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Private schools are becoming a recruitment ground for professional football clubs all over the country
In September, West Ham United received a series of offers for one of their brightest talents. Kyran Thompson, then 15, has already been compared to Jude Bellingham.
Manchester City, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur all courted him. But Arsenal had a trump card: a place at St John’s Enfield, one of London’s leading private schools, with Thompson’s annual £17,500 fees covered.
Arsenal won the battle. AtSt John’s, Thompson combines an elite education with phenomenal facilities, including an on-site spa. He also has a model to follow for how to combine academic and football life: Ethan Nwaneri.
At St John’s, Nwaneri pipped Myles Lewis-Skelly to a sports scholarship; instead, Lewis-Skelly won a scholarship at Aldenham School. Less than two years after leaving school at 16, the pair are now thriving in the Premier League.
Nwaneri returned to St John’s last Friday to give a motivational talk to the school under-14 team before the Enfield Borough Cup final.
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Ethan Nwaneri (third left) with the St John’s year eights whilst only being in year seven - Alexander Tardios
The Arsenal contingent embody a growing trend: how football clubs are working with the independent sector.
Manchester City, for example, have sent boys to St Bede’s College since 2011, paying the £17,000-a-year fees of more than 60 children a year. Butthey do not play any football for the school.
Last year, Arsenal agreed a similar, though less comprehensive, agreement with St John’s. Particularly academic boys can go to St John’s, fully funded by the club. The partnership is an official Full Time Training Model (FTTM): a concept approved by the Premier League designed to allow children, aged 13 and above, to combine football and education.
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Manchester City have sent boys to St Bede’s College since 2011, where fees are £17,000-a-year - PA/Anthony Devlin
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Arsenal and St John’s School in Enfield have a partnership in place for academy players
Manchester United partnered with Ashford School, a state school in Sale, in 1998. But, with more parents eager for their children to combine football and a high-class education, the club added Manchester Grammar School as a partner in 2021.
United pay the full fees for academy boys who attend Manchester Grammar, providing they pass the entrance exam. A total of 22 partner schools are involved in a FTTM with an English club; 12 are private.
Tottenham Hotspur have a partnership with Culford, in Suffolk; from September, a member of the club’s staff will be based permanently at the school. Norwich City have close ties with Langley School, which has become a regular source of players; former Norwich striker Grant Holt is Langley’s football academy director.
Beautiful game going back to its roots
Private schools are also becoming a recruitment ground for clubs. In 2023, Arsenal launched the Arsenal Independent Schools’ Trophy, staged at the club’s academy, with tournaments at under-14 and under-16 levels.
It serves to help boys make an increasingly common leap: from private schools to the Premier League. After more than a century of distrust, the private sector has learnt to love the beautiful game.
Independent schools shaped the early history of English football. In the 1840s, pupils at Charterhouse and Westminster School played early versions of the sport. Private-school old boys, led by Charterhouse, established the laws of the game at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in central London, in 1863.
Harrow alum Charles Alcock was the lead figure in the creation of the FA Cup in 1871. The tournament was initially dominated by independent schools: Old Etonians reached six of the first 12 FA Cup finals.
But as football’s national appeal grew, private schools prioritised more socially elitist games. By 1929 Gilbert Oswald Smith, a Charterhouse alum and centre-forward for England in the 1890s, bemoaned that “the public schools have in many cases forsaken association football”.
Instead, independent schools specialised in rugby and cricket. In these sports, it has been common for English national teams, especially at men’s level, to feature 50 per cent or more of players who were privately educated.
Football has been the lone major sport in which the proportion of elite players is less than the seven per cent of children who attend independent school. Privately educated children long had less chance of becoming professional footballers than those from state schools. The few exceptions – like Frank Lampard, who famously earned an A in his Latin GCSE at Brentwood School – were viewed as curiosities.
No longer. Football is now more vibrant in independent schools than any time since its original golden age in the mid-to-late 19th century. This can be seen in two, simultaneous processes: the boom in the amount of football in private schools, and Premier League clubs’ new eagerness to cultivate links with the sector.
In 2004, just 50 school teams were members of the Independent Schools Football Association. That number surged to 4,500 by the 2014-15 season. Today, there are 21,000 – 15,000 boys’ teams, and another 6,000 girls’ sides.
Neil Rollings, now chairman of the Professional Association of Directors of Sport in Independent Schools, started teaching in the sector in 1984. He remembers football as a widely “disapproved of game”, recounting a headmaster bursting a ball that a boy had brought to school, then throwing it over a hedge.
“Football has become a principal game in schools, and it has the same advantages that rugby or cricket did in terms of resourcing,” says Rollings. “The resources are three things – the time allocated to it; the calibre of people who coach it; and the facilities. All of those have improved dramatically.
“There was this artificiality of being the only country in the world where the leading schools didn’t play the national game. When something is as illogical as that, it finds a way of righting itself.”
The transformation reflects football’s embrace by the middle classes since the Premier League launched in 1992. Yet the biggest factor, Rollings says, is simply the rise in children being given a say in what sports they play.
“Back in 1984, you played a term of rugby. At Christmas you put your rugby ball away, you got your hockey stick out, put that away at Easter. Then, everyone played cricket.
“You can chart the growth of football alongside the rise of choice in school sport. Because where there is free choice, football will be the beneficiary.”
The Football Association is alert to football’s growing prominence in private schools. The governing body funds three full-time staff who work for the Independent Schools Football Association. The body organises a wide array of tournaments for boys and girls, including plate competitions for schools where football is less established.
Already, the recent alumni of independent schools includes a remarkable array of talent. Alongside graduates of St Bede’s, who include Phil Foden and Cole Palmer, and those Arsenal proteges, the list of privately educated English players includes Jude Bellingham, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Nick Pope. Tudor Mendel-Idowu, 20, juggled his education as a King’s scholar at Eton while playing for Chelsea’s youth teams; he is now at Ipswich Town.
One recovery pool, two gyms, 11 pitches and 16 coaches: Welcome to Millfield
A series of elite schools now double as mini football academies. Consider Millfield in Somerset, widely viewed as the best school for sport in the country. The school now has 16 Uefa-qualified coaches, including six full-time football staff – a similar operation to a Championship club. Together with five training pitches, there are 11 full-size pitches on the school grounds; the main pitch is Premier League category 2 standard.
After matches, players use the recovery pool and the two gyms. Recent pre-season trips include tours to the Netherlands, United States, South Africa and Spain. From a total of 10 football teams a decade ago, the school now runs 18 sides across boys and girls.
Millfield is one of the 10 teams in the Hudl Independent Schools League. The league was launched in 2017 and embodies the new emphasis that private schools are placing upon football. The competition’s motto is instructive: Pursuing Football and Academic Excellence.
“Before, we only had the cup,” explains Luke Webb, a coach who was instrumental in creating the Hudl league. All matches have three neutral match officials; each game is filmed and coded on Wyscout, the software that the Premier League uses. While independent schools once largely only offered football in one term – if at all – nine of the 10 Hudl schools now play football in two terms. There is even a growing trend of offering some football in the summer term, too.
“The Hudl league is about the schools who invest in their facilities and football education,” Webb says. “People always say, ‘why don’t you work in a state school?’ I wish I could, but the facilities aren’t good enough.”
The son of Neil, a Manchester United midfielder who earned 26 England caps from 1987-92, Webb had a fine junior career at Arsenal, and played with Cesc Fabregas. After being released aged 18, he played for Coventry City and Hereford United but then retired aged 21 because of injury.
He believes that the brutal odds of making it as a professional – just three per cent of footballers in Premier League academies play in the top flight – demand that players focus on their academic as well as sporting education. He believes, too, that education can give players an escape, and help them to retain their enjoyment of the game itself.
In 2009, aged 22, Webb got a job at Bradfield College; he is now director of football at Repton School. The best players here have 20 hours of football-related activities a week – playing and training, alongside working with psychologists, nutritionists and performance analysts, who are often PhD students. That is more time in the football programme than Webb had per week at the Arsenal academy.
“They feel safe – psychologically safe,” Webb says. “Pressure is good, but not crippling, unnecessary contractual, getting ahead of your team-mate, dog-eat-dog pressure. We don’t have that.”
The independent school landscape in football is very different to sports such as cricket and rugby. In those games, the best talent flocks to private schools. But in football, the demands of professional academies are such that players cannot balance representing a school and their club. For instance, Foden did not play for St Bede’s: the school is used by Manchester City as an educational partner, rather than shaping their football development.
“If a boy is at an academy full-time, they are not learning their football at the school,” Webb explains.
Coaches in the private sector are trying to create a new path: allowing children to learn football at independent schools.
Every year, Webb can point to new evidence for the football talent within the sector. In eight years, more than 20 players have progressed from the Hudl league to the professional game. While none of these players are regulars at elite clubs, Hudl alumni have signed for clubs including Burnley and Fulham.
“I didn’t have the pick of the boys in the country,” Webb says. “I had the boys that no one wanted.”
The Hudl league is essentially limited to players not signed by academies. Most players are from affluent backgrounds: two-thirds of those at Hudl teams are thought to pay full fees. Children who benefit from significant combined bursary and scholarship awards often join in sixth form.
The very best players at private schools, like Nwaneri and Lewis-Skelly, still largely leave at 16. But elite schools increasingly scout players released by academies aged 16.
Coaches from leading independent schools pack into “exit trials” – matches run by clubs for players that they are releasing, designed to give the children a chance to show their talent to potential new suitors. Should they impress, players might then receive scholarship offers.
“We’ve seen a rise in the number of pupils attending private school through either a bursary or a scholarship,” says Ian Bent, head of football operations at the IFSA. “Previously, a lot of those [sports scholarships] would have gone to rugby.”
For players released aged 16, joining an independent school at sixth form is a way of winning a second chance in professional football. “A huge number of students get spat out at 16 and don’t really know where to go,” says Jono Santry, who coaches at Millfield and is manager of the Independent Schools Under-18s, a national side for boys at English private schools. “Our schools are giving an olive branch to those students.”
Oneflag-bearer for this approach is Tyrone Mings. In 2009, aged 16, Mings was released by Southampton: a moment that normally marks the end of a player’s professional dreams. His story had a different ending. Millfield gave Mings a sports scholarship in sixth form. For these two years, Mings played his football almost exclusively at the school, then broke back into the professional game, setting him on course for a fine career with Aston Villa and England. Similarly, Solly March won a scholarship at Bede’s in year nine, playing for the school until upper sixth, when he signed with Brighton and Hove Albion.
While coaching in the private sector, Santry was used to having his calls to scouts ignored. But increasingly, Santry finds that professional scouts heed his advice about getting to games.
“That’s the biggest change. Now that we’ve got players that are good enough, the scouts are seeing them. I say to parents, ‘if they’re good enough, I will know who to speak to, and I will introduce you’. If you go to an independent schools national team game – under-18s, under-16s, even under-14s – you will see the whole pitch surrounded by scouts.”
Santry has been Independent Schools Under-18s manager for 15 years. Asked what would happen if his side today met the 2010 team, Santry laughs. “That would be unbelievably one-sided,” he says. “Let’s go for a conservative 6-0.
“The players were what I would describe as good school-level players, maybe playing for the counties. Not many would be good enough to do other things beyond that. Now, the schools national team is full of players that either want to be professional or to go to America.”
Indeed, the rise of football in the United States is an unlikely factor in the growth of the sport in independent schools. The number of scholarships for football, at male and female level alike, has soared in American colleges. Leading footballers at private schools can now aspire to winning a fully funded US education.
“We’re seeing more players that have gone to independent schools, got an education and gone on to great things in football,” Santry says. “Back in the day, if a player was good enough, they’d be almost encouraged not to go to an independent school.” Trent Alexander-Arnold, for instance, moved from a private school to Liverpool’s partner state school aged 13.
In 2016, Santry first learnt of parents who would only allow their sons to sign for a club if the contract included a guarantee to pay for a private education – effectively, an insurance policy if football does not work out. Now, when negotiating with clubs, parents are increasingly doing as Thompson’s family did with Arsenal.
“We see the FTTM going from strength to strength,” says Alexander Tardios, the headmaster of St John’s. “I always say to my academy boys: ‘If you do not make it as a footballer, do not say all your efforts were for nothing. Remember your footballing talent earned you a scholarship, which has led you to achieving good grades in your studies and now you have the qualifications to go to university and follow a new and exciting path.’ This is where the game is changing.”
From year seven, St John’s offers football scholarships, worth up to 100 per cent off fees. This arrangement is separate to the partnership with Arsenal, who started to pay academy players’ fees at St John’s last September. From year nine, players in club academies rarely represent schools, but often do when they are younger. Aged 11 and 12, players at club academies still often represent their schools. Nwaneri once scored eight goals in a game for St John’s.
Emphasis on football a ‘marketing tool’
Growing concern about the risks of concussion in rugby is contributing to a growing number of parents preferring their children to play football instead. For both boys and girls at independent schools, the number of football teams rose by 20 per cent from 2023-24 to 2024-25.
Football could also be an unlikely beneficiary of the introduction of VAT on fees, as schools became ever-more sensitive to parents’ demands.“Every private school is panicking,” Webb says. “Schools will move to more football provision because that’s what parents want more of.”
Overseas pupils, a growing constituency, are particularly likely to choose football over rugby. One pragmatic reason for the sector’s new emphasis on football, a coach at a prominent school admits, is simply as a “marketing tool”.
As schools cut costs, football will benefit from being significantly cheaper to run than rugby and hockey. As a 15-a-side game with relatively specialised positions, rugby will be particularly susceptible to any reductions in pupil numbers. “There’s a larger critical mass you need to run a rugby programme than a football programme,” Rollings explains.
For football in the independent sector, the biggest question is whether schools can eventually develop elite players at a similar rate to other sports.
“At the moment, the minute a kid is good enough, they’re taken into an academy,” Rollings says. “As independent schools continue to increase their quality and provision of football, I think they could be a breeding ground.”
Led by teams such as Arsenal, more clubs are showing flexibility in allowing children to spend more time at private schools.
“The academies have a better understanding of the quality of football programme, the quality of coaching the kids will get within the school,” observes Bent, from the IFSA. “Ten years ago, being a private school probably slightly hindered them going on. Nowadays it will probably help them. Some academies have really cottoned on to the idea that, actually, a private school is a fantastic place.
“You’ll see a number of players who have come through the private sector go on to play professionally at the top of the game. If you look at what’s happened to rugby and cricket, I don’t see any reason why that won’t become a real big thing in football too over the next 10 to 15 years.”
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