SPECIAL REPORT: The failings of Premier League football factories

'We are not complainers,' says Manila Wisten. 'We do not want to be seen to be pointing fingers at football. But our boy died upstairs, while we were in the house. We're having to live with that.'

He is talking about his son, Jeremy Wisten, who was two weeks past his 18th birthday when released by Manchester City in May 2019 and never recovered. A boy known to his City academy team-mates as 'Ace' seemed a shadow of his former self. He took his own life in October 2020.

The inquest into his death, last November, felt like a moment when British football's talent factory — the recruitment of thousands of children, 70 per cent of whom never earn a professional contract — might have been examined in full.

But the inquest was done and dusted in one afternoon. The Wisten family did not even have legal representation. 'We were told that would be highly unusual,' Mr Wisten says.

'We took that to mean we should not. Then we arrived in court to find Manchester City had four lawyers. We felt we didn't ask what we wanted to ask.'

What he wanted to ask was whether football is doing enough to prepare academy boys for rejection. Premier League figures show 97 per cent of 4,109 former elite academy players now aged between 21 and 26 failed to make a single top-flight appearance, with 70 per cent not gaining a professional contract.

The Premier League is undertaking a review of its academy system, 10 years after it was set up. But it is aftercare, rather than numbers recruited, which has become the priority issue.

MP Tracey Crouch cited recruitment numbers as her major worry in the fan-led review of football governance published in November. That detailed how 99 per cent of the 10,000 to 12,000 boys in the youth development system at any