0.06 per cent.
It’s a number so small, it’s hard to comprehend.
But that is the chance of a young boy becoming a professional footballer in this country.
Only six in every 10,000 make the grade.
Those odds are similar to the likelihood of being dealt four aces in poker. Or finding a pearl in an oyster shell. Or becoming an astronaut and travelling into space.
In an exclusive interview for Sky Sports News’ Chasing the Dream documentary, Trent Alexander-Arnold said: “You have more chance of winning the lottery than making it as a professional footballer.”
1.65m boys play our national sport. Less than one per cent of them make it into the academy of a professional club.
Of those, fewer than one-in-ten (nine per cent) go on to make a single appearance at the professional level. In the Premier League, the numbers are smaller still: just 1.5 per cent of academy graduates will play one match in the top division.
Armed with those facts, we embarked on what became the largest, most comprehensive investigation ever carried out by Sky Sports News.
The original idea came from Tony Pulis, who approached us with his own experiences, and plenty of questions.
After more than 400 games as a player and more than 1,000 matches under this belt as a manager, he’d always had concerns about the welfare of young academy footballers and the overall ‘failure’ rate.
Now, with two grandsons in the system, he wanted to know what football as an industry was doing to promote and support both those that make it, and those that do not.
What started off as a plan for a 15-minute mini-documentary, quickly snowballed. The more we spoke to people involved with academy football in England, the more stories we discovered and the more issues were uncovered. Whenever we answered one question, it seemed to lead to another that needed addressing.
Over a nine-month period, we carried out exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in the game. Legendary managers such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti and Harry Redknapp.
Elite-level players, including Alexander-Arnold, Kyle Walker, Levi Colwill, Ollie Watkins, Jordan Pickford, Tyrone Mings and many, many more.
We also heard some heart-wrenching stories from young boys and their families who didn’t quite make the grade.
The series includes the first-ever TV interviews with the mother of Matthew Langton who took his own life after being released by Mansfield; with Lewis Reed, who came very close to suicide as he tried to cope with rejection at Ipswich and Moses Swaibu who, after leaving Crystal Palace’s academy, fell into organised crime and was given a 16-month prison sentence for match fixing.
The documentary also features behind the scenes footage at a host of club academies, big and small. From Manchester United to Exeter City, Nottingham Forest to Blackburn Rovers, Crystal Palace to Chesterfield.
There are exclusive interviews with the power-brokers of English football, too.
We spoke to the man who has just appointed Thomas Tuchel as the new England manager, the FA’s Technical Director John McDermott, who gave us his first TV interview since taking over the role in January 2021, as well as the director of football at the Premier League, Neil Saunders.
The EFL also features heavily with the chief executive, director of football and chief operating officers all taking part.
You can also learn about the story of Curtis Anderson, who won the U17s World Cup with England alongside Phil Foden, who is now a financial adviser specialising in guidance for current football scholars.
What we ended up with was three-and-a-half hours of fascinating content, and a seven-part documentary series, looking at every aspect of youth football in this country. The good, the bad, and the seemingly impossible.
Because that was our starting point. Is the ambition to become a professional footballer an almost impossible dream? It is widely known that only a tiny minority of young boys ever make a career out of the game. And yet that doesn’t stop so many from trying.
Millions of young boys are “Chasing the Dream.”
Watch on Sky Sports Premier League and Sky Sports Football from November 24. Showing on Sky Documentaries from December 2 to December 5.
All episodes available on demand from November 24th.