A Big Success for Football and Genuine Proof That Talent is Thrown Away

For those of you that might of missed this story over the past couple of days, Scottish born player Ikechi Anya (21), who was thrown from professional football when he was released by Wycombe Wonders in 2007, has now just been signed by Spanish Premier side Sevilla. So how can a player go from non-league obscurity to top flight Spanish football? And more importantly if he had the talent to be there then why was he released from Wycombe in the first place? Well therein lies a worrying problem with football development today.

After his release by Wycombe, Anya spent the next couple of years at non-league Oxford City, then at fellow non-league side Halesowen Town, before finally being noticed by and enrolled in The Glen Hoddle Academy. This academy was set up by Glen Hoddle and is dedicated to finding talented players that have been released by their clubs before they have been able to develop their talent. This is a case that is all too common, particularly in England where physical strength and power is often deemed a necessity for players to cope with the physical nature of English football, and as a result smaller players are given a back seat and released prematurely. Ikechi Anya was one such player.

After nine months at the academy, in which he changed his position from winger to centre forward under the advice of Hoddle, Anya returned to professional football at Northampton Town for the remainder of the 2008/09 season. Here he impressed so much that Northampton manager Stuart Gray wanted to re-sign him on a long term deal, but instead he was snapped up by Sevilla Atlético, the reserve side of Sevilla.

The fact that a young British player can go from non-league football to a Spanish giant because of only few months of dedicated training really starts to paint a picture of how much talent is wasted in the footballing world. As Hoddle himself has said:

“This just shows that a player from amateur football, given the right development can return to the top flight. I always believed that this concept would work and for us to take Ikechi from amateur level to La Liga proves that with the right attitude from the player, with the right coaching and development, it can be done.”

The problem seems to be that age is given too much emphasis in football development, and that though a majority of players are likely to reach an assessable level of talent at the ages of 18 and 19, there are bound to be some that won’t reach this level until 21+. These players will be assessed too early, deemed not to have enough talent to make it as a professional player, and be released to fend for themselves. The result is that players like Ikechi turn up at Hoddle’s academy with bags of talent but no where to put it because they haven’t been given enough time to develop.

If football can learn anything from this story it is that there is probably a lot of undiscovered talent out there that is no longer in football because they were judged too early.

See also:

Top 20 Young English Players Under 20

Blatter’s Six Plus Five Rule Could Actually Reduce the Quality of English Players

Futsal: the Saviour of English Football?

Why the Relegation of Premiership Regulars Could Mean Great Things for the Football League