Most boys and girls across Merseyside dream of one day having the privilege to pull on the shirt of their favourite club.
Aspirations of reaching the first team one day start by getting picked up from a young age and working their way up through the Liverpool Academy or Finch Farm.
Even if you don’t ‘make it’, the opportunity to be able to represent the club you have a deep affinity for is something most would cherish.
If you walk down any street in Liverpool and ask most people their biggest dream, they’ll respond with ‘walking out at Anfield’ or ‘scoring at the Hill-Dickinson Stadium.’
For Zak Catesby, this chance became a reality. It also turned into root of frustration and stress for him. The 20-year-old from Spital on the Wirral grew up an Evertonian, attending matches at Goodison and fantasising about one day being able to pull on the famous Royal Blue jersey.
And for a while this dream seemed achievable. Picked up at a young age, both Zak and younger brother Joel were stars in the Everton academy, with the latter training with the first team before suffering a nasty leg injury playing for Everton under 21’s against Bradford in the Vertu Trophy this October.
But if you ask the pair of them, or ask people who knew them both, they will say the same thing. Zak was the better player out of the two brothers.
He worked his way through the academy until his contract expired aged 18. When he was not offered a new contract at Everton, Zak chose not to pursue academy football further, dropping out of the system.
He said: “It was a hard choice to make obviously. I absolutely love Everton, and I was living most people’s dreams. But I wasn’t at all happy, so continuing to play and not enjoying it was just not an option.”
What is lesser known about playing academy football, is the pressure and stress placed on its players. They’re expected to give up parts of their childhood that they would ordinarily enjoy if they didn’t have the commitment of football hanging over their head.
According to an article in Oxfordstudent.com, 0.012 percent of youth academy players in England will reach the top flight, meanwhile just 0.05 percent will play a single minute of professional football all together, let alone reach the Premier League.
Despite the low odds of ‘making it’, every player is still expected to carry themselves in the same way, to have the same commitments and make the same exceptions for a miniscule chance to play first team professional football.
And this was the main problem for Catesby. He simply wanted to be able to enjoy his life without having to worry about how his decisions and what he got up to would affect his career.
He said: “All my mates were going partying, and just in general having a lot more fun than me. Whilst on a Friday night I was away travelling with the team, my friends were all in town. It all became so frustrating.”
He also felt the competitiveness of playing academy football a source of anger. He said: “I’d come into school on a Monday, and everyone would be talking about how they got on at the weekend.
“People going on about passes they’d played together or laughing together about something that happened in the match. I didn’t get to have this experience because I played at levels higher than anyone I knew.
“At the end of the day I was a young lad who simply wanted to have fun playing footy. And I wanted to do this by playing footy with my mates, not with a random group who I would never have met if not for Everton.”
Catesby now works for the family business and plays in the Houlihans Birkenhead Sunday league alongside a number of his school friends after jumping around a number of local non league sides. He has seen success in his first season there winning players’ player of the season and helping his team to win the league.
He said: “I’m much happier now. There’s no pressure on you whatsoever. If I can’t make training, it doesn’t affect my chances of making the first team on a Sunday.
“And I get to share the pitch with some of my best mates every week, so it is much more enjoyable”.
