sport news Leeds fame academy laid bare... New documentary captures rollercoaster ride trends now
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.
Joe Gelhardt's story is shared in a new documentary following Leeds United's academy
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 docu-series, 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.
Gelhardt, 20, has now played 28 times for Leeds' first team, scoring twice for the Whites
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.
