The long game: independent schools are coming round to football

Until recently, football was viewed with suspicion in independent schools – the poor relation to its big-hitting step-brother, rugby. That well known saying about football being ‘a game for gentlemen played by hooligans’ seemed to sum up independent schools’ attitudes perfectly. Well into the new millennium, promising young players would be cajoled into playing rugby or hockey: anything rather than – shock, horror – football.

This aversion helps explain why professional footballers are usually state-educated. England’s rugby coach, Eddie Jones, may have lambasted public schools for ruining English rugby; he could never have said the same for football. Privately educated Premier League players could barely put together a first XI: Callum Hudson-Odoi (Whitgift and Chelsea), Tyrone Mings (Millfield and Aston Villa), Nick Pope (King’s School, Ely and Newcastle), Fraser Forster (Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and Tottenham) and Patrick Bamford (Nottingham High School and Leeds). Bamford even had to play rugby until Year 11 because of the lack of football teams at his independent school.