Life in Leeds fame academy laid bare
New documentary captures rollercoaster ride of Gelhardt & Co as they try to break into first team
IT TURNS out the death of street football has been greatly exaggerated. Joe Gelhardt, now of Leeds United, played on a patch of grass amid terraces in Liverpool’s Netherton district where a sign states ‘No Ball Games’ when he was a lad. He and his mates set up a goal there anyway and the crossbar is in the same state of dilapidation, held on by gaffer tape, that it was before he left for a shot at the big time.
That shot has been riddled with jeopardy. It was all going so well for him at Wigan Athletic — where he had been playing first-team football since the age of 16 — before the club was mismanaged to the brink of oblivion and all the best players sold. The financial administrators had just moved in when Gelhardt was told of Leeds’ interest, joined their Under 23s team and started all over again.
Gelhardt, ‘Joffy’ to one and all, does not make a great deal of this when asked in the new Amazon Prime football docuseries, Academy Dreams, which follows the fortunes of the young Leeds players who are trying to break into the first team, managed by Marcelo Bielsa at the time.
The cameras follow Gelhardt back to his home in Netherton in the early episodes, when we find him climbing an aluminium ladder into the attic — ‘this will hold me, won’t it?’ he asks uncertainly — to fetch down his box of trophies. ‘We’d play from 3pm until the light had gone,’ Gelhardt relates. There’s an intimacy and lack of ego about such interviews which make this six-part series highly watchable. The selection of Vinnie Jones as narrator is incongruous but the film takes us into the lives of players in whom it is easy to be invested. Gelhardt casually relates that Liverpool released him ‘several times’ — there’s that jeopardy again — as a kid and there’s some payback when Leeds play at his home city club’s academy. His two goals, in a 4-0 win, include a spectacular strike from inside the centre circle and a left-foot effort from 35 yards, though he misses a last-minute penalty. Gelhardt has now broken through into the Leeds first team, though is still living week to week, wondering if he will cement that regular place. One Premier League start so far this season.
He’s 20 now. It’s the same tightrope for Charlie Cresswell — likeable, transparent, and desperate to make it and emulate his father Richard, who played 38 times for Leeds in a long career.
Playing pool with Kalvin Phillips, one of those who really has made it, Cresswell confides to feeling like a ‘mannequin or dummy’ who is simply there to make up the numbers when he trains with the first team. The former Under 23s captain is currently on loan at Millwall, going round the houses to pursue a dream of captaining Leeds in the Premier League.
The young players grapple with some of the finer points of independent living — how to remove a bin liner for example — and some big emotional quandaries, like: ‘How long are you going to give this?’ as one asks another.
But what marks Leeds out from many others is a sense that those at the top of the club are absorbed by the challenge of bringing them through. The camera crews capture Bielsa walking the perimeter of the pitch as the Under 23s train. They know that they have a chance of a breakthrough, if they can live with the physical intensity. Gelhardt lost 9kg in his first season at the club.
Director of football Victor Orta discusses the young players with a level of detail which signals his investment in all of this, though Craig Dean, head of emerging talent, keeps his usual low profile. Dean, a former Manchester United academy player who arrived at Leeds from Oxford United in 2017, was integral to Gelhardt and Sam Greenwood both arriving for less than £2million. Leo Hjelde, Lewis Bate and Amari Miller are also his signings.
The challenge for the players is unremittingly tough. The series captures those left behind after team-mates get League Cup call-ups. The Under 23 team were ultimately relegated from the elite Premier League 2 division in the season the series was filmed.
So whenever Gelhardt wasn’t involved in a relegation fight for Bielsa’s team, he was trying to keep his contemporaries up.
‘I’ve always believed in myself,’ he says. ‘I tell myself this all the time: “You’ve got to believe in yourself because you are the one who is doing it. You are capable of it”.’
Academy Dreams: Leeds United is streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.