As a six-year-old with four million Instagram followers, Arat Hosseini was not your typical academy footballer, but although “Mini Messi” is an extreme example, the young Iranian epitomised the challenge confronting England’s top football clubs as the digital-native generation of young players comes through.
The headline-making child prodigy has now left Liverpool, where he spent three years, but there are others: “Kid Messi” and “Kid Ronaldo”, children whose parents have documented their “careers” on Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. Boot deals are signed aged 11 and one’s fame was such that he was mobbed while playing at a recent tournament.
Inside Premier League academies, there is an effort to warn against the “unintended consequences” of early fame. That is the term used by Manchester United’s head of education, Ian Smithson, who says “players’ behaviours have changed and improved since this work started 10 years ago”.
“Scholars used to use Twitter as a chatroom, and that’s when mistakes happened,” Smithson says. “They’re a lot more savvy now and it tends to be more influencer content. What’s got worse is the number of followers and how they can be exploited.”
External experts such as Cathy Wood, a former ironman athlete who works as a sports journalist and social media educator, support the clubs in their endeavours.
Speaking to United’s boys’ under-16s before a Thursday evening training session, Wood says: “It’s an amazing privilege to be good at sport. You’re wearing one of the most famous and recognisable badges in the world, and you’ve earned that. But with it comes different responsibilities than your friends’.”
Enrichment sessions such as these are embedded in the young players’ schedules. Wood draws giggles mixed with unnerved wriggles by reeling off the youngsters’ Instagram handles and snippets of personal information. It’s an impactful reminder to, as the Professional Footballers’ Association states, be “wary” that “anything you post online becomes part of the public domain”. Wood details those unintended consequences, such as vulnerability to scams, exploitation and abuse.
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“Clubs across the Premier League and Football League are offered social media sessions and some also really go the extra mile,” Wood says. “The players are like sponges now. They’re respectful and want to learn.”
Her audience includes some kids with private accounts, no posts and 200 followers, but others with 200,000 followers and major sponsorship deals. These players engage with her eye-opening points but when they go home they will also often engage with accounts and trends labelled as “dangerous” by United’s director of academy, Nick Cox, whose focus is more on preventing stifling pressure.
“We want to help players see how powerful and positive social media can be and the good it can do,” he says, citing the examples of Kobbie Mainoo, who recently sent a touching video to a bereaved fan, and Marcus Rashford. “But I have concerns. We try to keep young players off the radar, to reduce pressure and keep things childlike. But other parties promote players at a young age, with the hope of it furthering their careers. It doesn’t. The football does the talking.”
Rowan Griffiths, Crystal Palace’s head of education, who has worked with the Brit School for performing arts, agrees. He describes the increasingly varied workshops on “all aspects of life skills” to which clubs commit, including conversations on resilience, mental health, diversity, sustainability, future career planning, drug abuse, role models, cooking and safe driving, as well as social media. The education offered to academy players by Premier League clubs was last year rated by Ofsted as outstanding. Griffiths calls it “phenomenal”.
The clubs clearly agree on purpose and methods – “it’s about what to share, what to withhold … it’s about future-proofing them,” says Griffiths – but there are conflicting ideas elsewhere, from some players, parents, agents and sponsors. One is said to have taken a player out of school lessons for a photo shoot, whisking him away in a flash car, and a growing number of male academy players in England are home-schooled, allowing them to receive additional private training. Some coaches offer discounts if they can post videos of the kids in their club’s kit. Long-time coaches and educators are concerned.
Griffiths reminds students and parents that they began their academy journey “because they had a passion for football” which “should be the daily driving force”.
For most, it absolutely is, but managing the pressure on the digital-native generation is proving problematic. Content creators – including one with two million Instagram followers – actively communicate with young kids, sharing results, photos and videos from under-14s upwards. Smaller pages even post happy birthday messages to 13-year-olds.
In the end, just as youngsters mimic their heroes’ celebrations, there is a growing desire to emulate the modern focus on personal brand-building, too. After all, however excellent the academies’ education programme, elite football’s nature means that should these young talents achieve their goals, they will ultimately become “an item for sale”.
