Premier League Castoffs Start Over at 11

delivers a perfect cross for a teammate to score with a header, his father exclaims, “Get in, Iyad!” before turning to say — only half-jokingly — “the dream’s back on.”

The odds, of course, are heavily stacked against any youth player someday making it as a top-tier professional.

“The stat that is relevant here is that around one-third of 1 percent of all boys who enter an academy at the age of 9 will make a living from the game,” said Michael Calvin, who has written a book about the youth academy economy.

Mr. Calvin said even fewer — “only 180 of the 1.5 million boys who are playing organized youth football in England at any one time” — will play a single minute in the Premier League.

Iyad Bhatti clings to that dream. A diminutive right-sided attacker, he was at Tottenham for several years before being released in 2016. Nisar Bhatti said the club based its decision on a database that compared Iyad’s physical and athletic attributes to previous players’, but also on physical data it sought from him and his wife.

“The cutthroat nature is incredible — they drop you like that,” Nisar Bhatti said. “You learn that your kid is like a Kleenex: They can just throw it away and pick up another one.”

Mr. Daly, who once helped clubs make such decisions, reminds his charges of the fight they have on their hands.

“Most of you won’t make it, the statistics are clear,” he tells his team in Boulogne. “And I can tell you, you definitely won’t make it if you don’t work hard, if you don’t put a shift in every time you train, every time you play.”

On the surface, the rules governing young players in English soccer are strict. Teams can sign players to their academies as early as age 9, but cannot formalize that with a professional contract until they are 16.

Yet inducements are common. Some clubs pay for private school educations. Legitimate payments for travel allowances are abused — a way to funnel money to underage players in contravention of the rules — and poaching prospects from rival clubs is common, so much so that Huddersfield, promoted to the Premier League this season, recently scrapped its youth programs for players under 16.

Even if Huddersfield could scout talent, The Daily Mirror noted, “chances are Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool or even Chelsea will quickly be along to have a ‘chat’ with your parents.”

The problems for the boys begin when, suddenly, it’s all over.

“You are like a piece of meat really,” one Focus parent said of her son’s dismissal by a Premier League academy. “They need you until they don’t.”

The Focus players are a mix: boys whose parents declined to sign youth contracts, thus keeping their options open but giving clubs little reason to invest in them, and those who did but later were released after a year or two.

Parents’ faith in Mr. Daly, who says he does not make money when Focus players are signed by clubs, stems from his coaching ability but also from his contacts.

“He will prepare you because he knows each academy, knows what they require,” said Alex Quarcoo, a hairdressing salon owner whose son Malachi joined Focus after he was released by Tottenham after three years. “He’ll only take them when they are ready.”

They come, Mr. Quarcoo said, because they — players and parents — are not ready to give up their dreams. “My view is, one way or another, we want to get our children back in,” he said.

Most parents spend just under $100 a month for a child to attend two training sessions and play a game once a week.

And Mr. Daly can be abrasive. “Don’t stop the van,” he barked over the phone on the way to France. “I don’t care if he says he’s going to be sick. They have to learn to be mentally tough.”

Later, after the under-11 team’s goalkeeper blundered in an early game at the tournament, Mr. Daly dropped the boy for a subsequent game.

“He always tells it straight,” said Damian Kelly, who drives his prodigiously gifted 12-year- old son, Kyle, 70 kilometers to play for Focus. “What he’s always said is that he’ll always have the child’s best interests at heart, and he’s proved that over the last four or five years.”

At the Chti’s Cup, both Focus teams progressed to the latter stages of the tournament, one losing in the quarterfinals and the other in the semifinals.

A few weeks later, one of the players, Claude Smith-Kabanda, 11, said the trip to France was challenging, but it hadn’t altered his belief in himself.

“I think,” he said, “I’m going to make it.”