Starting Early:

Many former footballers are lost to the game entirely. After almost a quarter of century playing professional football Noel Blake turned to coaching eight years ago. Blake is one of the new breed of coaches – passionate about his work and determined to give something back to the game the game that gave him so much. The vast knowledge that Blake has built up over almost four decades of involvement in football will not be lost, but his path was haphazard – albeit limited by what was available when he was coming through.

There were no academies, youth development programmes or Centres of Excellence when he was a schoolboy on the verge of a life in football – just the usual route of being spotted by scouts while playing on a weekend. “When we were growing up we could only go I think it was Thursday evening – sometimes Tuesday evening – but it was just one evening a week you go to the football club,” Blake told us exclusively.

Academies begin working with potential players well before they become teenagers. Most are attached to clubs by then. That wasn’t possible when Blake was dreaming of a career on the pitch. “You couldn’t go the club until you were fourteen when you could sign schoolboy forms,” he told us, “so it’s brought it forward a little bit more where clubs have more contact with the players. We could still play for our schools teams and our district teams, which I was fortunate to play for my district team and the county team, which was the West Midlands, so there was more contact now with the academies than when I was coming through.”

So have the academies helped and would they have made him a better player? “Most definitely, says Blake. “I think the academies have got a lot more advantages than when I was a young player coming through. Obviously there are pluses and minuses with the system. There were a lot of good things that went on before academies came on board. In youth development for example, you can go into the clubs twice a week, three or four times a week. We didn’t have that facility.”

The Great Loss to Coaching:

Too many former players and the knowledge they possess are totally lost to the game. Very few have opportunities in management as there can only be one manager per team. There are many more former players than opportunities in management. Administration is another option that is taken by some players – consultancy even. For example, Brendon Batson MBE has taken that option. Other former professional players like Blake choose to go into coaching. His peers Chris Ramsey and Paul Davis chose the same path. Davis also works for the FA while Ramsey is the Assistant Manager of Tottenham Hotspur’s academy, so why are so many black former players lost to coaching?

“I couldn’t tell you how many, because I haven’t got the figures at hand,” says Blake. “There’s a lot of black ex-players who don’t choose to go down the coaching route, as there are white players who don’t choose the coaching route.” It is a vexed issue as some clearly have the talent and aptitude for it, so why don’t more choose this path?

Blake has been the question of why there are not enough black former players going into coaching, so why does he think more of them don’t choose coaching? “Not every black ex-player is going to become a coach,” he told us. “Not every white ex-player is going to become a coach. You’ve got to want to become a coach and that’s the critical thing for me. If you want to become a coach, then you will do whatever it takes to become a coach. You’ve got to put yourself out there to become a coach.”