Cardiff City’s academy is the envy of many Premier League clubs, but the Bluebirds as they are popularly known very existence is under threat due to financial woes. Nevertheless, Academy Manager Neal Ardley and his staff have done an exceptional job developing players, some of whom have been sold on to bigger clubs in the top league. Ardley hopes that the days when Cardiff has to sell their best players to survive will be thing of the past soon, but that looks unlikely at least in the short term. Nevertheless, Cardiff’s success requires more than just football skill. They have a team of dedicated coaches and staff whose job is far more than to churn out a conveyor belt of footballing talent. They intend to produce grounded human beings as well.

“I think we have a philosophy with our academy in that we consider the academy to be like a greenhouse where the players can grow,” Ardley told us. “The coaches aren’t just there to teach them football. They are there to teach them a little bit of life-skills away from it and social skills. Part of the coaching set up will be loads of interaction, loads of questions and answers, loads of fun games where players have to take responsibility and be vocal etc. etc. so I think there’s a variation of things. I just think that being around people of your own age – enjoying it – that helps your social skills and they do see each other a lot. They have to train a good amount of hours per week around each other.”

The Right Philosophy:

Cardiff is a small club on the fringe of promotion to the Premier League. Ardley knows that their prize assets are attractive to bigger clubs with financial clout, but they are also vulnerable to poaching from their academy, so how do they protect themselves against poaching? “There’s various ways of protecting yourself,” Ardley says, before outlining his philosophy to protect the club from losing their prize assets.

“I think the biggest way that we can protect ourselves is to do things right,” he says. “If we give parents and players a cause to not be happy with what they are getting here – whether it be the quality of the coaching, the man-management feedback, assessments, we don’t run it properly and we haven’t got a reason for everything that we are doing, whatever it happens to be – we give them a cause, you get them slightly not sure whether this is the place to be, then as soon as somebody does come calling, they’re going to think there’s better elsewhere and then their decision becomes easier.”

Parental Guidance:

Ardley believes that parents have an important part to play in the development of young players and his academy takes time to integrate them into the process. “We did a big presentation at the start if the season,” he said. “I think it’s very important to educate the parents on what we are doing – to inform them that everything we are doing is for a reason – because I think parents can create pressure on the children themselves. It’s important; a lot of people would give their right arms to be a football player. It’s such a big thing and I think sometimes the pressure on the kids can come from the parents themselves, where they don’t want the kids to pass up the opportunity that they are having.”

So what do they do to ensure that parents not only do not add to the pressure on the young players, but contribute to making the academy a fantastic experience with a chance of making dreams come true? “We just try and educate them because we’ve got a philosophy here that we want our players to play with no fear,” said Ardley. “Academy football isn’t results based. Obviously once we start getting to Under-16s football we’ve got to start teaching them a winning mentality – get the habits right in winning games – and start to prepare them for what might be with the first team, so it does start to get a little bit more intense at that age group, but generally we try to get them to express themselves and teach the parents too.”

Ardley stresses the importance of having the parents accept Cardiff’s philosophy. “I think if we can get that message across – a lot of kids make a mistake in a game and will look over to the sidelines to see what dad’s reaction is and that’s not right,” he says. “What we try to do is to explain to the parents that they perhaps don’t realise it sometimes. If the kid asks a question in the car on the way home, we try to educate them on what sort of answers to give and they should try and talk to the coaches rather than give their opinion or force their opinion on the kid.”