Is this boy worth £5m?
At 11 years old, Adam Pepper is already being courted by Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal, and astronomical sums are being bandied about by football agents. But he's not the only one. Oliver Burkeman reports on sport's growing obsession with youth
Friday June 27, 2003
The Guardian
Life offers few better examples of the variety of approaches that it is possible to take to the job of parenting than the cases of Thomas Junta and Ronnie Pepper, two sports-mad dads who both had high hopes for their offspring. Junta - as anyone watching US television early last year could not fail to recall - disagreed so violently with the judgment of his school-age son's ice-hockey referee that he beat him to death immediately after the game, repeatedly slamming his head into the ground in front of the shocked players and prompting a new wave of fears in America over "sideline rage" attacks by obsessively ambitious parents.
Ronnie has been pursuing a somewhat different strategy with his son Adam, the 11-year-old football ace revealed this week to be the target of a battle between Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and several other top clubs, all desperate to sign the young Liverpudlian. The difference presumably has much to do with why Thomas Junta is now serving a six-to-10-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter and Pepper, a youth worker from Kirkdale in Liverpool, isn't.
"He's not in it for the money, and he doesn't want it all to happen too early for the lad," says the Peppers' agent, Peter McIntosh. And so, despite being on the receiving end of an awesome display of Premiership flattery - birthday cards from Ryan Giggs, a personal visit from Michael Owen, a pair of David Beckham's boots, and shin pads that formerly graced the legs of Ruud Van Nistelrooy - Adam remains defiantly unsigned.
If this admirably level-headed and protective approach to sporting parenthood seems increasingly rare, it is also increasingly essential. With economic competition, in football especially, unprecedentedly intense, the professional players of tomorrow are being hunted, and deluged with enticements, younger than ever before.
"It's a trend we've been seeing for a couple of years now," says Phil Smith, the football agent who represents, among many others, Arsenal's Freddie Ljungberg and Southampton's James Beattie. "You're put in the direction of good young players, and some of them have already been, how shall we say, got at. It's mainly newer agents, trying to get into the game - they can't get anywhere near established players so they do a bit of research and chance their arm ... Sometimes the parents are hoodwinked. Their backgrounds - they don't often come from an advantaged background, so they haven't necessarily got a family lawyer, for example."
But even Ronnie's protectiveness can only go so far. "I've stopped taking Adam to games now, because I just get pestered by agents and club officials all the time - they talk through the match," he said in the only interview he gave, to a national tabloid, before retreating into silence. "You can't blame the clubs," McIntosh says. "He's a good player, and if you had a star player like Beckham and suddenly he's got a pair of Beckham's boots - you can see why they do it. It's understandable."
Clubs and teams in many sports seem to be aiming younger, agents say, not least because the skyrocketing sums involved in buying fully-fledged players makes it a wiser use of resources to sign the most promising ones as early as possible, and much more cheaply. "When we signed up [the Everton player] Wayne Rooney," McIntosh says, "we waited. We knew him since before he was 14 but we wanted to let him come through in his own time, so he was 15 when he came to us." But that was then. At just 11, Adam is, McIntosh says, "very, very unusual ... but that's what's happening."
Ronnie's philosophy has much to do with the fact that he was himself a star player for Everton's boys team - a promising early career that didn't culminate in professional superstardom, despite the hype surrounding him at the time. "Ronnie was a real good footballer himself, and he's seen how it broke his heart and he doesn't want it to happen to his son," McIntosh says. "And they're a very close-knit family. They wouldn't want him going to Ajax" - the Dutch team also rumoured to have expressed an interest in Adam. "No money in the world could take him away from them."
Eric Hall, the flamboyant football agent not known for keeping his opinions to himself, has already been naming numbers in Adam's case, suggesting that he should be insured for between £1m and £5m, based on his likely astronomical earnings in the near future. "I'm not sure that does Adam any favours to talk about money like that," McIntosh insists, despite his obvious financial stake in the prodigy's success. "I've got grandchildren of my own, and I wouldn't want anyone thinking, oh, Adam's going to be making me £20,000 in a couple of years' time."
Things are already at a rather more hysterical stage in the US, where a 14-year-old soccer player, Freddy Adu, has already received a $1m marketing contract from Nike. "He's already wanted by clubs as far away as Italy," says Smith.
Taking matters to a more absurd extreme, there is the case of Mark Walker, a three-year-old who was caught on home video shooting 18 basketball hoops in a row - using a hoop 8ft off the ground, just 2ft lower than the pros. The size of his advertising deal with Reebok is undisclosed, but his ambition is certainly not. "It's a God-given talent," he told reporters, immodestly declaring himself "the future of basketball".
Adam Pepper seems unlikely to be making any equivalent statements any time soon. "I don't know what all the fuss is about," he has said, and it is a testament to Ronnie's approach to his son's vast talent that, McIntosh says, "all this stuff just goes completely over Adam's head. He could be playing against Beckham, he could be playing against his mate in the street. It's all the same to him."
