There is nothing unusual about seeing school children in pristine uniforms bustling around a market town like Market Harborough. What is noticeable is just how diverse they are.
They are students at Brooke House College, an independent boarding school set in the very heart of the town. There are 300 in total and they come from all over the world for an education — but for more than half of those it is with football in mind, rather than academia.
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It may be relatively unknown, even in the county of Leicestershire, but it is known around the world for providing an alternative pathway into the professional game, with links to former Arsenal and Portsmouth striker Nwankwo Kanu and Bolton Wanderers’ forward Jay-Jay Okocha, Leicester City, and even The Wild Boars, the Thai football team involved in the dramatic 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue.
The college is even set to take on the FA in a battle for foreign students to be able to play in England.
This little school in south Leicestershire is having a big impact.
After playing more than 500 games as a senior professional, and taking charge for nearly 800 as a manager at 11 different clubs, Micky Adams has experienced nearly everything possible in football.
For the past six years, since his last job with Sligo Rovers, Adams has worked as the technical director at Brooke House — and he loves it.
“Compared to managing a professional team this is a doddle,” he tells The Athletic. “It suits me. I live in Market Harborough. I have been very lucky. I work for a gentleman in Giles (Williams, the college’s managing director) who trusts me to go abroad and represent the school to put showcase events on.”
That is how the college attracts students and finds footballing talent for the academy. Through Williams’s vast connections around the world, Adams and other staff, which has also included former Leicester captain Matt Elliott, fly to other countries to put on trials to discover talent they can invite back to Brooke House.
“There is talent everywhere,” Adams says. “I have been to Uzbekistan, Kurdistan, China, Russia, Ghana, Sierre Leone, Hong Kong three times. You name it, we’ve been there.
“Obviously, for the past couple of years travelling has been difficult but we also have a network of educational agents who identify talent on all continents.”
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The students are then invited to study at the college, if their families can afford the fees, which can be close to £40,000 per year, but some are given partial scholarships, full scholarships and bursaries. “They have to be talented though,” Adams adds.
“We have a current student that is at Nottingham Forest and we are helping him through his education,” says the college’s principal Ian Smith. “We support him. They are not all fee-paying students.”
The college has links with academies around the world, one of which is Kanu’s in Nigeria.
“We have worked with the Pepsi Academy in Nigeria,” Williams explains. “We have had boys from the partner college in Bulgaria on scholarships, and we have had boys from Right to Dream in Ghana. If parents can only afford so much then we may look at bursary packages. There may be student support or financial support. Or we will have an agreement with an academy to take one a year.
“We have one now with Kanu, a new partnership. We will take one student every year. He came to visit, before lockdown. He was walking around and everyone wanted photos with him, except Ajay Okocha, who just went up to him and said, ‘Hello uncle!’”
Ajay is the son of Kanu’s Nigeria international team-mate Jay-Jay and was a promising central defender at the college while doing his A Levels last year.
“He is as good a passer of the ball as I have seen for his age,” Williams adds. “He can ping it 40 yards just four feet off the ground but completely flat. Unbelievable. He will get sorted, I am sure, with a contract. He is an incredibly nice boy as well.
“Another scholarship we did was to the captain of the Thai team (Duangphet Phromthep) that was stuck in the cave. We wanted to help them out.
“The agency we work with in Thailand don’t normally send scholarship kids but they asked if we would make an exception for one of the boys who were rescued from that cave, and we were happy to do so.”
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For most of the 165 in the academy, who come from 60 different countries and include five girls, the goal is to make it as professional footballers, but only a handful will do so. Former students Kelvin John (Genk and Tanzania striker), the Bulgarian defender Nikolay Todorov (Nottingham Forest and now at Dunfermline), Mark Tan Chun Lok (Hong Kong national team captain who was at Peterborough United and Northampton Town, but now at Guangzhou City in China), and Michael Wan (Hong Kong under-19s goalkeeper), have all graduated through the system.
The college showcases their talent in tournaments, which can be attended by 20 professional scouts, and play in college leagues and arrange friendlies against professional clubs, often beating them.
“We do more than hold our own; we beat the academy sides,” Adams says proudly. “We can go all over the country to play. It has taken time to build our reputation and they are coming to us now about players.”
“Every year we have five or six players who go to some level of the professional game,” says Istvan Kislorincz, football academy manager and a former professional from Hungary. “If you go to Europe and play the third level in Sweden and sign a professional contract, that is still professional. They aren’t all going to play for Manchester United or Leicester.”
One did end up at Leicester. Habib Makanjuola, a midfielder from Nigeria who had also played for Chelsea at under-18 level, signed for Leicester’s development squad but is now a free agent. Through Adams, the college has good links with their local Premier League club and regularly take groups to watch not only Brendan Rodgers’ first team, but particularly the under-23s and under-18s.
“I know Jon Rudkin (Leicester’s director of football), because I gave him his first job within the academy when I was Leicester manager,” says Adams. “Head scout Bill Ward too. He regularly comes down to watch. It would be remiss of Leicester City to miss a player on their own doorstep.”
One player that is on Leicester’s radar is another Nigerian, 17-year-old Thompson Isiaka. As Williams takes The Athletic around the pitches at Harborough Town FC, where the college train and play five times a week after their school studies finish at 2.20pm every day, he points out Isiaka, who has been to train previously with Leicester, but can only train with them for two weeks of the year. In fact, Isiaka couldn’t even play for Harborough Town. It is the same situation for many of the college’s foreign students and the reason the college, and many other independent schools with international students, are at odds with the FA.
Currently, the rules on International Transfer Certificates require overseas players to gain enough points through the Government Body Endorsement system, similar to the visa system, to be able to play in an FA affiliated league, and the FA’s interpretation is different to many places on the continent, where students are exempt.
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Previously foreign students could play for Brooke House College in the local leagues, like the English Colleges Football Association, and the Independent Schools Football Association’s amateur leagues, but the FA started to clamp down on these leagues, saying foreign players need an ITC to play. Effectively, schools are treated the same as professional clubs and the students the same as professional players.
The FA stance is that if a player is a student and moves without their parents to another country temporarily for academic reasons in order to undertake an exchange programme then they may qualify under the relevant exemption. However, the player’s new club or academic institution must be purely amateur with no legal, financial or de facto links to a professional club. The move must be made solely for academic reasons and not motivated in full or in part by football activity.
“FIFA’s regulations on the status and transfer of players (RSTP) relate to all national associations,” a FA spokesperson said. “As a result, all affiliated competitions and their member teams, whether they are clubs or academic institutions, are required to comply with Article 19.2 of the RSTP which prohibits the international transfer of a player if they are under the age of 18 unless they meet one of the stated exemptions.”
The Athletic has also contacted FIFA but have not received a response at the time of publication.
As many of the students don’t qualify for an ITC through the GBE system, it has left Brooke House struggling to provide enough match experience to compliment the coaching in the academy, stifling the progress of young players who are then forced to move to Europe.
Brooke House has been seeking a legal solution for the past two years and claim that FIFA itself does not agree with the FA’s stance. In the meantime, players like Kelvin John will look to Europe — and usually Belgium.
John was proposed to the college by an academy in Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania and the college provided financial assistance for John to study at Brooke House, where he excelled on the pitch, but despite being a full international for Tanzania he didn’t meet the ITC criteria.
It was Genk, who also picked up Wilfred Ndidi and Didier Zokora from Nigeria and Ivory Coast respectively, who then stepped in with a contract offer when John was 18 and in his second year at the college. Isiaka could follow a similar path.
While Brooke House look to help budding young players reach professional standards, and have been doing so since 2008 when they started with 11 players on the course, the main priority is their education.
Down at Harborough Town, Adams is putting one group through their paces while former Liverpool and Arsenal Women’s player Kirsty Linnett is working with another group as she progresses towards her UEFA B licence since retiring.
Former Notts County and Hull City defender Mike Edwards, a former team-mate of Kasper Schmeichel, is also on the staff as a strength and conditioning coach.
“I think we emphasise when we go abroad that this is a school with a football academy attached to it — it is not a football academy, it is a school with an academy,” Adams states.
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“The education is most important. Not every child will make it as a professional footballer so they need their education to fall back on.
“We try to be as professional as we can. That is why I am involved. If they didn’t take it seriously and learn anything then I would walk away from it.
“The fact is it is a smart academy that teaches them how to be professional, and how to be a professional with good habits. We look at everything involved in the game — nutrition, sports science, fitness, psychology and analytical analysis, which we are good at doing in training. We are a professional outfit in that sense, other than the fact we are a school.”
Ultimately, most go on to play at universities in the UK and overseas, particularly the US where the collegiate system is a pathway to the professional game. Many also pursue a career in the game in other areas, like sports science.
“It really is about progression to university and playing football for enjoyment, as well as potentially as a career,” Smith, the college’s principal, says. “Having that sense of well being as well. We do a lot with the boarding environment and ethos. I would say the quality of our ethos resonates from the pitch as well, the way they behave with maturity and discipline, and all the things you would expect from elite performance.
“That translates to the whole college, a sense of pride in what they do.”
“The universities come to us now too,” says Adams. “They want our players, building their university sides up. The US is a good market for them as well.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)
