Academy Dreams: Leeds United – Q&A with Joe Gelhardt and Sam Greenwood - The Athletic 23/9/22

By Phil Hay

“The harsh reality,” Vinnie Jones says, “is that only a tiny bunch will make it.”

And there it is; the truth of academy football which has to be uttered once in a while.

Jones is the narrator of Leeds United’s new documentary, Academy Dreams, and episode one does not wait long to tackle the elephant in the room. “It might not work out,” agrees centre-back Charlie Cresswell. But then again, it just might.

Academy Dreams, a six-part series going behind the scenes of last season’s under-21 crop at Leeds, is released on Friday. It follows the lives and emotions of the players about whom so much is always written; the players who cannot say for certain if a career in the game is waiting for them but go after the carrot in front of them with the honest belief that they can. James Milner pops up in the early scenes and the Thorp Arch academy, through 100 years, will have no better poster boy.

Leeds hold the reputation and track record of a club where youth development is not a dead end. Their productivity over many seasons makes them a good subject for an academy documentary, capturing the yin and yang between the camaraderie of the under-21s squad and the ruthlessness of the industry. Kalvin Phillips is in the thick of the footage, another example of what happens when everything goes right.

To mark the release of Academy Dreams on Amazon Prime, The Athletic sat down for a quickfire Q&A with two of the main faces in the series, Joe Gelhardt and Sam Greenwood — a pair of gifted forwards affectionately described by Cresswell last weekend as “the two doughnuts”. Gelhardt and Greenwood were close friends before both signed for Leeds in the same summer of 2020. And pursuing their ambition together has only made them closer.

Phil Hay: You two are interesting because you go back a long way, quite a long way before Leeds. What was the story?

Joe Gelhardt: When we were young we both played for England together. We went to our first camp in the under-15s and we were friends ever since. We’d always speak, even away from the camps, so it was a bit mad when we both joined this club at the same time.

Sam Greenwood: We always shared a room. We just clicked straight away and we’ve been close since then. Coming here, at exactly the same time, like Joe says, it was mad. It all goes back to England, basically.

Hay: Were you competing for the same shirt with England then? Because you don’t necessarily play in the same position but you’re not far off either…

Gelhardt: We were both strikers with England.

Greenwood: Yeah, we both were so he’d have times when he was playing in front of me and I’d have times when I’d be playing over him. But we never really had that jealousy you sometimes get.

Gelhardt: It was healthy competition. I was happy when he scored and he was happy when I scored. And anyway, it wasn’t like one was playing 90 minutes. We come off after 60 or go on for 30, so we were both getting game time. For different games, it was all about whoever suited it better.

Hay: That will change throughout your career, won’t it? You’ll have some players where them being ahead of you frustrates you or where it’s harder to be happy for them. But with some people, you can cope with that better?

Greenwood: We pushed each other. We were in it together, which is how it should be. We made each other better, I felt, whenever we were away.

Hay: Who helped who settle in at Leeds, given that you landed a few weeks apart?

Gelhardt: I was here first, wasn’t I?

Greenwood: He was, so it was him who introduced me to the other lads. They’re a great group so we were both able to settle in really quickly.

Gelhardt: It was dead welcoming here, even with the first-team lads. We joined in with ’23s first so we got to know them but then we’d train with the first team on other days and they didn’t treat us like young ‘uns. They treated us like we were first-team players — not so much by what they did in training but in the way they spoke to us. It was just normal.

Hay: What about friendships like yours in an academy? How important is that? People think it’s an amazing lifestyle, an amazing opportunity to have, but it’s wildly competitive in academies and, I guess, a bit cutthroat from time to time.

Greenwood: It can be tough. You go through tough times, the frustrations of not playing and stuff like that. It’s important to have people who you’re close to, who you can talk to and who help you get through it. It’s a massive thing for me.

Gelhardt: Sometimes people just see the lifestyle of footballers but not what they go through. You’re not getting picked or you’re getting abused on social media if you’re not playing so well. People forget that we’re humans sometimes and we have feelings. It’s part of the job, though. You get on with it.

Hay: Some bits of the documentary are funny, like Max Dean getting sunburned on a sunbed, but then it gets serious very quickly. With the click of the fingers, you’ve got Mark Jackson shouting at you in the changing room. It must swing quite a lot from fun to not so much?

Gelhardt: Of course. In the changing room, that hour before training we can be ourselves. As soon as you step on the pitch, you’re there to work, with Jacko shouting sometimes. It happens when we don’t play well and that’s when it becomes about working a bit harder and less joking about.

Hay: Did you enjoy last season though, genuinely? The under-23s went down and it was very tough for the first team. At the same time, both of you were breaking through.

Gelhardt: I liked the thrill of it, yeah. We weren’t safe and everyone was nervous, which is normal. But we didn’t show it. Every day we came in with high spirits and the worst thing you could do is mope about or be sad about it. It was still a good place to be around and we fought through it.

Greenwood: I liked the challenge, too. We didn’t play every minute for the ’23s but when we did, it meant you had to be on your best performance. I liked the challenge of trying to stay up and when we stepped down, because the ’23s were struggling too, there was the challenge of being a role model to the other lads, trying my best to get us out of it. It can be frustrating when you know you’re only going to play 45 minutes for the ’23s. You can only try your best in the time you’ve got to make an impact.

Gelhardt: That was the hardest part. We weren’t playing many minutes at all. Like Sam said, you’d have maybe 45 minutes for the ’23s and then 10 for the first team. It’s hard to keep your fitness up, your match fitness. You can run all you want but when you don’t have match sharpness, you’re not going to be at your best. For me, that was the most difficult part of the season. Every time I went down to the ’23s, it was doing my head in that we were in a relegation battle as well — the first team and the ’23s, it was both important.

Greenwood: It was like we were in both!

Hay: Vinnie Jones says in the first episode that only a small percentage of academy players will make it in the end. Do you ever think about that?

Gelhardt: Anything can happen with injuries and stuff. I feel lucky but I know that I’ve worked for it as well. It’s a bit of both. You need luck and you need hard work. I just appreciate what I’ve got.

Greenwood: It’s not (in my head) so much. I focus on what I’m doing day to day. I don’t look at those stats. I just look at my ability to keep going, pushing forward.

Hay: Joe, you’ve come from Wigan, and Sam, you came from Arsenal. What’s the transition been like and what’s the difference here? Sam, I remember someone saying that you hardly went out in London — that you went home to watch Sunderland’s youth team a lot when you had free time.

Greenwood: I just got on with my football down there. It was a massive difference moving from Sunderland to London, a totally different world. Coming from Arsenal to here, there isn’t too much difference but I get a lot more opportunities here. I wasn’t as close to the first team at Arsenal as I am here. It’s been a good decision for me.

Gelhardt: The biggest change for me was the quality. Wigan were in the Championship when I left, we’d just got relegated, so my first few sessions here I was like “wow!” Even just the little things, like passes being crisp and proper. Then there was the physicality of Premier League fitness, too, the speed of it. That was hard to adapt to. I had to change everything to try to get used to it.

Hay: Finally, tell me how the last day was at Brentford last season? Particularly you, Sam. When did you know you were playing in midfield and what did you think?

Greenwood: I got told a couple of days before and I got butterflies. But on the day, during the warm-up, I felt calm. I had the feeling that I wanted to show it was my time. I didn’t get too nervous. Sometimes I do before playing for the first team but in that game, I felt quite relaxed even though the situation was massive. I didn’t overthink it.

Gelhardt: That would be the worst thing you could do. Treat it as a normal game and then you’ll do the things that got you in the (team) in the first place. You can’t be that bad if you’re playing in the Premier League. I was confident because I knew what we had in the dressing room. Sometimes I thought to myself, “How are we even in this situation with the team we’ve got?” We’d train with them every day and see the quality. Some games we were so unlucky. But when that game came, I knew we’d leave it all on the pitch.

Greenwood: And I think it’s one of the best days of our footballing careers so far, even though it was a bad situation. The feeling of doing it and playing with my mate as well, who I’ve been with since I was young…

Hay: …who scored the best volley he never scored (Gelhardt had a spectacular first-half finish ruled out for offside)!

Gelhardt: Ha, yeah!