Chasing the impossible dream: Why football is far from 'the beautiful game' for so many young players
At 17, Ryan Corrigan was training with Sergio Agüero and Kevin De Bruyne. At 22, he's been chewed up and spat out by a game that still does too little to support its players
If he had to, Ryan Corrigan could name a pretty strong XI of players he’s played alongside.
“When I was a kid there was Curtis Jones and Anthony Gordon,” he says, eyes widening. “Then coming through at City you had the likes of Phil Foden, Jadon Sancho, Eric García, Jeremie Frimpong who has just been to the World Cup with Holland.
“Honestly, our group was a joke. Felix Nmecha, Taylor Harwood-Bellis who is at Burnley with Vincent Kompany, Ian Poveda, Rabbi Matondo, Ellis Simms. We used to absolutely smash teams.”
Easy to imagine. But while stories of Sancho’s dribbling and Foden’s brilliance are fun, we are not here simply to chew the fat and look back on the good old days.
No, Corrigan is here, and has asked to meet, because he wants to talk about the other side of football, the one too many within the game would choose to ignore. He wants to speak about the dark days, the fear and the uncertainty, the pressures which are placed upon shoulders too young and too frail to cope.
He wants to talk about managers and coaches, the influence they have and the power they possess. Power which isn’t always, it has to be said, wielded fairly or in a player’s best interest.
He wants to talk about mental health and the struggles he has had, how the game he loved became the life he hated. He wants to talk about chasing the dream and being left with a reality that he couldn’t accept. About being 16, training alongside Bernardo Silva and Kevin De Bruyne and believing he’d be a Premier League player. About being 22 and playing for the Lobster in the cut-throat world of the Liverpool Sunday League.
He wants to talk about recovery, hitting the bottom and rising up. Finding happiness, internal and external. Letting go, if you like, of the baggage accumulated during a dozen years pursuing a career in the professional game.
His story is worth your time, I assure you, and it is one that so many who have spent time within pro football will be able to relate to. We hail the superstars and the success stories of this world, but there are far more Ryan Corrigans than there are Phil Fodens, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion, after two hours spent in the former’s company, that the sport can, and must, do more for those who don’t reach the promised land.
Early days
Corrigan’s story begins in Fazakerley, Liverpool, three miles or so from Anfield and Goodison Park.
He grew up a Red, and one of his earliest teams was Croxteth Park, the same amateur side for which Trent Alexander-Arnold once turned out. Corrigan’s teammates included both Gordon and Abdi Sharif, an FA Youth Cup winning midfielder with Liverpool, who now plays for Wigan Athletic in the Championship.
Croxteth Park were run by Ian Barrigan and Steve Gorst, both of whom worked for Liverpool’s academy. Gorst still does, in fact, operating as the head of pre-academy recruitment, while Barrigan left the club last January after 25 years in which he played a huge role in the rise of players such as Alexander-Arnold.
Corrigan, a tall, imposing left-back, was invited to train at Kirkby, featuring alongside the likes of Jones and Neco Williams when he did.
“At the same time, I was going to Everton and Blackburn as well,” he says now. “Then when I got to eight, it was decision time.
“I’m a Liverpool supporter, my whole family is, but the one that felt right was Everton. I felt at home there, so I signed there.”
There he remained for more than five years, progressing well. He remembers Kevin Sheedy and Duncan Ferguson, two Blues legends, taking a shine to him immediately. “Maybe it was a left footed thing!” he laughs, recounting an experience that most Evertonians would have paid for.
“I remember at the end of one session, the boys were doing a cool down and Kev was just feeding me balls to whip in for Big Dunc to head in,” he says. “Twenty minutes it went on, the three left footers. Sheedy, Ferguson and me. It was surreal.”
At 14, and having established himself as one of the best in his age group, Corrigan became aware that Manchester City were sniffing round. He ummed and aahed, checked out the facilities at the Etihad Campus and, on the back of a few unsatisfactory training sessions with Everton, made the call to move.
It got messy, and as he reflects now he realises it cost him a fair few relationships. “I regret it now,” he says. “I lost mates doing it.”
‘Yeah, that’s Sanch!’
At City, he found a group of players that, with all due respect to Everton, were operating at a higher level. Nmecha, Frimpong and García were in his group, along with Simms and Poveda. Foden and Sancho were a year above, with Harwood-Bellis and Cole Palmer a year below.
“We’d all train together,” he says. “I remember going in in the summer, and everyone was talking about ‘Sanch’. They’d say ‘you’re OK, he’s on the left today!’
“I hadn’t really heard of him, but the first time he got the ball he sat down three or four fellas and scored, walked away with this kind of strut, and everyone was like ‘yeah, that’s Sanch!’
“It was another level. You know when you go in and you think ‘I’m a decent player and I can handle myself’, but then it’s just….wow! The level of training, the way they zip the ball, how intense it was. It was scary. I felt like ‘I’ve got a lot of work to do here’, but I got on well with the lads and I got stuck in. It probably took me a year to properly bed in.”
Corrigan attended St Bede’s College, a private school linked to the club, and enjoyed it. He and Bobby Duncan, once of Liverpool’s academy and another whose story is worth hearing, would be chauffeured to and from Merseyside each day.
By the 2017-18 season he was starting to get opportunities to train with the first team, with Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta, then City’s assistant, and alongside the likes of De Bruyne, David Silva, Sergio Agüero and Raheem Sterling.
He remembers one session in particular, prior to the Champions League quarter-final first leg with Liverpool in March 2018. He was in the ‘opposition XI’ that day, asked to be Andy Robertson as Guardiola sought to try out his matchday tactics.
“I was up against Kyle Walker and Raheem,” he says. “We got told to press how Liverpool press, and I remember Kyle speaking to Sterling and saying ‘bro, this is never going to fucking work against Liverpool, Mané and Salah are too quick!’
“He’s looked at me and gone ‘Ryan, you’re a Scouser, is this going to work?’ I didn’t say anything, but he was right. I think it was Bernardo and somebody else pressing, and even they were getting a sniff and winning the ball.
“The next night I was in the stands at Anfield watching it unfold. Everyone was nervous about City, but I knew they were worried. I’d seen the fear in the players’ eyes the day before.
“And if you remember that first half, Liverpool were all over them. It was 3-0 at half time and everything the City lads were worried about, happened.”
Corrigan puffs his cheeks out as he runs through some of the things he saw. Agüero’s finishing, De Bruyne’s passing, the speed of Walker and Sterling or the genius of Silva.
The best player he ever saw, though? That might surprise you.
“Mikel Arteta, man!” he grins. “I still say to people now when they ask who the best player I ever played with was, it was him. In training, he was the best by a mile.
“There’d be a small-sided game and Arteta’s team would be 4-0 up, and rather than swapping anyone else - Aguero or Bernardo or De Bruyne - Pep would swap Mikel to the other team! And they ended up coming back!
“I don’t think people realise how good he was. You look back now and think ‘imagine how good he must have been in his peak?!’”
Moving on
Corrigan had gone to City with his eyes open, knowing that finding a route to the first-team would be difficult, nigh-on impossible even.
But he also believed that the coaching he would receive, and the attention which City academy games receive, would stand him in good stead for wherever his career took him thereafter.
That looked like it would be the case when, in January 2019, the opportunity to move on arrived. Brentford, Norwich City and Stoke City all came in for him. All offered him the shot at a senior career.
He chose Stoke, who were managed at the time by Nathan Jones, recently sacked by Southampton. They gave him a three-and-a-half year contract with the option of an extra year. He would, according to the technical director, Mark Cartwright, be groomed to take over from Erik Pieters as the Potters’ left-back in the coming months and years.
“It was music to my ears,” Corrigan says. “Stoke were, and still are, a sleeping giant. They’re a Premier League club in many ways, so when they were telling me that, I was listening.”
Quickly, though, that early optimism faded. Within months, Cartwright had left his role. Gareth Jennings, the academy director who had recommended Corrigan’s signing, went too. Soon after, Jones was sacked.
“That’s everyone who had backed me at the club, gone!” Corrigan says, ruefully.
Michael O’Neill was the new manager, while Andy Cousins, a scout Corrigan knew from City, joined the backroom staff.
“I remember seeing Andy in the canteen and he told me I’d be in the first team soon,” Corrigan says. “They were just trying to offload a few big hitters and blah, blah, blah.
“Then we had the Covid year and everything changed. I still struggle to get my head around it, to be honest.”
‘Your face doesn’t fit’
This is where the story turns dark. This is the part Corrigan really wants to speak about, even if it isn’t easy. This is the part where football starts to cover itself not in glory, but something entirely different.
Corrigan, remember, is 19 at this point, a year into a three-and-a-half year deal. He had set up 14 goals in his first full season with Stoke’s U23 side, and returned to the club ahead of the 2020-21 campaign expecting to kick on.
And then?
“Everything was going fine. I felt good, in tip top condition, and I remember them asking to see me in the office at 2pm one Friday,” he says.
“I genuinely thought it was to tell me about a potential loan deal. I went in and Michael O’Neill sat me down. He said ‘look Ryan, there’s two weeks of the window left, I think you should try and find a club’
“They didn’t want me. It was the 18th of September, the day before my birthday. They said the club was going in a different direction and that was that. They said it was nothing to do with football, it was my personality around the club. My face didn’t fit.”
Corrigan was stunned. He thought of himself as a strong enough character, a bit of a joker, but far from a troublemaker. He got on with the coaches and with his teammates, he thought. Why this?
Quickly, his mind drifted to an incident a couple of weeks earlier, during a pre-season friendly for the U23s.
“Ryan Shawcross was playing, the club captain,” he remembers. “We were 1-0 down late on, and we got a corner. A lad went over to take it, and I saw there was a short corner on. He’s played me in, I’ve zipped it across the six-yard box and it got cleared. Pretty much straight after, the ref blew his whistle.
“At the end of the game, the manager was grilling the other lad asking why he’d taken the short corner. I stood up and said I asked for it, because it was on.
“I remember Shawcross going mad saying ‘it’s fucking laughable’. I’ve said something back, and I remember him saying, I don’t know where it came from, ‘you’re always fucking chirping back, no wonder everyone upstairs thinks you’re a c*nt’. The club captain just came for me in the middle of the dressing room. I just had to take it.
“On the Monday I got pulled in, and they said forget about it. Shawcross never spoke to me again, which I thought was shitty Then 10 days later, I get told my face doesn’t fit. That to me doesn’t make sense.”
The fall
Little did he know, however, but his nightmare was just beginning. The next year, he says, took him to places he never wishes to return.
“If a club says to you ‘we don’t think you’re good enough’ or ‘you’re too slow’, you can sort of deal with that, right?” he says. “You can work harder, do extra training, prove them wrong.
“But they were basically saying ‘we don’t like you as a person’. What can you do about that? Nothing. I can’t change who I am. I can’t make people like me.”
Having failed to secure a new club, Corrigan soon found himself in the kind of situation which will be all-too-familiar to players of a certain level. “In the bomb squad,” they call it, made to train alone, away from the main group, and treated as an outsider, a problem.
“It was exile,” he says. “I couldn’t play games, couldn’t train with the team. They wanted me gone, there and then.
“They’d tell me they wanted me in at 8.30am so I could do my running alone with the sport scientist. Then I’d get in at 8.30 and they’d say ‘no, we wanted you in at 2’. They’d make me wait until 2, just to do half an hour of running.
“There’d be snide comments from the staff. ‘Not saying good morning today?’ or ‘in one of your moods again?’ I felt they were trying to get me to react.
“None of the senior players came and spoke to me. I remember Kevin Russell, the U23s manager, came over to me one day and said ‘it must be a ballache all this, have you never thought of just knocking on the door and asking for your money?’ I told him where to go.”
Corrigan stuck it out until the summer of 2021, when he was released by mutual consent. But by that point, he was at a low ebb, drinking heavily, gambling on a daily basis and watching a once-promising career slip away.
“I completely fell out of love with football,” he says. “What happened with Stoke changed everything for me. It was months and months of suffering with regards to my mental health. It damaged me, it damaged my family, it damaged my relationships.
“I lost my ex-girlfriend because I changed as a person. I didn’t want to go out, I couldn’t talk about it, I didn’t want to do anything. I must have been horrible to be around. I was gambling, drinking too much. I was bored and had no self esteem. And I was only 21 years old.”
Corrigan says he “spiralled for a year” after leaving Stoke, and insists nobody from the club ever checked it to see how he was doing. He played briefly for Southport in the National League North, and turned out for City of Liverpool in the Northern Premier League, but it wasn’t until an unexpected opportunity to work as a one-to-one mentor in a school arose that he began to feel the fog lifting.
“I absolutely adore it,” he says. “I love the kids, love seeing their faces. I love doing sports with them. I’m doing my coaching badges alongside it all. This is me now.
“It sounds cliche, but I don’t want anyone to feel the way I did at Stoke. Excluded. Alone. If I see a kid having a tough time, I feel like I have the skills and the experience to relate to them and help them. And I love that.”
Still, it must jar to see Foden doing what he does, to see peers from City and Everton enjoying success in the Premier League, Football League and beyond?
“Have I underachieved? Massively,” he says. “I feel that. And yes I could have done things differently and better, no question, but I also feel like it was taken away from me. I needed guidance and support and I never got it.
“The club didn’t see me as a human, but as an object. They didn’t give me the best chance of having a career. And someone who wasn’t as strong emotionally as me, they might have really struggled. It’s no way to treat a person. I just hope they learn from it, and that by telling my story I can help others who might find themselves in a similar position.”
With that, our time is up. A rollercoaster couple of hours, we both agree, but necessary and cathartic too.
One suspects that similar stories could be told by countless other young men and women who have been chewed up and spat out by this supposedly ‘beautiful’ game. His is by no means a lone case. There will be others, this week and next week, next month and next year.
And doesn’t that just tell you everything?
Hope Ryan goes on to success, he's made a good start to recovering. Interesting article, well written - it's important to see all aspects of the game. As Clancy said in his comment it's why Trent needs to be heard on the subject.
Good read ,sorry to hear football has treated him badly.
I’m happy to hear is recovering to be a better person now
Good luck Ryan