Wycombe Wanderers’ house-share
Four young players and a member of staff move in together and learn to cook. What could go wrong?
Phil Neville once confessed to having never made a cup of coffee, so you shudder to think of the outcome if he was locked in a kitchen and handed a ladle, a slightly simmering saucepan of water and two free-range eggs. Had he begun his career 20 years later, and not in cosmopolitan Manchester but in rural Buckinghamshire with League Two Wycombe Wanderers, then his culinary landscape might have been very different indeed. Far from having everything done for them, Wycombe’s youngsters are getting a rounded education in every sense. Coffee? Pah. How about a wet decaf soya latte with a sugar-free shot of vanilla? And eggs? Well, what do you fancy: hollandaise or Benedict? Wycombe’s academy, which can count Liverpool’s Jordon Ibe, QPR’S Matt Phillips and Roger Johnson of Charlton among its alumni, closed down in June 2012. With the club haemorrhaging cash and in desperate need of savings from somewhere, the Wycombe Supporters Trust gave the OK for Wanderers to become the first of the 72 Football League clubs to effectively pull the plug on their youth system. Now they’re intent on restoring their reputation for developing young talent, not through the re-opening of that academy, but courtesy of an anonymous-looking five-bed gaff on a sleepy residential road between the club’s training ground on the outskirts of Marlow and the Chairboys’ Adams Park home.
It’s called the ‘Life Academy’, and the house is the hub of an experiment that aims to provide not just a roof over the heads of the club’s youngest players, but the chance for them to broaden their education when it comes to nutrition, sports science and general domestic skills.
At first glance, they appear to be doing a decent job. There’s precious little debris on the floor and the kitchen appears clean enough for Mary Berry to go about her business without fear of Listeria. Hell, even the TV looks as though someone has given it the once-over with some Pledge. If FFT was looking for chaos, we’ve knocked on the wrong door.
It’s a gloriously crisp February day when we wander into this suburban ideal to be greeted by three footballers in their civvies, fresh from training and ready to lift the lid on what really happens when strangers aged between 18 and 22 move out of home and live together for the first time.
On a comfy leather three-piece suite sit Wycombe youth product Max Kretzschmar (22), Daniel Rowe (a 20-year-old defender brought in from Rotherham United the previous summer), and on-loan defender Jason Mccarthy (20) from Southampton.
They’re soon joined by goalkeeper Alex Lynch, 20, whose hip injury against Plymouth the previous weekend allowed 46-year-old goalkeeping coach Barry Richardson to hog the headlines after playing his first
It could be the new Friends: four Wycombe Wanderers starlets (and one assistant sports scientist) move in together, with hilarious consequences. Except this is no sitcom – this is scarily real...
“It’s their rst step into the adult world, where they have to cook and clean”
competitive match in eight years. Closely behind is 23-year-old Reece Clifford, the club’s satsuma-brandishing assistant sports scientist – or as the players like to call him, ‘the bedtime and girls police’.
Unless they’re hiding somewhere upstairs, there are no females present as Welshman Lynch walks in and unceremoniously throws the players’ training kit onto a two-seater sofa. For a man labelled ‘the messiest in the house’ before his entrance, Lynch immediately lives up to his reputation.
“New kit man is here,” he says, before he and his team-mates talk through some of the rules of the house.
“We had to sign an agreement before we moved in – there are house rules, basically,” says Kretzschmar. “And there are no parties.”
“And no trainers on the table,” quips Lynch, with his size nines placed firmly where a cup of tea would traditionally be perched.
Whatever goes on in the house, it’s certainly a step up from what went before. Rowe, Lynch and Kretzschmar had spent the previous season staying in a B&B above a pub run by local supporter Christine Barry.
“It was carnage,” says Kretzschmar. “When the club still had an academy, there were eight of us staying in five rooms. The lady who ran it was a huge Wycombe Wanderers fan. She loved having us all around and did a fantastic job, but this is obviously a far better environment for a young footballer.”
Barry would routinely cook for the players during their stay, but this lot have been left to fend for themselves – admittedly with a little help from Clifford, who spent last season with the club as an intern before earning a permanent appointment last June.
The house has worked out as well for Clifford as it has for the players in that he has effectively been placed in charge, albeit in the loosest sense possible.
“If it wasn’t me staying here it would be another member of staff,” he says. “But it has been good. To be fair, these aren’t guys who go out boozing – they all look after themselves and they’re here because they want to learn. A lot of what they want to know is around nutrition – they want to know what they should eat and when they should eat it.”
Mccarthy, who has come through a Southampton youth system that reads like a Premier League who’s who, is, according to his house-mates, the player who has come on most in the kitchen in the six months he has lived here. He admits: “I couldn’t cook a thing before. Now I can do a good few meals.”
Kretzschmar says it was his mum who really wanted him to come into the house, if only so he can clash the pans competently when he returns to his Sunbury home. He does, though, question whether Mccarthy has any right to claim himself as the new Heston Blumenthal. “It’s chicken, pasta and peppers,” says the midfielder. “He has it every night.” Lynch, meanwhile, claims that he has steak and mash down to a fine art. “They take the piss but I think it’s a good meal,” he says, smiling.
When he’s out of earshot of the others, Clifford reveals to FFT that Mccarthy is now competent enough in the kitchen that he feels sufficiently confident to wine (or maybe not, in this particular household) and dine his other half. “I feel like I’ve played a part,” says Clifford.” Jason can actually cook now, and what he serves up is presentable. He cooked for his missus the other day and she was really impressed with him.”
“A LOT OF Y OUNG PLAYERS HAVE NO LIFE SKILLS. THEY’LL END UP IN A SUPERMARKET, STACKING SHELVES”
It was Christmas 2014, in the office of Wycombe manager Gareth Ainsworth, that the idea of the Life Academy was conceived.
In the Football League’s hardest-to-access training centre, Ainsworth and his chairman, Andrew Howard, were sat with Millwall loanee Fred Onyedinma before the midfielder, then just 18 years old, set off for his digs in a taxi. “It’s easy when you’re trading stuff and don’t see it, but when you’re sat next to the lad, suddenly it brings it home to you,” Howard tells FFT. “I walked out behind Fred and he got into this taxi, all very impersonal, and off he went. I followed him to West Wycombe and thought: ‘Oh my God, would I really want my kid disappearing off like this?’”
Howard returned home and immediately called Ainsworth. The discussions that followed ultimately led to the club buying the house in a deal that eventually went through in the spring of 2015. “It had to have five bedrooms – it had to be big enough for the lads – but it had to be anonymous too,” he says. “The whole aim was to give these lads more.”
Howard himself made his money from ice cream. His Beech dean company, the UK’S third-largest ice cream manufacturer, currently sponsor the club. In November 2014 the players did a shift at his factory in the south, being encouraged to design their own flavours, packaging and marketing campaign. It’s another example of how Howard has attempted to introduce an element of real life into the education received by everyone who passes through the Adams Park door.
A month before the players were plonked on the factory floor, the club ran a trip to the Somme to visit the Footballers’ Battalion Memorial at Longueval in France. Now, Howard argues the Life Academy is merely an extension of their efforts to ensure that the club’s players aren’t just decent footballers, but also have a chance of making it if they are unfortunate enough to be flung onto the sporting scrapheap.
“A lot of young players in football have no life skills,” he says. “They’ll end up in a supermarket stacking shelves – and a lot of them don’t realise how close they are to that step-off. As a result, they’re not prepared for it.
“Now the house gives them a chance to learn some of those skills. It also gives us a great chance of attracting players on loan from clubs higher up the ladder, because they can see what we’re trying to do.”
The house occupied by these League Two starlets boasts a Slough postcode and, entirely in keeping, it’s Ricky Gervais and
“WE JOKE THA T FOOTBALLERS STRUGGLE TO FRY AN EGG – THESE BO YS CAN DO WONDERFUL THINGS WITH EGGS NOW ”
one of the country’s most famous sitcoms that dominates the boys’ choice of viewing.
“The Office is always on,” says Rowe. “We’re constantly doing impressions of everyone in it. Even on the training ground, we’ll be shouting out some of the classic lines.”
If David Brent isn’t on their screens then Big Brother probably is. And if the PS4 comes out, then it’s the footballers getting one over on Clifford, their non-playing housemate. “He’s not great,” admits Kretzschmar.
An ability to play the PS4 competently isn’t written into the players’ contracts, but keeping the place neat and tidy most definitely is. In the absence of a cleaner, the players are expected to keep the place presentable, despite the best efforts of Lynch. “He’s slowly getting better,” insists Mccarthy, which sets Kretzschmar shaking his head incredulously. “I’ve seen zero improvement,” he says. “Zero.”
Perhaps the equipment is to blame. “We don’t have a cleaner – just a terrible vacuum cleaner,” says Rowe. “We’ve got a Henry. But what we really need is a Dyson.”
Maybe that’s one transfer in and out that Ainsworth could look at completing this summer, although he’ll obviously hope to have more important things on his mind – such as tackling a season in League One after promotion from the bottom tier.
The club literally came within seconds of achieving that aim in the play-off final against Southend back in May last year, conceding an equaliser to the Shrimpers in the 122nd minute before Phil Brown’s men triumphed in the penalty shootout. With the Chairboys in contention for promotion again this season, Ainsworth will hope they can go one better.
“I was sitting on the bench at Wembley and had just told a few of the lads in front of me that they’d better move out of the way because in about 15 seconds we were all going to charge on the pitch in celebration and knock them flying,” says Kretzschmar. “I’ve never known a feeling like it when they equalised.”
Lynch was between the sticks that day, which in itself represented one of football’s great turnarounds. “I’d been on loan at Burnham, who had an absolutely shocking season,” he says. “They finished bottom of the Southern League Premier, but I was called back shortly before Wycombe’s league season ended. Then Matt Ingram got injured against Northampton in the last game before the play-offs, so I got my chance.”
Lynch grabbed it with both hands, starring in Wycombe’s 5-3 aggregate semi-final win against Plymouth and keeping his place for the final – which so nearly ended in triumph.
“All I can remember is lying in the goal just after they had equalised and seeing the Southend supporters going absolutely nuts behind me,” he says. “Shocking.” The players in the house clearly get on, and over the course of the past seven months a palpable bond has developed.
“You can see it wherever we are, really,” says Mccarthy. “Even on the training pitch or in the gym, we’re always joking with each other or hanging around together. Obviously we’re all from different parts of the country and we’ve been thrown together, but we all look out for each other.”
The home-based hijinks never end. “Who spends the most time in the bathroom? It’s him – definitely him,” says Lynch, pointing not at any of his fellow pros, but at a slightly embarrassed-looking sports scientist. “It’s probably true, to be fair,” admits Clifford. “They’re always having a pop at me about my quiff.”
Regardless of bathroom waits or cooking prowess, the success or otherwise of this experiment will be measured by how many of these players actually graduate to Ainsworth’s Chairboys side as first-team regulars.
All have played a role so far this season and all confess that they’re lucky to be at a club where youth will get opportunities – as much out of necessity as anything else.
“The manager is good with young players: everyone gets a chance in this team,” says Rowe. “Some teams in our league have got squads of 30, 35, even 40 players. At the end of our match against Luton, they were able to have an 11 v 11 of players who weren’t involved that day. We’d have to rope the supporters in if we wanted to do that!”
Wycombe’s bare-bones roster is not an ideal situation for Ainsworth but, as the EX-QPR, Lincoln and Preston midfielder has proved, you don’t have to have a huge squad packed with experience to be competitive.
“It’s hard for us to put on sessions where you need 22 players,” he says. “You ask any club at our level and they always have a number of their youth-team players making up the training squads. They’ll be able to put together an 11 v 11 session in preparation for a match, but we can’t do that here.”
What the club can do, and are doing, is ensure that the young players they do have at their disposal are geared up for whatever football and life throws at them.
“We’re giving them the first step into the adult world, where they have to clean, wash and cook for themselves,” says Ainsworth.
“We joke about footballers struggling to fry an egg – I think these boys can do wonderful things with eggs now, with the cooking lessons they’ve had.”
If Wycombe are celebrating promotion to the third tier in May, they still might not be knocking back the bubbly. In one house at least, it’ll be omelettes all round.