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Answer by Greg Gordon, professional soccer scout:
There’s no point in giving you false hope. Basically, if you are not in the system in some form from age 10-12 and have not been playing at a good level since age 7-8, you can forget it. It is all about playing hours and supervised coaching. You can’t really gloss over that gap in your learning.
MORE: Beautiful people who love the beautiful game I’ve just scouted the annual exit trials, for example, and that represents the last chance saloon (most likely) for 19-year-olds freed by club academies here in Scotland. By 20-21, most of these boys will be working in completely new careers and playing football with their pals on the weekend, if they can even bear to look at a ball again. It really is that brutal a system.
More from Quora: Who is the best football (soccer) player of all time? | Which is the best goal ever in football history? At age 17-18, you should already be pushing for a first team place at a professional club or at the very least farmed out on loan to a lesser light for game experience. I think you have very little chance of success because even the late developers tend to have been in the system from an early age to some degree or another. The two biggest factors against you are firstly a clear lack of exposure to the required standards of competition and also the strength of your mentality (you are not in the system now so I doubt you will ever be mentally prepared for what’s required). As a scouted and signed player, your ability and athleticism is almost taken as read, although it can be improved. Generally, the mental stuff is a more or less fixed attribute of personality after a certain point. On another level, you are also trying to enter a professional sport at the very point where there is the biggest cull of its players and where clubs can and do become exceptionally choosy. This is a professional game, where the attrition rate at age 19 is probably 90 percent already from players who started out at young ages. By 21, probably only one or two percent of players in that intake will still be playing in the professional game. But let me humor you and let’s assume you are a superstar, because that is what you will need to be. Make no mistake about that. So let’s assume you are good enough to be in the top 1 percent of all the players in the country. That’s the common description of players in the English academy system. You can quibble over the numbers but they are not going to be so far out of line as to be nonsense. Of players who graduate to professional contracts with English clubs — that’s players deemed good enough to have the chance of a ‘good career’ on leaving school at 16 — there is still only a one in two chance of a career. That’s boys who have been playing ‘professionally’ for their club and often their country too at all sorts of underage levels from 8 years old upwards. According to a BBC report, “The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) estimates that each summer, about 700 players are released by their clubs.” “The biggest attrition rate is undoubtedly among young players,” says Oshor Williams of the PFA’s education department, which offers support and training to prepare them for a life outside professional football. “Of those entering the game aged 16, two years down the line, 50 percent will be outside professional football. If we look at the same cohort at 21, the attrition rate is 75% or above.” (source: BBC Sport). Or here’s The Guardian on the same topic: players already in the professional system aged 16. “The Premier League and Football League say between 60 percent and 65 percent of the 700 or so scholars taken on each year are rejected at 18. Even half of those who do win a full-time contract will not be playing at a professional level by 21, reckons the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA). Put another way, five out of every six of the scholars starting next month will not be playing football for a living in five years. “If it was a university of football, with our success rates we would have been closed down by now because it’s just not good enough,” says Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the PFA.” (source: The Guardian). Unless you can point to some very valid reasons why you’re an exception to 99 percent of the 400,000 players seriously pursuing a dream of Premiership glory at any one time then I suspect you are wasting your time. Or if I can put it another way, even an average professional player in Scotland’s League 2 or the top league in Lithuania is a very, very good footballer even to have gotten that far. An Ian Wright, a Stuart Pearce, or an Andy Robertson does happen, but statistically speaking you might get three such players per decade. That probably gives you a 3 in 4 million chance of reaching the top of the game as a player who is outside the system aged 16. As a player who has never been in the system at all I would think that that chance shrinks to the point where it is so small as to be microscopic in size. You’d be better trying to divert your energies to pipedreams with better odds — like creating a £1m start-up or trying to write a worldwide smash hit song.
