Johnny Phillips: How London replaced the north as the talent hotbed
A few weeks ago I turned out for a charity team from back home in Liverpool who had come down south for a game in north London.
The salt and pepper hair was a giveaway in our team, but it was great to be sharing a pitch full of lads who were similarly the wrong side of 40 and more.
Chatting in the bar afterwards we shared stories of schoolboy football and how big it was back in the day before academies swept up the local talent at an early age.
At the home of the Liverpool County Football Association headquarters in Walton there are walls full of team photographs littered with stars from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
The city, like others in the north, was a classic hotbed of football.
Huyton alone – with a population of just 33,000 – produced the likes of Steven Gerrard, Peter Reid, David Nugent, Joey Barton and Tony Hibbert.
Working-class cities in the north have always had a tradition of producing professional footballers.
In the North-East, Wallsend Boys Club is famous for producing more than 90 professional footballers, including Peter Beardsley, Steve Bruce, Alan Shearer, Steve Watson, Lee Clark and Michael Carrick.
But then something changed.
Gradually the dominance of the north was replaced with the emergence of south London.
The ‘Concrete Catalonia’ is home to a new generation of stars such as Jadon Sancho, Wilfried Zaha, Joe Gomez, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Ebere Eze and many more.
