As McClaren prepared his resignation and English football went into one of its periodic moments of self\u2011loathing, Burnham, Purnell and Scudamore used the anguish to plot a way out of the wilderness. \u201cPreviously, Richard had been of the mindset that youth development was down to the clubs and it wasn\u2019t for the Premier League to intervene,\u201d said another guest in the box. \u201cBut that game was a genuine Damascus moment for Richard and Andy Burnham and James Purnell were a big part of that post-match discussion. There was a lot of chat about what needed to be done and how to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Long story short, out of that discussion came the wholesale reform of the academy structure of English football, with the Premier League leading the way to create the elite player performance plan<\/a>. Although far from perfect, it was a step change in English football, allowing clubs more time with younger players on the pitch and the ability to recruit from a wider area. It has created the gold standard of English players coming through.<\/p>\n Not just England players, either: Germany\u2019s Jamal Musiala and France\u2019s Michael Olise were among the leading beneficiaries of a system redesigned to produce more creative players. Even if Thomas Tuchel has eschewed them, Phil Foden and Cole Palmer are academy poster boys, coming through at Manchester City, as is Morgan Rogers, who was at West Brom. Jude Bellingham came through Birmingham\u2019s Category B status academy and Harry Kane came through at Tottenham.<\/p>\n Andy Burnham, then minister for culture, media and sport, makes a speech at Anfield during the memorial service marking 2009\u2019s 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. He was drowned him out with calls for justice for those who died. Photograph: Reuters\/Alamy<\/p>\n That Burnham was there at its birth \u2013 though clearly it was Scudamore, the Football Association and the Premier\u00a0League\u2019s Ged Roddy who pushed the revolution through \u2013 speaks volumes about the depth to which Burnham gets football, even if his Everton top has become the equivalent of Keir Starmer\u2019s \u201cmy dad was a toolmaker\u201d trope.<\/p>\n Burnham was at the Villa Park FA Cup semi-final between Everton and Norwich in 1989 when news filtered through of the Hillsborough tragedy at the other tie between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.<\/p>\n That event has marked his life, from his teenager\u2019s perspective at the time to the occasion when he was repeatedly heckled and booed at Anfield at the 20th anniversary service<\/a> and interrupted by chants of \u201cJustice for the 96\u201d, because of perceived prevarication from the Labour government.<\/p>\n It was an extremely uncomfortable moment, though he recovered well, a skill set now evident in his communications. He has since said he has never felt more nervous than when addressing the crowd that day and the raw emotion he encountered there led to Burnham helping to create the Hillsborough Independent Panel. That excoriated several authorities<\/a> and led to several apologies for the disaster from the government, South Yorkshire police and the Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, whose apology was rejected by survivors\u2019 families.<\/p>\n It is also partly down to Burnham that football has ended up with an independent regulator<\/a>. The genesis of that goes back to the botched attempt by major Premier League clubs to form a breakaway European Super League <\/a>in April 2021 and the then prime minister Boris Johnson\u2019s threat to drop a \u201clegislative bomb<\/a>\u201d on the idea. Johnson appointed Dame Tracey Crouch to investigate football in the aftermath and she handily had all the detail prepared on how a regulator could work because, in October 2020, the former FA chair David Bernstein, along with Burnham and Gary Neville, had produced a report, Saving Our Beautiful Game, which called for a regulator and showed how it could\u00a0work.<\/p>\n
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