APPRENTICE footballers learn little from the educational programmes they are given to train them in a back-up career if they do not get a professional contract, a new study from the University of Chester reveals.
Research conducted with 302 apprentice footballers with professional football clubs found that many were simply copying material from the internet and each other to pass their courses.
Dr Andy Smith and PHD student Chris Platts, from the university’s Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences and Chester Centre for Research into Sport and Society, found that some apprentices said that their tutors rarely reported them for copying others’ work, and encouraged ‘learned helplessness’.
The findings were presented at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference in Glasgow last week.
One apprentice at a League Two club told them: “You can’t really fail it.” While another apprentice at a Premier League club said his teachers “even tell you to go to this website and then copy all this information”.
The researchers said that in the past 12 years Academies and Centres of Excellence had been set up to train young people in qualifications such as sports-related B-TECs and NVQs that would be valuable should they not be offered a contract at the end of their apprenticeships.
Some courses were directly relevant for a career in football, covering coaching and nutrition, for example, and others were more general courses on sports and in other areas.
The apprentices were taught, on average, for a day-and-a-half each week, either by their club’s head of education and welfare, a teacher going to their club, or them attending a local sixth-form college.
In focus group meetings with the researchers almost all the 302 apprentices, aged 16 to 18, described the teaching as boring and said it did not significantly help them to learn.
One League Two apprentice said: “It is like no one wants to do the course we’re on,” and another: “It is just long days”. One Championship club apprentice said his course was “boring – it’s literally the worst college ever.”
Another apprentice at a Premier League club told the researchers: “It is easy... you just copy and paste at the end of the day,” while another said: “It is not really like I am learning off my own back.”
The researchers told the conference: “The boredom that players experienced whilst completing their educational courses was in part related to the tendency for them to simply copy and paste their work from sources such as the internet and, in some cases, from each other. “