The tapping up of youth players: it just goes on and on, and still the FA won’t act properly.

By Tony Attwood

There is a certain type of person who not only says about rules and regulations “they does apply to us” but who also seriously means it.   The sort of person who knows about the rules but also says “no one bothers with that”.

Football it seems is rife with such people, especially when it comes to the issue of dealing with children.  While the horrific details of child abuse in football clubs have now vanished from the media (it was, it seems just a three week story, with editors reportedly saying after that, “the public  don’t want any more child sex stories”), we now have another child scandal.   Tapping up, and illegal contracts.

Alan Smith, the ex-Arsenal man, wrote an article about it in March 2000 under the heading “‘Tapping up’ a fact of life”.  Can I just make that clear – it was 17 years ago he wrote that piece and even then by way of introduction he could say, “There is nothing new about illegal approaches for players,” and continued, “What is remarkable is the extent to which it goes on and the fact that it is largely accepted, albeit reluctantly most of the time.”

He was writing in the aftermath of West Ham being ordered by an FA tribunal to pay £500,000 compensation each for Jermaine Defoe from Charlton and Leon Britton from Arsenal.

Of course at the time it wasn’t new, it was just that the FA were utterly inept at handling it then, as now.

There was another sudden “discovery” of tapping up in 2009 after accusations were made by French and English football clubs that a number of Premier League clubs had been enticing their youth players to join them.  This is the one that started with RC Lens midfield player Gaël Kakuta running off to join Chelsea.  Other French clubs and an Italian clubs quickly reported to Fifa that Manchester United and Manchester City, had made this standard practice.

The Sun, always a little late with the news suddenly discovered it last September and announced that the “Premier League to clamp down on tapping up of youth players as young as nine by rival clubs”.   And later, “New rules will see phone records and bank details come under the spotlight in attempt to stop illegal deals”.

And why did it take 17 years to get there?  We are not told.

In November 2016 the Mirror had a go with “Chelsea accused of tapping up former Spurs academy player” adding that Tottenham claimed “Chelsea tampered with one of its former academy products, and it was enough to get the Blues to back off from signing him.”

Now you can understand why clubs keep going.  For 17 years the FA has done nothing, nothing and then nothing, and no one seems to care.  Except maybe, just maybe, maybe someone has woken up somewhere as the headline “Liverpool face fine and transfer ban for tapping up Stoke schoolboy” has started to appear.”