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EPL Steve Harper, bottom right, among others speak to The Athletic about how Newcastle academy is run Illustration: Eamonn Dalton; Getty Images It is lunchtime, Newcastle United’s academy is a hubbub of people and Steve Harper is conducting an impromptu tour, slap-bang in his element. The club’s former goalkeeper, its longest-serving player and now the academy manager knows everybody and their backstories. There is encouragement, feedback, a steady stream of dad jokes. Advertisement We pass by the front door, where “TODAY IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY” is emblazoned above the entrance and “DID YOU MAKE THE MOST OF TODAY” is above the exit. A big screen picks out highlights from recent fixtures, a goal or a save or a good decision, demonstrating, Harper says, “the key pillars of what we do. ” What they do is produce footballers for Newcastle — the primary objective — and along one internal wall there is a mural of academy graduates who made their way into the first team. Sean Longstaff is open-jawed after scoring, Andy Carroll is in an England shirt, arms outstretched, Elliot Anderson is there. But what they do is way more than football. We step into the gym, or “the torture chamber” as Harper calls it, laughing, a throwback to the early, brutal moments of his own playing career in the 1990s, when it was “diving around on concrete floors, no padding, ” he says. “It wouldn’t be allowed now, but it was just what you did. ” These days, the space is airy, the equipment ultra-modern and the vibe professional. Newcastle’s values are spelled out on the walls: “Hard working, collaborative, passionate, disciplined. ” Harper gazes through the window at two new pitches which have cost £750, 000 ($1m) to install. “We now have three elite-level training surfaces, ” he says. “Thanks to the support of the board, our facilities are incredible. ” Outside the gym, there is a pinboard where young men can scan QR codes on their phones, connecting them with advice on mental and sexual health, gambling, financial support, doping, and discrimination. There is a new players’ lounge, complete with games consoles and a dartboard. The corridors around the dressing rooms are painted black and white, with a colour explosion of signed kits from different clubs: a shirt from Anderson in Nottingham Forest red, Ivan Toney’s old No 17 top at Brentford, Freddie Woodman, Fraser Forster… The message here is that there is more to football than Newcastle; other clubs, other pathways. There are classrooms, administrative offices, psychology, coaching, analysis, recruitment, medical support, safeguarding and sports science rooms, all inside a building which has been constantly modified since Newcastle’s takeover four years ago and run by a staff which is more than 50 per cent larger. “It’s snowballed, ” Harper says. Advertisement Yet they are still playing catch-up, 10 to 12 years behind the Premier League’s more established clubs in Harper’s estimation. So Newcastle do things differently; their USP is “small on numbers, big on opportunity, ” as he puts it. “Other clubs cast a huge net and stockpile players. We use a rod. Fewer numbers mean more playing time. ” Around the rest of the club, there are big questions to be resolved, such as what happens to St James’ Park or a new training ground. With the academy, Harper believes “we’re there. It’s built, the roles are filled, the programme is there. We need to keep making it better, but we’re in a good spot. ” What he craves is a “TV remote to fast-forward two, three years into the future, because we have quality players coming through on the back of our full-time training model, the 15, 16, 17-year-olds. They’re coming. The seeds of the work we’ve done collectively are coming. Are they coming quickly enough? No, but I’m an inpatient so-and-so. ” It is a compelling, exciting prospect. At the back of a buzzy canteen, there are a pair of meeting spaces, whose names revolve with the latest academy players to have started a Premier League game for Newcastle. One is the Elliot Anderson room and the other, where the window opens towards the first-team campus a couple of fields away, is the Lewis Miley room. “The next time we get a Premier League start, we’ll change the names again, ” Harper says. “So it’s, ‘Who’s next’? ” The rooms are in use. When Harper was appointed not long before the takeover, the academy was smaller and siloed; heads-down, survival mode. New ownership has brought investment and a collegiate approach. There are coffee emojis on the walls; if you have a problem, if in doubt, talk about it. Back in the corridor, Harper stops in front of another board, which features photographs and biographies beneath the title ‘NUFC ACADEMY ALUMNI’. There is a firefighter, a trainee pilot, engineers. “It’s a storyboard of our other successes, ” he says. “It’s a reminder to the boys that this is where most of them are going to end up. ” Advertisement The message here is that there can be more to life than football — other jobs, other pathways. For the vast majority, there will have to be. On average, fewer than one per cent of the 173 youngsters who are currently part of Newcastle’s academy go on to have a full-time career in professional football. “We paint a very realistic picture of how hard it is, ” Harper says. “It is high challenge, high support, but everything you learn here is about giving you life skills. ” The numbers may be stark, but the surroundings and the environment are anything but. Gone are the days when players left academies ill-equipped for a world outside of the game, bruised and bereft. This is a hub for sporting endeavour but the bigger picture is about ensuring that, when the time comes, nobody feels they are leaving Newcastle United at all. The hope, the idea, is that whether they are walking onto a pitch, teaching in a classroom, or stepping into a burning building, they carry Newcastle with them. Welcome to the academy. Ben Parkinson was warming up on the touchline beside Paul Dummett and Emil Krafth when there was a shout and a point from the dugout. It came from an animated Eddie Howe. “From then on, it was a blur, ” Parkinson says. “I went on to the pitch and although we were getting beat, I had a massive internal smile. Playing in the Premier League is something no one can ever take away from me. It was a dream. ” This was two years ago, when Newcastle’s first team was riven by injury. Parkinson, a striker, found himself on the substitutes’ bench, including in the Champions League, but his first (and only) senior appearance was in a 2-0 defeat at Bournemouth. He had been fast-tracked by Newcastle, elevated at 17 into the under-21s and then to train with the first team. “I was so nervous, ” he says. “I was looking at Joelinton and Jamaal Lascelles, absolute units, and you’re like, ‘What am I meant to do? ’ I had to use my brain. I felt I did myself justice. ” If 2023-24 was a breakthrough moment for Parkinson, 20, last season was the opposite. He scored 11 goals before Christmas for the under-21s and, “clubs in League One, League Two, were sniffing around, ” he says. An ankle injury, which he suffered in training, “shattered my hopes of a loan. ” Advertisement After appearing for Howe’s team in their opening pre-season friendly against Carlisle United in July, Parkinson succumbed to a foot problem just as another move beckoned. He has not played this season. The next transfer window will be critical. He could do with some luck. “It’s about playing now, building myself back up, assessing my options, ” Parkinson says. “It’s about trying to make my own way in football. ” Wherever he goes, Newcastle’s academy has shaped him. Parkinson began playing for Bowburn Youth in Durham, where he was scouted by Newcastle. At nine, he joined the academy full-time, which meant sessions on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and matches on Sunday. At 13, he left school at lunchtime twice a week to train at the academy. At 16, properly out of school but still living at home, he would leave his parents’ house at 7. 30am and take a bus, train and Metro to get to the academy. “It wasn’t easy, but you’re learning your trade. I loved every minute, ” he says. At 18, it was a scholarship, a wage, in from 9am until 3-4pm. Where Parkinson ends up remains opaque, but his ability and application have got him to this point, along with a firm support network, encouragement, qualifications. “The pathway is there and it’s up to you to make the most of it, ” he says. “The academy has built who I am, on and off the pitch. Newcastle has been my family. ” There is no equivalent of the U. S. college system in English football, where players are either purchased from other clubs or nurtured internally and sometimes a bit of both. Buying players is expensive and restrictive, given the landscape of profit and sustainability rules (PSR). Nurturing takes time and commitment. Traditionally, the north east of England has been regarded as a fertile breeding ground for talent, but its clubs have been rather less good at keeping that talent and rather less good altogether. Advertisement When Anderson joined Forest for a £35million fee last year, it was a transfer nobody at St James’ wanted to happen. It was also absolutely vital given how close they were to breaching their PSR responsibilities. So how do academies get their players? Newcastle scouts watch local school and grassroots games featuring five, six and seven-year-olds, widening their network over recent years to give more kids the opportunity to be spotted. Promising players are logged onto a system and watched again before being invited to development centres or a “Mini Magpie” session. The first entry point to the academy is under-9s, but children do not all develop at the same time, so the scouting and recruiting does not stop. The rules allow Newcastle to scout 9-11s within an hour’s travel time. “When half your catchment area is the North Sea, you’re at a competitive disadvantage, ” Harper says. “From 14, we can sign nationally, provided we put the boys in full-time education. We’re in year three of that now and it’s been a game-changer for us in closing the gap with the so-called superpowers. They’re worried about us. ” At 18, players can be signed from abroad, another area in which Newcastle are growing. Overall, around 30 of their players are non-local. Harper points out that the younger boys spend only six per cent of their week in the building, pushing back against the notion of “talent factories, ” or the “identity piece” of them being “Newcastle academy players, ” rather than gifted kids who are being presented with an amazing opportunity. “There are no false promises, ” he says. “We tell everybody how difficult it will be, but we also tell them about all the benefits, about enjoying the journey. ” Chris Moore is back where it all started and ended. He first joined Newcastle as an under-9s player and was there for a decade until one day in the changing room, he was pulled by his coach, who told him: “‘You’ll not be getting another contract next year’. Simple, really. ” Advertisement Moore was a winger. “Our reserve team was full of first-team players, ” he says. “I had Diego Gavilan in front of me; he played for Paraguay in the 2002 World Cup. If I’d been good enough, I’d have found my way in. ” He “didn’t leave with resentment, ” but at 19 it was a shuddering full stop. “It was the norm, just that tough business of you’re not going to play, so you go, ” he says. “It was hard at first. You get why people could be bitter about it. ” Moore’s career took another path: non-League football, a degree in the United States. Four years ago, he returned to Newcastle’s academy to coach the under-16s. Now 41, he is the lead coach for the under-18s. Between then and now, the academy is “completely different, ” Moore says. “I had a brilliant coach in Alan Irvine, but it was just him. There was a part-time strength and conditioning coach from the university, one physio and no analysis. “If you look at the process of being released, it was one conversation after training. Now, there’s nobody else in the academy that day, there are reviews leading up to it, a lot of thought. There is safeguarding and aftercare. If it’s bad news, it’s about delivering it in the best way you can. ” Moore and the other coaches are supported by Mark Atkinson, the head of football development. Atkinson provides a “helicopter view”; on the grass when needed, but also looking at the long-term progress of individuals, providing each player with a personal development plan. Because Atkinson isn’t attached to a specific age group, he can take dispassionate decisions. Anderson benefited from this approach, with Atkinson influential in determining when it was time to really push the midfielder and when to hold him back. The same occurred with Miley, Sean Neave and Leo Shahar. Atkinson also provides a link to the senior setup. There are monthly meetings between academy staff and Stephen Purches, the first-team coach, and Dan Hodges, the first-team head of performance, to assess how the youngsters are performing. “That communication is really important, ” Atkinson says. Advertisement The level of detail is enormous, but Newcastle’s story remains intimate and there is something profound about Moore filling this role in this of all places. “I love it. I see it as an achievement to get back to where I was as a player, ” he says. “You want to push beyond that. You’re helping people achieve their dreams. ” There is an old cliche in football that the league table never lies and when it comes to the first team, it is probably true. For academy sides, it can be a grand deception. Newcastle’s Under-18s are third in their league which, on the face of it, looks decent, but winning is not everything. “If we’re winning the league, we’re not stretching the players enough, ” Harper says. “It would mean three, four or five of those players should be with the Under-21s and two of them should be out on loan because that would be the best thing for their development. We’re trying to bring players through, not teams. ” To put that a different way, Neave is 18, but has been training with Howe’s senior squad since February and is a regular for the under-21s. Something similar applies to Shahar, the full-back. This is what Harper means by small on numbers, big on opportunity. Last season, there were nearly 400 first-team training opportunities for academy players. To date, this season it is 153. At the same time, Newcastle teams strive for victory. “You’re there to try and win, and you’d be doing the lads a disservice if you’re not, ” Moore says. “They’re going into a competitive environment. But our job is to develop players for the first team. ” “The ultimate barometer is how many players we produce and nobody runs away from that, ” Harper says. “And of course we want to apply winning behaviours, but what is a win for an academy? Yes, it’s three points, or a kid playing in the first team or going out on loan. But a win for us is also a kid leaving better for the opportunity. ” Advertisement Darren Darwent is standing in the Sean Longstaff classroom. There are tables, desktop computers and laptops. In one corner, a skeleton hangs from a frame; sports science is one of the qualifications delivered here. Like the rest of the staff, Darwent is wearing a Newcastle tracksuit rather than a suit and tie. Darwent works with three other teachers. Their “primary focus” is the 20-25 players who attend the academy full-time when they leave school at 16. There are the younger boys who come in one day a week and bring schoolwork, plus the small number of players from outside the region who attend a nearby school and are given additional education. “When I was sitting in a classroom, it was chalk and talk — you listened to the teacher, ” he says. “Now it’s facilitate and guide. ” Darwent was first taken to St James’ by his dad in the 1970s and the club is “in my DNA” . Yet he gets a “bigger buzz” from a player passing their exams than playing for the first team. When Miley first broke into Howe’s senior side at 17, he would come back to the academy twice a week to complete his education. “Lewis is so humble, ” Darwent says. “Sometimes, he’d text me on a Friday afternoon saying, ‘Darren, unfortunately I can’t come down today — I’ve got a match tomorrow against Manchester City…’ “He epitomised the ‘student athlete’. He’s such a good role model. Yeah, you can be a successful player, but you can develop yourself in other ways as well. ” Miley was so clearly destined for big things; would it really have mattered if he had given up on his schoolwork? “That’s not in our ethos, ” Darwent says. “Education shouldn’t be compromised by football and we get the boys to achieve beyond their target grades, including Lewis. Our results are probably the best in the Premier League. I tell the boys that having qualifications is like putting money in the bank. You might not need it, but it’s good to know it’s there. ” Advertisement For Julie Smith, this is professional, personal, everything. The safeguarding and wellbeing manager is Newcastle through and through, and Dylan, her son, was released by the academy a decade ago at 14, when the “process was a letter and that was it, ” she says. The safeguarding part of her job is similar to what you would find in a school; players under the age of 18 are children, so there must be a risk assessment for every activity. If they play matches abroad — there have been tournaments in Tokyo and Dallas — hotels, training facilities must be checked in person. The logistics are the realm of Gary Douglas, the academy’s head of operations. He and his team “set up the fixtures, training, scheduling and programming, the booking of buses, hotels, trips and tours, ” he says. He line-manages and works around budgets, leadership and rules, “the stuff that makes us a smooth-running organisation. ” Players’ well-being and moods are constantly assessed, with Smith’s four full-time staff, which includes a qualified nurse, using World Health Organisation tools. Some of their work is delivered in a classroom setting and some of it is one-on-one. Her office has a comfortable sofa: everybody is welcome to sit and chat. There is a mandatory part of the academy scholarship where boys undertake community projects, working with schools in deprived areas close to St James’. “They come back with a sense of contributing, of belonging, ” Smith says. “I’d say it absolutely impacts positively on performance. ” Her department looks after 20 host families. “Some clubs have players living on site, but we think a home-away-from-home is much healthier, ” she says. When Newcastle recently signed an 18-year-old from abroad, he was provided with personal tuition and a pitch-side translator. A member of Smith’s team familiarised him with public transport and took him to cafes in the city centre. As well as finding comfort on arrival, Smith is determined that those who move on do not feel abandoned. Newcastle has a thriving alumni scheme with ongoing support and a lively Whats App group which, at the last count, had 79 members. Advertisement Josh Nicholson is one of them, the pilot who features on the alumni board in the main corridor. A defender, he joined the academy at 13 and was awarded a scholarship three years later. Nicholson was a Newcastle fan as a kid and was obviously talented. Football was not what he dreamt of, however. “From a young age, I was fascinated by planes. Whenever we went on holiday, I looked forward to flying rather than the actual holiday, ” he says. There was a specific episode in one match, away to Leeds United, that he recalls vividly, missing a ball he shouldn’t have missed. He was a “100 per cent kind of player, ” and his error was not deliberate, but: “I just knew there and then. ” Harper had seen it. They got talking. Nicholson stayed at the academy, “in order to achieve the education that would help me in life, ” he says. In his second year, he was named scholar of the year, “a proud moment and a different sort of take on best player, ” he says. Nicholson left the club in 2022 and now works at Newcastle Airport, helped through Smith’s contacts there. He has a pilot’s licence which allows him “to take my family and friends flying in a little Cessna aeroplane, two seats, ” he says. “Flying over St James’ is unbelievable. ” Not too long ago, he was joined by Harry Barclay, his old academy centre-half partner. To Harper, Nicholson is “the kind of success story we should be shouting about, even if it’s not related to making his first-team debut. Through the academy, Josh has been guided to his passion in life. ” Nicholson is a face on the wall and much more besides. It may sound trite, but he still represents the best of Newcastle. “I carry the beliefs I had when I was playing for the academy, ” he says. “I try to be a leader, to apply myself 100 per cent in everything I do. “Being a footballer isn’t just about playing on a Saturday. Some of it is the basics: being on time, putting in the extra work when you need to, and working together. Those are all things that help you integrate into other working environments. That’s all born from my academy life. ” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle