And So, All right I'm here this week with Ryan Baldy who's ridden a new book called The Dream Factory, which is about youth football and a really deep dive

into the world of youth football. So Ryan, welcome to the show.

Thanks having me. I'd pleased to be here.

Great. So I guess you opened the book with a sort of anecdote from Tony Weeland, a long time United coach who talks about his sort of passion, deep passion for the game,

and especially youth football and sort of this pastoral sense

he has of need to look after the younger players.

I guess that's my first question really the inspiration behind why you took on this project

and why you wanted to look at a kind of curious part of the football world.

That's exactly it, you kind of put your finger in there. It was like a general curiosity

I think a lot of fans will share. I think a lot of people know which clubs have a good

academy and which don't have have particularly productive academy based on

the number of players coming through to the first team but I don't think generally

many fans know what goes into that on a kind of deeper level. I was the same I just wanted to kind of know more about that. And yeah, that was the idea to go and explore it to try and get in into these places if I could. To be honest, I didn't think it would be possible. I thought it's quite a closed-off world or it leads to it seems to be from the outside.

Clubs keep their cars pretty close to their chest with what goes on behind academy doors.

I think because more often than not the stories that come out are negative.

So I think they probably just try to bat it away and

anything that does come out is from sort of club control media so I didn't think they'd let an

outsider in to go and have a nose around but fortunately I found that the people during the day-to-day

work the coaches the Academy managers,

and were really keen to kind of show their work and show the positive aspects of what they do.

And they're also really aware and cognizant of the negatives too and weren't shying away from those. I was able to go in and get a really

balanced view of Academy life. So I spent a couple of years going up and down the country.

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