My son Charlie was scouted by QPR last week. I say ‘scouted’, but that’s not quite accurate since he’s only six. Rather, a man claiming to be a member of the club’s coaching staff suggested I bring him along to the QPR pre-academy in Willesden.
At first, I was suspicious. The man in question teaches football at the local leisure centre and I was worried that this ‘pre-academy’ would turn out to be an expensive, fee-paying affair with no official links to QPR.
When the man first introduced the idea, I had to ask if he’d got the right boy. Charlie’s quite small for his age and not exactly lion-hearted. His method of winning the ball is to go in for the tackle, fall over, accuse the other player of committing a foul and then demand a penalty, no matter where the ‘foul’ has occurred. He then positions the ball inches from the goal, takes a massive run-up and, as often as not, falls over when he makes contact. To my untrained eye, he doesn’t look like a future star of the Premier League.
The ‘scout’ insisted that he’d got the right child and assured me no money would change hands. All I had to do was turn up to the pre–academy on Monday, let the coaches take a look at him and, if they liked what they saw, bring him back for an hour’s training every week.
Once I’d established that the whole thing was genuine, I began to fantasise about the possibilities. If Charlie is earning £100,000 a week by the time he’s 18, he might buy his dear old dad a Bentley -Continental for Christmas. Better yet, I could become his agent and take a hefty slice of all his earnings and transfer fees. Charlie could become the family’s cash cow.
It fell to Caroline to strike a note of caution. She pointed out that the chances of Charlie ending up as a professional footballer, even if he got into the proper academy, were extremely slim. She’d heard too many stories of teenage boys who’d devoted their early years to Premier League academies, only to be let go at 16. Did we really want to expose him to such soul-destroying disappointment?
And what about the commitment it would require of us? If Charlie progressed any further, one night a week would turn into four, with weekends sacrificed entirely to football. The way she laid it out, it -sounded about as sensible as becoming a gold prospector at the end of the 19th century.
I was still weighing up the pros and cons last Sunday, when Charlie played in his weekly fixture for the Chiswick Youth Under-Sixes. This is a team that requires no talent to get into. If you turn up and fork out £175 for the season, your child can play. They were facing their arch west -London rivals, the Holland Park branch of Little Foxes, who’d beaten them in every previous meeting. As the referee blew his starting whistle, I looked over at the Little Foxes’ parents and suddenly came over all left-wing. It was the sans-culottes versus the 1 per cent.
Then, something miraculous happened. Charlie started playing properly. He managed to win tackles and then keep the ball. For the first time ever, he made some mazy little runs, skipping past defenders and getting off some decent shots.
It was as if the interest shown in him by the QPR scout had boosted his confidence. The critical moment came in the dying seconds when Charlie won a penalty. His team were trailing 2-3, so it was all down to him. I was so tense I could barely look, knowing how ashamed he’d be if he let his teammates down. As he placed the ball on the spot, his face was white with fear.
He took his usual lengthy run-up, but this time he didn’t fall over. Instead, he blasted the ball into the top left-hand corner. Before he even knew what he’d done, the referee had blown the final whistle and his teammates had piled on top of him. It was Roy of the Rovers stuff.
I took him over to the QPR pre-academy on Monday and, after assessing him for an hour, the coaches asked me to bring him back next week. When you see Charlie score the winning goal against Germany in the final of the 2026 World Cup, I hope you’ll remember where you first read about this wunderkind.
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