Dan Burn never played academy football. The closest he got to it was Newcastle United's ‘development squad’, a group of players deemed not good enough to sign for the academy itself, but sufficiently talented for the club to monitor them via training sessions a couple of times a week, with occasional games.
Released from that setup at the age of 11, Burn played Sunday League football, and by 16, when most players sign their first professional contracts, he was struggling to pin down a place in an amateur Saturday team.
“Everybody had left school and started their YTs, joined clubs, signed contracts, and I hadn’t done that,” he says now. “I wanted to stay within football. I went to Cramlington High School, who were meant to have an academy for football, but it didn’t end up happening. But they were offering the course I wanted to do, so I just played football at weekends.”
