Sorry it is a long article. I copied n pasted...
‘13 years down the drain. Just like that’ — The Premier League’s forgotten kids
Devonte Redmond will never forget the day he found out he was no longer a Manchester United player. He was on holiday. It was the summer of 2018, Jose Mourinho’s final year at the club, and Redmond had headed to the beach on the Greek island of Kos. “I looked at my phone,” he tells The Athletic. “All of a sudden I’d got loads of notifications on Twitter. ‘All the best’ — lots of messages like that. It was really strange. But then I saw the reason why all these messages were being sent. There was a list of all the lads that United had let go. It had been posted on Twitter and it was the official ‘retained and released’ list. And that was how I found out.”
How do you even begin to understand the shattering effects that had on a young footballer who had known virtually nothing but the United system? Redmond was eight when he joined United’s junior ranks. He stayed with the club until the age of 21 and, though he has had nearly two years to come to terms with the rejection, there are still times when it is unmistakable sadness in his voice. Even now, with a sense of order returning to his life, it is a difficult subject. All those dreams, all those aspirations. “Thirteen years,” he says at one point, “all down the drain, just like that.”
It certainly hasn’t been easy to adjust since that day in the Mediterranean sunshine when Redmond found out United had submitted their released list to the Premier League. “I tried not to panic at first,” he says. “I rang my dad and it was the first he had heard about it, too. ‘It’s obviously not been done in the right way,’ he said. ‘Try to keep your head.’ He’s quite a calming person, so I listened to him. I don’t think it sunk in straight away. It was later, probably after a couple of weeks, that I started to panic.” It helped that his father, Paul Edwards, was an ex-pro who knew and understood the sport. Edwards made nearly 350 career appearances, including spells at Wrexham, Blackpool, Oldham Athletic and Port Vale, and could pass on his knowledge from nearly 20 years in the game.
But it still did not prepare Redmond for what it was like, mentally, to cope with the rejection and the long months when life felt empty and directionless. Redmond was in the same youth team as Marcus Rashford and regarded as one of the more talented players from a crop that included Scott McTominay, Timothy Fosu-Mensah and Axel Tuanzebe. Only one, however, had found out via Twitter that he was being cut free and Redmond was so wounded by the experience that, to begin with, it was an ordeal even to watch United games on TV.
He can remember feeling lost without the daily routine of training, the camaraderie of the dressing room and the emotions of a match-day. Then there was the sudden realisation that he had no real life experience other than being inside “the bubble” of a Premier League club. “I’d come from a background where football was everything,” he says. “It was everything to me when I was growing up. I was always the most enthusiastic player. I loved it. And then I was no longer part of it.
“It would always hit me when United were on television. I found it hard to watch, especially because a few of the lads from my age group were starting to break through. There was a period at the start when I used to think that could have been me, or maybe that should have been me. I was hurt.”
On some days, even the people who were closest to him found it difficult to find the right words. “Every day I was trying to stay fit, doing runs and playing football with friends. Then I’d go home. Everyone always asked how training was, but you could feel they were a bit edgy around me. They didn’t really know what to say to make it any better.”
He, in turn, did not want to show his family how much it had affected him. So he told them he was OK and that he was sure everything would work out. He did not always know if that was true, but he said it anyway. But the longer it went, the harder it became. The weeks turned into months. Christmas came and went. “I remember going out in my car one day,” he says. “I said to my mum I was going for a drive. ‘I don’t know where,’ I said. I just wanted to drive. I set off and, all of a sudden, I found myself crying.
“It was one of the first times I’d had an outpouring of emotion like that for years. I’d been bottling everything up for so long. I’d been trying to put a brave face on everything because I’d never been in a situation like that before. I’d always been looked upon as being one of the better players in my age group. So it was hard.
“Then there comes a point when you haven’t had a team for a few months and you have to think, ‘Right, what do I do now? What’s my purpose in life now?’ And that’s when you start thinking negative things. ‘I’ve got no purpose now. Are my family still proud of me?’
“When it gets to Saturday, it hits you again. You say, ‘Good luck for the match’ to your friends. But then it hits you: ‘I’m not playing, I’m not doing anything.’ My mum would always tell me that something would happen. But the phone wasn’t ringing. There was nothing going on. I had thought the transition would be easy. My dad kept telling me, ‘Don’t think it will be easy.’ But in my head, I thought it would be easy. Then after a while I started to realise, ‘Wow, this is hard.’” What he realises now is that it hit him harder than he ever let on.
Redmond spent his first post-United pre-season at third-tier Shrewsbury Town. He trained with Dijon of Ligue 1. He knows what it is like to go on trial and be seen as ‘The lad from United who didn’t make it.’ He came to realise how, in terms of perception, that wasn’t always a good thing. He would also find out that the skills he developed on United’s training pitches did not necessarily suit lower-league football. “If you have come through the academies at United, Man City or Liverpool, you are trained a certain way. It isn’t about long balls, or being a battering-ram up front, or running the channels. I’m not saying you can’t adapt. But a lot of managers lower down don’t have time for academy players.”
This was around the time in autumn 2018 when McTominay was establishing himself in United’s midfield. Redmond had played alongside McTominay for years and was once considered the better prospect. Now, though, they were heading in completely opposite directions. As McTominay became a Mourinho favourite, Redmond was straying dangerously close to becoming another of football’s statistics — chewed up and spat out, with nowhere left to go.
“I had to start thinking if there was anything else I could do,” he says. “I knew that if it got past January I might be struggling because if you go a year out of the game, how do you get back in?
“I’d done business studies at college. Maybe I could have been a personal trainer or something to do with sport. I didn’t really know what I was going to do.”
It is a hard industry sometimes.
When Manchester United sent their list including Redmond to the Premier League, showing the eight players who had been released from Old Trafford, it also included Charlie Scott, one of their young midfielders. Scott had established himself as a regular in United’s under-23s and, according to his profile on the club’s website, was “commanding but composed in possession” with the “attributes to become a valuable asset”. Redmond was the year above and thought his younger colleague had a long career ahead of him. Scott, he says, was a “really good player technically”. Yet there is a misconception sometimes that when a player is dropped by an elite club there will always be another one, not too far down, who will break their fall.
Scott is 22 now and has moved home to Staffordshire. He plays for Newcastle Town, who were fourth-bottom of the Northern Premier League’s south-east division when their season was aborted after the coronavirus pandemic forced football to hit the pause button. Otherwise, he has been working on building sites in and around Stoke-on-Trent. “He does a bit of coaching, too, and we’re very happy to have him,” Ray Tatton, Newcastle’s club secretary, tells The Athletic. “We’re his local club. He lives so close he can walk to games.”
Michael Carrick was also on that United released list from June 2018, at the end of his 19-year playing career. The others, however, were aged 19 to 21 and they have all found it a long way down. Theo Richardson is now at eighth-tier Cleethorpes Town. Ilias Moutha-Sebtaoui plays in Luxembourg. Max Johnstone is third-choice goalkeeper for St Johnstone. Joe Riley, who was given a first-team debut by Louis van Gaal, has had two difficult years at Bradford City. Jake Kenyon, once a promising left-back, drifted out of the game. Redmond might have gone the same way if he had not been put in touch with Paul Mitten and, together, formed an action plan to reignite his career.
Mitten is another one-time United starlet and if his surname rings a bell it is because his grandfather, Charlie, played for the club in their 1948 FA Cup final win and made over 150 other appearances. His father, Charlie Jr, was on United’s books too. Football follows in the family and Paul, now 44, is a fitness coach and mentor for modern-day players who have been left, in the parlance of the sport, on the scrapheap. His first impression of Redmond was that he was “completely lost, his world has come to an end. No direction, no focus, expecting the phone to ring but it doesn’t. It’s a horrible, horrible, lonely place. I know because that was me 20-odd years ago.”
Mitten speaks from experience after finding out, the hard way, what Alex Ferguson meant about United being a bus that waits for nobody. Mitten was 18 when he was released from Old Trafford and, by his own admission, he was not prepared for the mental devastation. “The gaffer called me into the office,” he says. “There were two queues. One was the queue where you got a contract, the other was for the lads who didn’t. It was five minutes with the boss. He just said, ‘We don’t think you’re good enough.’ There’s no answer to that, is there? So you accept it, you pick up your boots and off you go. And you don’t get another phone call. That was the last time I heard from the club.”
As harsh as it is, Mitten can understand why football clubs are programmed this way. “I don’t blame them,” he says. “Football is brutal — one out of the door, the next one in. But they are leaving a trail of destruction behind them: broken young men, dreams shattered, weaker characters turning to gambling, booze, drugs. Then that becomes some mess.” In his case, Mitten was a striker, or a No 10, in the team a year behind the famed Class of ’92. But he suffered a grievous setback in the form of ruptured knee ligaments — and the standard at Old Trafford was frighteningly high.
“I’d cry myself to sleep,” he says. “I felt like I’d let my parents down after they had spent years of their lives taking me everywhere. I was embarrassed. I knew old school associates would be laughing at me, I was an outcast, I didn’t belong. I was a mess.”
Mitten eventually found a way back, signing an 18-month contract at Coventry City, but his knee gave way again, six games in. It was during the long hard slog of rehabilitation that the club signed Darren Huckerby and Noel Whelan, both of whom played the same position as him.
He was placed on a month-to-month contract and two incidents in particular linger in his mind.
“They put a list of all the pros on the wall,” he says. “It was pinned up on a piece of A4 paper, numbers one to 40. It went all the way down, player by player, to 27. Then it stopped. There was a gap. And then it was me, number 40. Take that, at 20 years old.”
Later that day, the players were asked to try on their club suits. “I went in and the message was, ‘Sorry, we’ve not got one for you.’ I was still a kid. I’d never grown up because — forget the real world — all I’ve done is go from football club to football club. Those two little things probably ruined me, mentally, more than anything else.
“You’re out of football. You get a black bag, get your boots. I went to my digs, picked up my little portable television. I drove up the M6, crying my eyes out. I turned up at home and my mum and dad didn’t know why I was there. ‘I’ve been released’ — and then I’m bawling, at 20 years of age, on their sofa.”
A fortnight later, Mitten signed up with an employment agency and landed his first job out of football. “It was cutting grass at the hospital. I had a lawnmower, going up and down, and there was someone bollocking me because I hadn’t done the hedges. That was two weeks after being a professional footballer at a Premiership club.”
How long does it take to get over that kind of ordeal?
“Honestly,” he says. “I don’t think I ever did.”
What is it like, as a teenager, to train alongside Sergio Aguero, Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling?
Sam Tattum joined Manchester City as a 10-year-old in the year before Abu Dhabi took ownership of the club. He signed as a first-year professional eight years later — the season that would eventually lead to Pep Guardiola replacing Manuel Pellegrini as manager — and harboured his own dreams of starring in the Premier League.
“People ask me sometimes if I wish I had started from the bottom and worked my way up,” he says. “But I can’t say yes because some people will never experience what I did, being on that training ground, training with those players, in the transition of City going from being a big local club to a massive club worldwide. I’m proud of what I achieved to get a professional contract at a club that size.”
Unfortunately for Tattum, he also knows what it is like to be told, after nearly a decade in the system, that City were letting him go.
“It hits you in the stomach,” he says.
The difference, perhaps, is that City handled a difficult situation with care. Tattum has always been grateful to Simon Davies, their then academy coach, and Mark Allen, who headed the department at the time, for cushioning the blow.
“When you hear it, you still think, ‘Oh shizat. fudgeing hell,’ but they were just being honest. They were straight-talking and I have a lot of respect for them,” Tattum, who had won caps for Wales’ under-17 and under-19 teams, says.
“People ask me sometimes, ‘Did it break you?’ But I had to be positive. I had to think, ‘OK, it’s time to press on and maybe it’s my time to shine somewhere else.’ I wanted to prove them wrong. I expected I would find a league club and I was thinking it would be a decent level.”
Tattum, Man City
(Photo: Anna Gowthorpe/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)
A trial was arranged at Leeds United but, short of match fitness, Tattum accepted an offer to play for non-League Stalybridge Celtic at Droylsden. A bad tackle came in. His leg was broken, the ankle dislocated. “Then I was in the back of an ambulance on my way to hospital and, in the space of three months, I’d gone from Manchester City, where they had the best facilities and the best care possible, to lying in a hospital bed, still in my kit, without a club. It’s then you realise you’re on your own.”
Tattum plays now for Brattvag, in the third tier of Norwegian football, but there have been other spells at FC United of Manchester, Marine and Altrincham. And for the best part of 18 months, trying to get back to fitness, his career in football was a whirl of uncertainty.
There were trials at Macclesfield and Gateshead when, by his own admission, he came up short. “I’d never played men’s football before,” he says. “I was coming back from 12 months on a sofa and trying to play men’s football for the first time. Physically, I was nowhere near.”
As Guardiola set about turning City into record-breaking Premier League champions, Tattum had to reassess his life. He started looking for other bits of work. He did some football coaching for kids of primary school age and, for a while, he thought about getting an office job. But it was a scary thought. “I knew as soon as I did that, nine to five, Monday to Friday, that would have been it for me and football. And I wasn’t ready to give football up.”
Instead, he teamed up with Mitten to build his fitness. Then he left his home in Salford and, at the age of 23, relocated to Scandinavia in the hope that he can still make a career in the sport that has shaped his life.
Mentally, he has had to be strong.
First, he spent 10 days at Ostersunds in Sweden. After that, it was Hodd in Norway. But now he is in Brattvag, a seaside village of 2,400 people in the Alesund municipality, 350 miles north-west of Oslo. Their league season was supposed to begin on Monday but it has been put back because of the coronavirus crisis.
And, though the air is fresh and the mountain views spectacular, it is not where Tattum saw himself when he was measuring up against Aguero, De Bruyne and the rest of City’s A-listers.
“It’s quite sad because there is no real support network,” Devonte Redmond says. “A lot of lads can go astray.”
Older, wiser, Redmond has learned a lot about himself, and the football industry as a whole, in the last two years.
Salford City, then of the National League, offered him the first route back, seven months after his release from Old Trafford. He started 11 league games last season and played the full 90 minutes as they beat Fylde at Wembley to win promotion to the Football League. “It has made me realise there are other pathways,” he says. “It wasn’t meant to be at United. I gave my all. Then I worked to get out of that hole and I got back in.”
Redmond signed for Wrexham, again in the National League, in the summer and, to be absolutely clear, he holds no grudge against United. His social-media feeds are filled with positive messages about the club where he spent 13 years. They are still his club, as a United fan, and he knows they would not usually release a player without breaking the news personally.
“At the time, they were going through a transition,” Redmond says. “It’s better now. They have a better loan system, they have a loan manager who can help the lads. There is more communication. It just felt, at that time, like there was no communication. It was always: who do you go to? There was no one person who made a decision. It was a bit all over the place.
“Until then, it was really enjoyable. It was like a family club. But it changed when Jose Mourinho came in. It went from being a family club to something else. Suddenly it was the first team, the reserve players and the academy. All separate. It wasn’t as integrated. It was structured more in a way that the first team were always by themselves.”
Redmond has also had to be mentally tough.
“He never once missed a session with me,” Paul Mitten says of their fitness regime. “He never kept anything back. Eyeballs out when I asked him to dig in and see what it’s like in that dark place. What a kid. We put a plan together: get fit to do yourself justice, get mentally ready, get an opportunity, grasp it.”
But what about all the other young footballers who have gone all the way through academies only to have their dreams snatched away?
Mitten’s organisation, Revive Player Care, is supported by Karl Brown, who was part of the Class of ’92 but torpedoed from the team of David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, Gary Neville and brother Phil because of a series of major injuries that led to him being released and sinking into depression. He, too, can remember what it was like to feel “lost and isolated” and so damaged psychologically that for a long time he could not even watch football.
“I was in a team with some of the most successful players of the last 30 years,” Brown says. “Leaving was the hardest thing I have ever done. The club was my home. I was left with no job, no real life skills and no sporting career. I also lost most of my friends. They were off, soaring to success and I felt left behind. My life, as I had known it through all of my teenage years, had ended.”
Brown returned to football after 18 years out of the game to go into coaching. He was taken on by United in 2014 and has worked in their academy ever since. “I felt I could offer players first-hand advice and support, along with developing them as footballers,” he says. “I never wanted another player to feel the way I had felt.”
Mitten has helped Callum Gribbin, once one of United’s more highly-rated youngsters, to refocus after being released last year. Gribbin is now at Sheffield United and, at the age of 21, still has time to turn his career around.
Further down the football pyramid, another example comes in the form of Max McGreal, formerly of Rochdale’s academy.
McGreal is one of hundreds of youngsters, thousands even, who are let go every year. He, like many, felt he was treated badly. He started to drift and go out drinking when ordinarily he would be preparing for games. Now, though, he has knuckled down under Mitten’s guidance. McGreal has started playing for 10th tier Stockport Town and says he is enjoying football again.
But it is still a drop in the ocean when, as Brown says, there are footballers being “discarded daily”.
For many, the added problem is they have been so fixated on the idea of becoming footballers they have not taken their education as seriously as they should.
Mentally, it is harder than ever to cope when many have been attached to clubs from the ages of six or seven — not 14 to 16, as it used to be — and it is all they really know. And, though nobody wants to be too alarmist, there are qualified people who genuinely fear that football needs to wake up to this problem, belatedly, and remember the tragedy of Josh Lyons at Tottenham Hotspur.
Lyons was released from Tottenham’s youth system, aged 16, and spiralled into depression before committing suicide ten years later. At the 2013 inquest, the coroner, Dr Karen Henderson, criticised the sport for not doing more to support young footballers. “It is very difficult to build up the hopes of a young man only then to have them dashed at a young age,” she said. “It is very cruel. I find there was an absence and lack of support in football.”
Many in the sport still do not think the authorities — the Premier League, the EFL, the Professional Footballers’ Association — do enough on this front.
One suggestion is that clubs should provide parachute payments to any academy graduate who is released or that, as part of their contracts, a top-up fund should go into a pool that can be used, if necessary, as player-care packages for education and fitness programmes.
But then again, there still appears to be an attitude among some clubs that, once that player is gone, it is somebody else’s problem.
“Too many amazing players are ignored and just disappear,” Mitten says.
He, after all, knows what it is like to be sold the dream then churned out with no aftercare or direction.
“It took years to pick myself back up after so many people had forgotten me,” he says. “Did I get any support? Zero. And guess what? Twenty years later nothing has changed.”
