How can we stop football academy rejects ending up in prison?

‘The first team at Wormwood Scrubs is said to be better than QPR’s’. That line from Toby Young’s article from November has stuck with me. Could it be true? Are our jails full of talented footballers who didn’t quite make it? Are players regularly ‘spat out’ without any qualifications? Is there an academy-to-prison pipeline?

To find out, I spoke to some former academy players who had been to prison. ‘Brian’, who played for a London first division club’s academy in the mid-2000s, missed a lot of school to train. He’d leave classes at lunchtime on Wednesday for football practice; on matchdays he’d be out of lessons by 11am. This meant he was often skipping six or seven lessons every week. Predictably, Brian started to struggle at school, but, he said, ‘football was my life’, so he didn’t worry too much.