Brendan Rodgers stands before Anfield’s next generation. They are the teenagers hoping to succeed Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher as the heart and soul of Liverpool Football Club. Maybe they are expecting a pat on the back, a congratulations or gentle massaging of the ego. Instead, Rodgers’ message is forthright.
“You may think you play for Liverpool,” he remarks. “Let me tell you now. You don’t. Until you play regularly for the first team, you are not a Liverpool player and you should not say you are a Liverpool player. If anyone ever asks you, all you should say is one day you hope to play for Liverpool.”
There is a brief hush around the Tom Saunders Lecture Theatre at the club’s academy in Kirkby, long enough for that particular sentiment to register. For the next 40 minutes, Rodgers spells out the particular demands and sacrifices required, as the manager puts it, “to do what it takes”.
“Do you want to live the footballers’ life or live the life of a footballer?” Rodgers asks, before warning of the perils of pursuing sports cars and celebrity parties ahead of sporting excellence. This is an insight into football’s greatest fear in the modern age, where promising adolescents become millionaires before they have played 30 games. The world at their feet at 17, washed up at 21.
Liverpool urgently need to reverse a worrying trend since their academy was built 14 years ago. For many Premier League clubs, discovering and nurturing local talent is an aspiration. At Anfield, it is an obligation. Carragher retires this summer. Gerrard is 32 and asking himself how long he has left. Those two embody the current Liverpool. Someone has to redefine it when they are gone.
“It’s important for identity and this club is about identity,” says Rodgers. “All I want is good players, whether they are from Liverpool, Spain or Ireland, but I also inherently believe if you have someone from this area you will get that extra passion because this is their club. You want those from your own family with you.
“Carra and Stevie would have always got to where they are. You need good people to help you get there quicker, but it’s always the players’ responsibility. Everyone here needs to understand the dirty work to get there.”
The senior coaches and players have spent the day coaching at The Academy. It may seem nothing especially unusual, first team staff taking time to underline the requirements to those coming through. In a turbulent recent history at Liverpool, it is unprecedented.
Luis Suárez and Gerrard are playing five-a-side with the eight-year-olds, the Liverpool captain hosting a question-and-answer session of his own. Pepe Reina is trying to stop the ambitious under-12s beating him in a penalty shoot-out.
Every other first-team player is involved at some level on site, joining in the small-sided games with each of 198 of the academy playing staff aged eight to 21, and embracing a mentoring program Rodgers is pushing.
“We’ve never done anything like this before,” Carragher observes, his son among those enjoying the coaching sessions with the likes of Gerrard and Suárez.
The manager also spoke at length to parents to offer a reminder that whatever issues they encounter as they seek the best for their son they should approach him or his staff. Such is the inclusiveness he is encouraging, last week he arranged for under-14 players to be ballboys in the Europa League game against Zenit St Petersburg.
“We were meant to be in Dubai having a break this week,” says Rodgers. “I cancelled it after we lost to Oldham and told the players we were coming here instead. I couldn’t get it out of my mind the idea of players walking around Dubai after we had gone out of the Cup. I said 'no’. You have to earn those rewards. This is more important.”
It was not so long ago different areas of this football club were perceived as factions rather than departments. Liverpool’s academy was the first purpose-built facility of its type in 1999, the aim then precisely as of now – to maintain a conveyor belt that produced Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Steve McManaman and Carragher.
There have been an assortment of good professionals who have come through since, but nothing comparable to the 'centre of excellence’ crop who pre-dated the move to Kirkby. Even Gerrard had barely spent time here before being summoned to Melwood.
It is a moment of symbolism when the current academy director, Frank McParland, introduces Rodgers to his development squad as 'the boss’. During the Gérard Houllier era and most of Rafael BenÃtez’s reign, there was only friction. They would go years without stepping into the place, no deference considered necessary from the academy director to the manager. Those who worked under successive regimes do not only see a different relationship, but a different club.
“We are one club compared to what it was then,” says McParland, who took on his role in 2009. “There are clear lines of communication. The relationship offers the players a pathway. It’s the best time there has been in terms of that relationship.”
This season, the edict was issued that from the under-nines up, the fluid, passing style and formation of the first team was to be replicated.
“When I came in I sold the owners that idea so that if it doesn’t work out for me, at least you bring in a different manager who wants to play the same style and then it evolves,” says Rodgers. “I want to create a shortcut so that everyone who comes in immediately understands what is expected in terms of style of play. It saves time, money and effort. This is the first year of that and, naturally, there are growing pains.
“The alternative is you have no plan. You start one way, that doesn’t work so you bring in another manager who wants it completely different. Half your squad plays one way, the other half another. All you get then is stockpiling of players. Then it’s the club’s fault if you’re not successful, not the players.
“The ideal is to bring us all together on one site. The environment here is terrific, but ultimately I’ve already advocated to the board the benefits of bringing us all together. If I’m here a long time, that’s what I want to see happen.”
Liverpool’s last flurry of world-class youth products emerged in the mid-90s before that separation. McParland was a community coach in those days, promoted in the final year of BenÃtez’s reign working alongside academy technical director Rodolfo Borrell, who was recruited from Barcelona’s famed La Masia Academy. The network of scouts is spread across South America as much as Speke nowadays. The aspiration is to recruit the finest global talent while keeping the Scouse heart beating.
“There will be a number of top, Liverpool-born players coming through in the next five years. I will say that for definite,” says McParland. “We’ve done well getting some through recently, but I don’t think you say they’re proper Liverpool players until they played 100 first-team games. I think we’re doing alright, but there is no massive success until you get a situation where they’re playing every week and the boss can’t drop them.
“We have a massive network of scouts working for us - impossible to put a number on it because we have contacts everywhere but you have to remember we also have to look beyond Merseyside. We want the best of the best, not just from this area, but from London and Lisbon. But we also want that team of Carraghers the crowd sings about. That genuinely is the aspiration.”
One theory is Liverpool, just like Manchester United, simply enjoyed a golden period in the mid-90s it is impossible to replicate. Look around the league, even across the continent, and few of the elite clubs are packed with academy talent.
“Throughout Europe it’s a small percentage of under-21 players in the first team,” says Rodgers. “The recurring question is whether those top players are a product of nature or nurture? There are some you see straight away and you know they’ll be a player, and then others who haven’t got quite everything but they will fight to be the best they can be. You want both.”
Borrell spent 13 years at Barcelona, Lionel Messi among the most prodigious talents he oversaw.
“Some players are born to this, but not many,” he says. “Messi, Dalglish, Cruyff and Gerrard are rare. The type of game in Spain makes it easier to produce a certain profile of player, but England has other qualities. The football here is not better or worse, just different and English football is creating better facilities and a structure which can only be positive for the future.
“We are always comparing players, but I won’t say we will have a new Steven Gerrard at Liverpool. To find another Gerrard or Carragher is difficult. I want a player with his own name, making his own impact and I’m sure that will happen.”
Rodgers concludes his speech to the development squad, some of who have already enjoyed a taste of the senior action. He tells them to honour and learn from their predecessors, but to strive to ensure the perennial quest to find the next 'big thing’ from Anfield ends with them.
“The past is incredible but we can’t be hostages to that,” says Rodgers. “Don’t be one of those sitting in the pub at 55 blaming everyone else saying how you could have been this or that. It is down to you to learn from Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher. It is down to you to make it happen.”
