the times.

“With Brexit everyone is looking at the same group of players so the internal academy recruitment market has got mega competitive and with the rules set up to encourage people to develop their own and sell them on it’s become even more competitive,” Harper says. He is not a fan.

“It’s a sad development and it’s counterproductive. You don’t want a transfer market at U14 or U16 because you want kids learning on their doorstep in the right environment.

“I was in interim charge when Bobby [Clark] left. He was a big fish in a small pond. We did what we did to try and keep Bobby but I can understand why he wanted to leave at that time. He’s gone to an excellent academy at Liverpool under a top drawer academy manager in Alex Inglethorpe and he’s gone on and won the League Cup which wouldn’t have been possible here.

“Unfortunately we do everything we can to mitigate against that but the truth is every academy is losing players because of this internal transfer market and it’s something we do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen.

“We have to put a pathway in place so that it is an attractive proposition to stay at Newcastle and get into the first team. We’ve been able to do that with Lewis, with the six debuts we’ve had and we have a manager in Eddie Howe who has proven what a good coach he is and how highly he values young players. He has an interest in developing them and will give them an opportunity if they’re good enough.”

On a table in Harper’s officer sit a clutch of get well cards, a reminder of a frightening brush with mortality in September last year when he suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage, a rare type of stroke.

He is better now, and – he says – better for it. One of the cards is from Newcastle’s head of people and it has a terrier on the front.

“That’s what they used to call me. I almost wanted to fix everything when I first came in, that is probably what contributed to what happened back in September,” he says.

“Having an enforced eight weeks off did change me. I was a ‘why can’t it be done’ person before but now I can walk past conversations in the corridor without feeling the need to get involved.”

He is too modest to say it but speak to others and they will tell you he has driven a culture reset at Little Benton, a conscious effort to encourage openness, collaboration and fun.

In one of the rooms now there is a dart board, where an ongoing staff-player tournament is taking place. Harper remembers resigning from the academy in 2019 because “there was a dark cloud over the place” but those have been lifted.

A little example. They run a Magpie Club among the players, with a point attached to a competitive training session every day. The winning team collect the point and every six weeks they invite a guest in to speak about their high performance journey and announce the top three players, who win a voucher, and the bottom one, who has to spin a wheel for a light-hearted forfeit.

Harper has tapped his contacts book to get elite athletes like Jonathan Edwards, Lee Westwood, Steve Harmison and Alan Shearer to do the honours.

Businessman Sir Graham Wiley, the multi-millionaire founder of software company Sage, gave a memorable answer when asked what he looks for in an interview.

“He said: ‘I’ve made my mind up in a minute and I spend the rest of the hour deciding if I was right or not’. We tell the lads ‘first impressions are important, every touch leaves a trace’, but having someone who has been fantastically successful in their field in to reinforce the message helps,” Harper says.

Behind Harper is a whiteboard with squares devoted to each of the age groups, from U8s up to the U21s. Each player – who walks through the doors with youthful hopes, dreams and aspiration – is represented by a white magnetic name card. Quietly they’re confident that there are more Miley’s in that pool and there’s particular enthusiasm for the crop of homegrown goalkeepers coming through the ranks.

“Part of me wants to get a TV remote and put it on 30x speed and see what the academy looks like in two or three years’ time because we’re in a really good place now,” he says.

“The infrastructure is there, the set-up is and the people are in place. We’ve come a long way in a short time. If you look two or three years down the line hopefully we will have created something special’.

Jack Ross – Head of Coach Development

Jack Ross is the club’s head of coach development (Photo: Getty)

When Jack Ross does presentations at Newcastle’s training ground, he knows the questions are coming so tries to head them off at the pass with his final slide.

It is a picture of him in his former role as Sunderland first-team manager and has the heading “Forgiveness”. It instantly melts any awkwardness that a former Black Cats boss is now central to operations at Newcastle’s academy.

“I keep telling people [academy director] Steve [Harper] played at Sunderland too! He likes to pretend he didn’t but he did. I’m a nice deflector for him in that sense,” he jokes.

“Mark Atkinson, our head of player development, was in the same role at Sunderland when I was there and Paul Midgeley, our head of Academy recruitment, was at Sunderland when I was there too. So I think I’m the one that takes all the heat for it and they get away with it!”

Ross explains his journey from first-team management to Little Benton to become Newcastle’s head of coach development as a result of his thirst to “see football through a different lens”.

He had taken four years out of the game at the age of 18 to do an economics degree and always wanted to return to academia. He juggles this job with a masters in sports directorship which he will complete over the summer.

Initially employed by the club’s former sporting director Dan Ashworth to review the club’s academy coaching set-up on a consultancy basis – “What could we do better with greater resources post-takeover,” he surmises that initial remit as – he took the role on permanently last year. Ross comes over as smart, savvy and open to new ideas. His appointment feels like a coup.

The role is a relatively new one but Ross sums it up neatly as “maximising the potential of our coaches and creating a domino effect – if we can raise the calibre of the coaches we’ve got a better chance of developing players”.

To do that means a lot of “observing”: watching coaches deliver training sessions, oversee matches, paying attention down to little things like body language, the way messages are imparted and information presented.

Coaches are filmed and mic’d up five or six times a year, a data-led breakdown of their performances then presented to them. There’s a weekly Friday coaching forum to exchange ideas and feedback and chances to observe elsewhere too.

Recent visits include a trip to Red Bull Salzburg, and a delegation of U18 coaches taken to observe and speak to Brendan Rodgers at Celtic. Last week Ross and Atkinson were at a Uefa conference in Geneva.

“The goal is to create an environment where coaches are comfortable being challenged and they challenge us to get better,” Ross explains.

When you walk around the building there are diagrams embossed in black, white and green that detail Newcastle’s “game model”, an overarching playing style put together by current U21s assistant coach Neil Winskill.

It includes words like “Regain, ambush” and phrases like “We press to score” and “intensity is our identity”. It breaks down Newcastle’s aspiration to become a high pressing, forward-thinking, attacking side into an easy to understand diagram to be followed by players at all age groups.

“It’s an incredible detailed, thorough piece of work that sets out brilliantly what Newcastle want to be and what they need to be but my job is to make sure the coaches can put their own spin on it, they don’t feel too handcuffed,” he explains.

There has been a significant coaching restructure on his watch and they’re in the final stages of moving to full-time individual age group leads across the academy. It is a “significant step forward” for the club’s coaching staff, Ross says.

A host of murals celebrating the academy adorn the corridors (Photo: Mark Douglas)

As for Ross himself, he sees his next step as being a sporting director, which is intriguing given the vacancy at St James’ Park.

“I didn’t quit management, I just decided to explore other routes in the game,” he explains.

“Sporting director is an area I want to pursue because ironically I don’t think there’s that many people with my background in the role. That’s surprising and if you do a deeper dive there’s actually not that many who have been managers or players.

“Dan [Ashworth] mentored me and spent a lot of time with me and one of the gaps I had in my CV was academy experience so this has been brilliantly insightful.

“I thought I knew it all in football but far from it. If I was to be a first team manager again there are bits that I would definitely take into it from here, which is the greatest compliment I could pay it.”

Peter Ramage – Assistant Loans Manager

Sometimes you don’t answer the phone.

Peter Ramage is talking about how he manages Newcastle’s army of loan players, in particular the teenagers who have left home for the first time and find themselves in an unfamiliar city or town.

“Some of the lads here haven’t ever really experienced life outside these four walls. They’re having to wash their clothes and cook their meals for the first time so you want to be there to support them,” he says.

“But sometimes they come with a request and you think ‘You have to figure that our yourself’.”

Ramage is one of six in Newcastle’s loan department, second in command to Shola Ameobi, a friend of 25 years and, like him, a former Magpie.

Ameobi is based at the first team training ground and broadly has responsibility for the senior men who are out on loan while Ramage, who has an office at Little Benton, oversees younger players. Every day he watches both the U18s and U21s train “so I know inside out what’s coming through”.

The loan experience is about development but sometimes that means struggle. The broad idea is to send players to a club with a similar style to Newcastle’s but it is also about challenge: a striker scoring freely for the U23s might be sent to a struggling lower division club that isn’t creating many chances to stress test their readiness.

All the players are supported by a physio, sports scientist, analyst and the club’s psychologist. There are weekly calls with players who are out on loan and in the case of Yankuba Minteh, starring at Feyenoord, regular flying visits, the latest scheduled for this week. Last week they were in Volendam to check in on Australia international Garang Kuol.

Ramage himself has just returned from Rome, where he represented Newcastle at the Transferroom forum. It is kind of like football’s equivalent of speed dating, with 500 people from 350 clubs across the globe networking and making connections.

Ever since the takeover Newcastle have been a hot ticket which is both a good thing and bad thing. “It’s tough because everyone wants a piece of us now for understandable reasons, but for us it’s about making sure we work with people who have the right intentions to use us and our players,” Ramage explains.

It is through Transferroom that Newcastle set up Rodrigo Vilca’s move to Serbian SuperLiga side FK Vozdovac and Kuol’s loan to Volendam in the Eredivisie.

The club’s long-term ambition is to build a multi-club network but that is not imminent so in the meantime the goal is to strike more informal relationships. Newcastle are close to finishing a piece of data-led research into which managers and clubs utilise loan players and how they do it. The hope is it will inform their loan strategy moving forward.

“We’re not at a stage where we have people on speed dial, telling them we have X, Y and Z available. But it’s something we’re building towards – a lot more clubs are showing interest in our players after how well [midfielder] Joe White did at Crewe and [goalkeeper] Max Thompson at Northampton,” he says. The club never insist on clauses demanding first-team starts, he adds.

Newcastle loanee Yankuba Minteh plays for Feyenoord in the Eredivisie (Photo: Getty)

PSR regulations mean the loan department has become vital to the club’s business plan, both in terms of developing players for the first team and adding value to those who might end up having careers elsewhere.

“With financial fair play it’s becoming a business – especially as you can bank 100 per cent profit with academy players. It’s also becoming a way of bringing money into the club, especially with FFP and how close we are to the limit,” Ramage says.

There is understandable excitement at the progress on Minteh, whose recent form has created a considerable buzz around the Gambia winger.

“He’s a great kid and he’s taken to it like a duck to water but there’s so much work that has gone on behind the scenes,” Ramage says.

“Feyenoord have been brilliant with him and we visit every four to six weeks. We’re in constant communication with Yankuba, we still treat him as a player who is coming through our academy in terms of reviews, analysis, clips and making sure he’s getting any information the manager wants to get to him.

“It’s been a good experience for us working with Feyenoord because the hope is that going down the line we’ll be bringing in more Yankuba Minteh’s and they’ll be going out to Champions League clubs and top European clubs.”

Things have not gone as well with Kuol, the 19-year-old prodigy who signed for Newcastle to great fanfare a year ago. Managerial upheaval and a change of sporting director has disrupted things and a new boss, Regillio Simons, father of PSG prospect Xavi, wants him to play in an unfamiliar role that he is still learning.

“There’s been a lot of political struggles in the background but he’s learning a new style, a new culture in a top European league,” Ramage explains.

“He’s a great kid but he’s very young, he was probably thrust into the scene with that World Cup appearance in 2022 but we have to remember he’s 19 years old and there’s not many that age playing regular football,” Ramage says.

“There’s still plenty of time for him to develop and develop into – hopefully – a first-team footballer at Newcastle United.”

Julie Smith – Head of Safeguarding and Well-being

In the corner of Julie Smith’s office is a well-worn couch.

Smith is Newcastle’s head of safeguarding and well-being, a dry title that barely scratches the surface of what her all-encompassing role entails. The couch probably sums it up better than words can.

“My office isn’t a football environment so that couch is a safe space for any of the boys to come to me and to talk about whatever they want. As you can see, it’s been well-used,” she says.

Smith recounts a recent case of an U18s player who was deeply unhappy and came into her office to confide that he no longer wanted to play football. His dream was to be a pilot but he felt unable to tell his parents because he believed he was representing their dream for him to play for Newcastle.

When his parents were eventually called it, they were horrified he’d not said anything before. They just wanted him to be happy in whatever he did and he’s now, thanks to Smith’s contact, on Jet2’s trainee pilot scheme.

“The pressure these boys put on themselves is huge and we have to be aware of that,” she says.

“The young boy sent us a video a couple of weeks ago of him having a flying lesson. Someone else had filmed it, he was flying over St James’ Park and he sent the video to me with a caption: ‘I prefer to be flying over it than playing in it’.”

Smith is naturally ebullient and optimistic, pointing to work the academy has done with primary schools in the deprived West End of Newcastle as proof they can make a difference.

The schools sit in the shadow of St James’ Park but few of the pupils could ever dream of affording a ticket to a game. County lines drug gangs are a real problem there. The schools felt the club had become detached from the community so a project to send academy scholars in to talk to the pupils about the values of hard work and aspiration was hatched.

The club provided tickets, signed shirts and signed balls to the schools as prizes. Literacy rates have improved and the scholars enjoy it so much that two former players went on to become teaching assistants after their release.

But she is also acutely aware of how vulnerable some of the boys who pass through the doors are. A big part of her job is education – on things like consent, sexual health and online risks. Some of it sounds terrifying.

“There’s a big thing at the moment around sexploitation and young footballers being targeted by criminal gangs online,” she explains.

“They’re sending pictures as a girl, popping up on their Instagram and luring them into sending explicit pictures. The minute they send it – because they think it’s an attractive girl who is genuinely interested in them – they get back a demand for money.

“They threaten to send the picture and put it over social media, send it to friends, family and the football club. It’s a really high profile issue at the moment.”

Some wise words from the old master, Pele (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

On the back of the troubling rise in popularity of social media influencer Andrew Tate, the club also arranged a seminar on misogyny with a local charity that deals with violence against women and girls.

“It wasn’t as simple as us saying ‘Don’t follow Andrew Tate’ but we said make an educated choice, make your own mind up when you see what he represents. It was very powerful,” she says.

Smith recently set up an alumni club, pinging a WhatsApp to hundreds of former academy players to invite them to enjoy hospitality at Newcastle’s upcoming game against Tottenham Hotspur. It will happen three times a year from now on.

Most are now out of the game and among their number are paramedics, firemen, nurses and lawyers.

Some left on bad terms but Smith wanted them to reconnect with the club and plans to feature their stories on an ‘alumni wall’ at the academy training ground to remind the current generation there is life beyond football.

“We say family is part of everything and we don’t want them to leave and forget they were part of this family,” she says.

Ben Dawson – Under-21s Manager

I sit down with Ben Dawson in the Lewis Miley room at the academy, one of two glass-fronted breakout offices that have recently been added next to the canteen.

It is a Harper idea: the rooms are named after the two most recent academy graduates to make their full Premier League debut. A signed, framed shirt hangs on the wall. The window looks over to the first team pitch.

When the next player comes through they will replace the adjoining jersey and Dawson, the club’s U21s manager, thinks there is enough talent bubbling under to ensure that won’t be too long.

By the time we speak Dawson has done a morning training session in the rain. He’s sat with a bowl of soup rapidly cooling in front of him but is generous with his time, reflecting on a stint at the club that included taking the first team for the Premier League Asia Trophy while Steve Bruce’s appointment was confirmed four years ago.

Now he’s back on familiar ground, leading that tricky stage when development and the need to start preparing for a win-at-all-costs first team environment begins.

“We’ve seen some big strides recently. Our game methodology gives us real consistency from U8 all the way through to U21 and there’s a really good link between the first team and U21s now,” he explains.

Lewis Miley is a famous product of the Newcastle academy (Photo: Getty)

In November he was at the Parc des Princes to see Miley – who joined the club as a mini-Magpie at the age of seven – “boss” a Champions League game.

“We were ten rows back, in among family and friends of first team. You get those moments in this role and that was one of those,” he recalls.

That day there were three other academy players on the bench and more who travelled and trained with the first team. “Two days before that game they were sat in this canteen, so it’s a tremendous motivation to everyone. That’s how close you are to it.”

Dawson believes Newcastle need to spread that message more effectively, having been guilty of too much humility in the past.

“We’re going in the right direction,” he says.

“There’s a lot of things that go on here that are best in class across the country but we don’t necessarily shout about it.

“Some of that is for good reasons, if you shout about it people will steal your ideas. We can be too tentative but we have to publicise the good stuff a bit more.”

Darren Darwent – Head of Education

Miley has two more pieces of work to do to complete his Btec – and it is a measure of both his own flawless attitude and Newcastle’s commitment to the classroom that he will complete that qualification despite his whirlwind season.

“I haven’t bothered him while he’s been training with the first team or away with England,” Newcastle’s head of education Darren Darwent tells i.

“But the week after next I’ll get him down here for a session. He’s got two pieces of work to do and then he’s done but you know he’ll do it. He’s such a nice lad and a great example to the others.”

Miley, like everyone who joins the academy on a full-time contract at 16, works towards a Btec in sports science. That means three three-hour sessions a week – Wednesday mornings, Thursday and Friday afternoons – spent in the classroom.

If they choose to they can add an A-Level but the Btec alone gives them enough Ucas points to go to university, which many do if they don’t win a contract. It also opens the door to American university scholarship programmes, which is another popular route after football.

Education takes place on-site inside a designated classroom (Photo: NUFC/Serena Taylor)

At Newcastle, attainment levels are high. They have one of the best academic reputations in the Premier League and deliver all of their lessons from a designated on-site classroom.

“There can be a bit of defeatist attitude at some clubs – I hear quite a lot of the time they say to the boys ‘Just get it out of the way’,” Darwent says.

“They’re trying to be helpful but it’s not because they build up a perception that it doesn’t matter.

“We’ve created an environment from Steve Harper down that we’re respected. Their time with us is like a sixth form or a college, divorce yourself from the football in the three or four hours we get.”

To prove the point he leaves the room at one point, returning with a stack of thick final-year projects his students have produced. They are on seriously weighty topics – transgender issues in sport, the growth of the women’s game, sexism in sport – and are thorough, meticulous pieces of work.

“These lads are no different from any other student really – they might be tired, irritable but it’s just getting that switch that we’re here now, we’re here to work,” Darwent says.

“If people get given a certain target grade, we always make sure they aim to go above their target grade.

“We could easily get them all through on basic passes and no-one would bat an eyelid but that’s not why we do it. Steve wouldn’t want that either. We just want the best for them.”

Hope that's all legit and not just a puff piece. All clubs will wax lyrical about their kids coming through.

 

[r0cafella]

9 minutes ago, madras said:

Hope that's all legit and not just a puff piece. All clubs will wax lyrical about their kids coming through.

 

That’s exactly what it is, boasting about working in portacabins the kids share with the data people

 

This article only demonstrated how far behind we are and the massive obstacles we’ve got to overcome. 

[madras]

23 minutes ago, r0cafella said:

That’s exactly what it is, boasting about working in portacabins the kids share with the data people

 

This article only demonstrated how far behind we are and the massive obstacles we’ve got to overcome. 

No, I mean it paints a very positive picture for the future, which is easy to do but ha e things actually improved much ?

 

I've asked several times off people who seem to be in the know if our standing has changed in view of attracting and developing youngsters.

[r0cafella]

51 minutes ago, madras said:

No, I mean it paints a very positive picture for the future, which is easy to do but ha e things actually improved much ?

 

I've asked several times off people who seem to be in the know if our standing has changed in view of attracting and developing youngsters.

I mean we have definitely improved things, because things couldn’t actually have been worst, but it’s all low hanging stuff, hiring more people etc. 

[Joelinton7]

So good and yes honestly relieving to see Harper still working at the academy. What happened to him could have been way worse. I know of someone recently who had an aneurysm and they’ve been in a coma for the last 4-5 months. I know this is morbid but this club has had rotten luck the last decade or so with this sort of thing after Speed, Tiote, Pav, Atsu, Ginola had a heart attack. Of course it’s not a club thing, these were all personally horrible situations for their families. I just don’t want any more of it. Sorry to be morbid.

 

 

Edited March 28, 2024 by Joelinton7

[Guest]

Hope reporting these academy players are being released at the end of the season:

 

Jude Smith (GK)

Dylan Stephenson (ST)

Lucas de Bolle (CM)

Amadou Diallo (W)

Michael Ndiweni (ST)

Kyle Crossley (ST)

Jordan Hackett (LB)

Will Brown (GK)

 

 

Edited April 5, 2024 by Jack27

[Dokko]

21 minutes ago, Jack27 said:

Hope reporting these academy players are being released at the end of the season:

 

Jude Smith (GK)

Dylan Stephenson (ST)

Lucas de Bolle (CM)

Amadou Diallo (W)

Michael Ndiweni (ST)

Kyle Crossley (ST)

Jordan Hackett (LB)

Kyle Brown (GK)

 

Always a shame. That last one supposed to be Will Brown? 

 

Nearly all of them at some point were supposed to be decent and had potential. Looking forward to managing them for the next 15 years on FM. 

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Dokko said:

 

Always a shame. That last one supposed to be Will Brown? 

 

Nearly all of them at some point were supposed to be decent and had potential. Looking forward to managing them for the next 15 years on FM. 

Aye meant to be Will Brown, apologies NO 

[The Prophet]

37 minutes ago, Jack27 said:

Hope reporting these academy players are being released at the end of the season:

 

Jude Smith (GK)

Dylan Stephenson (ST)

Lucas de Bolle (CM)

Amadou Diallo (W)

Michael Ndiweni (ST)

Kyle Crossley (ST)

Jordan Hackett (LB)

Will Brown (GK)

 

 

 

 

Weren't some of these lads on the bench this year?

[gbandit]

Think Diallo, Stephenson and Ndiweni have been on the bench? Would need to check nufc.com

[GEFAFWISP]

Just now, The Prophet said:

 

Weren't some of these lads on the bench this year?

Diallo and Ndiweni played one PL game.

 

Those two might find lower league success but not convinced others are anything but Blyth/Shields tier tbh. Good luck either way lads.

[Guest]

Lucas de Bolle has potential but has been very unlucky with injuries

[The Prophet]

Bloody Howe, first he doesn't use them as rotation options and then he release then.