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EPL Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Jordan Campbell / The Athletic; Jamie Mitchell Wilma needs no encouragement to fetch the scrapbook. Its burgundy spine wore out many years ago, so layer on layer of tape tries desperately to cradle over 60 pages of newspaper cuttings documenting every word ever published about her son, Jamie Mitchell. It is a timeline of his triumphs. The wonderkid hyped alongside Barry Ferguson and Charlie Miller at Rangers Boys’ Club. The day he signed an eight-year deal at top-flight side Norwich City in 1990. His heroics in Europe’s biggest youth tournament in Belfast. Over 300 hundred senior appearances at Scarborough, Clyde and Partick Thistle. Five player-of-the-year awards. Advertisement Mitchell’s achievements are a source of pride for his parents. But there were moments in his career that did not make the press cuttings. Moments he did not share with anyone. Behind the headlines and adulation lay years of dealing with anxiety, prompted by an episode that caused such deep shame it followed Mitchell, now 49, his entire life. “They should have been the best days of my life, having a laugh with my mates and playing football all day, ” Mitchell tells The Athletic. “I gave that impression a lot of the time, but I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t. I don’t look back at those years between 14 and 17 with any fondness. “The experiences were difficult and shaped my confidence, identity and how I saw myself. ” A 12-year-old Mitchell looked Walter Smith in the eye and told him that he was choosing Norwich City over his boyhood club Rangers. Norwich’s head of youth, Gordon Bennett, had driven all the way to Glasgow to meet his parents. He told Mitchell he was the best young player he had ever seen. Norwich offered a seven-year deal, guaranteeing a year as a professional player. They arranged a job for his dad and offered his parents a house at no cost, allowing them to choose from a brochure of 25 properties. Every one felt like a mansion to a working-class family from Glasgow. Despite his diminutive frame, Mitchell’s technical brilliance allowed him to excel. He had no doubts he had made the right choice. It was scary making such a big move but Mitchell wanted to be a footballer. That was all he thought about. His talent spoke for itself but anytime he entered the dressing room he went into his shell. When he turned 16 he entered his two-year apprenticeship. He was now mixing with famous players and felt overwhelmed. Norwich finished third, behind Manchester United and Aston Villa in 1992-93, the first season in which the top flight had been re-branded as the Premier League. The experience of standing up to announce his name and city of birth to this group was nerve-wracking. It was physically intimidating: he was 5ft 2in and undergoing tests to discover whether he was going to grow to a height that would increase his chance of making it as a professional. Advertisement “I was aware I was miles behind the rest in terms of physique and body. My voice hadn’t broken yet. I looked about 10 or 11, ” says Mitchell. The first-team players knew that the apprentices were skint, earning £29 a week. Some of the kinder ones would give a Christmas tip if the apprentices did a good job cleaning their boots but others, basking in the new money of the Premier League, preferred to peacock. “There were occasions when £50 notes would be flashed, ” says Mitchell. “I would have to go and get them money from the bank and check how many zeros there were. That’s the way you were treated as an apprentice. I felt humiliated by the bravado. I don’t think players knew the impact they had. ” Mitchell could cope with some of those boyish games, but when he was called up to the reserve team, he struggled with having to shower alongside older players every day when he had not yet been through puberty. “I didn’t want to be naked in front of them, ” he says. “You get used to people walking around with nothing on as it’s how it would have been at clubs around the country but I hadn’t matured and it was badly impacting me. “It was always on my mind. I was dying to be like the rest of them. I didn’t want to go in some days and there was no one I could speak to at the club about it. “I broke down one night and told my dad. He said he’d go and speak to the club. The advice was just to deal with it and that one day I’d be fine. But I’d been carrying that for a long time by this point. There was a lot of pressure on me. My parents had moved down, I needed to make it for them. I couldn’t let my personality impact me or show that I can’t be in a dressing room with guys. I couldn’t show any sign of weakness. “I felt I hadn’t proven myself as a man. That’s it in a nutshell. I wish I had had the bravery to say what I’m saying now. They had spent nearly half a million quid on me, so surely you want to give me the best opportunity to make it? ” Advertisement When Mitchell first started training with the first team he was the same age as Arsenal’s Max Dowman is now. Dowman, just like Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri before him, is not permitted to get changed in the same dressing room as the Arsenal first-team due to safeguarding rules. There were no such protections in the 1990s. By this stage, Mitchell was profoundly uncomfortable. Then things got worse: in the lead up to Christmas 1994, there were whispers about having to perform a humiliating act on the final day of training before everyone split up for the Christmas break. “I was pals with boys at school rather than my team-mates so I didn’t usually know the rumour mill, ” says Mitchell. “I was shy, so I just sat waiting for training. But I remember hearing about this for weeks. “I was panicking every day about it. I was trying to think of all the things I could say not to do it. There were rumours that if you don’t do it you would be made to run around the pitch naked in the snow. Some of the boys were saying we would get a lot of money after it. It will be two minutes and it will be over. ” Mitchell had just turned 18 in November, but was still behind his peers in his physical maturity. They had to team up in groups of threes, stripped of their clothes, and run into the first-team dressing room. Around 25 senior players, plus the coaching staff and club photographer, were waiting for them with their cameras at the ready. They then had to clamber up on the medicine table, perform a Christmas carol while being sprayed with, among other things, condiments, flour and ice water. The day came and Mitchell knew he had to somehow get through it. He does not know who took the picture but, 30 years later, the polaroid that captures the moment still transports him back to that changing room, back to that scared little boy. “I got in a zone where I pretended no one was there: ‘I need to get it done and if they laugh or take the piss then I will deal with the repercussions after’, ” he says. Advertisement “I could not not do it for fear of how it would look. ‘If he can’t do that how is he going to have the character and resilience to be a footballer in a cut-throat environment? ’. All these things were in my head. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was the song. Then they were squirting ketchup over us, throwing money at us. I tried to cover up in the shower. “They were the worst minutes in my life. I had to stand in front of my peers and coaches, get sprayed and then run through a shower. Why? Because it’s Christmas. Or to earn our tips. ” The way the changing room was designed, Mitchell had to run through the galley-style showers to wash the mess off. He was in a daze. “I did not pick up a single note. I got out of there as quickly as I could. ” It is only in recent years that Mitchell has come to terms with the trauma. His mind still wanders to it occasionally, however, and it set the precedent for how he coped emotionally with major events as an adult. “I didn’t break down, but I was depressed during those years at Norwich. I never went out. School, home, computer. It stunted my personality but I don’t blame Norwich or any of the lads for it. I just put it to the back of my head and numbed myself. I have done the same ever since with anything that made me feel a similar way. “I want to highlight that there will be lots of boys like me throughout the country. I feel privileged to say I came through this. It was awful. There should be steps in place to stop that sort of thing now. Clubs should be looking out more for these signs. ” Mitchell is one of multiple players The Athletic has spoken to who recall another apprentice not returning to the club after that day. Humiliation rituals were driving players away from the game. One of the players who endured the ritual humiliation alongside Mitchell, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says it was symbolic of the power imbalance between first-team players and apprentices. Advertisement “When you were a YTS we knew you were the lowest of the low. If someone asked for tea, you made it. If someone said to clean the shit in the toilet, you did it. You spent hours cleaning boots. You had to earn your stripes. “But I wasn’t in the same mindset as Jamie thinking about my body. I was in the best shape of my life and physically developed and didn’t notice if he had gone through puberty, but I can understand why that affected him so much, ” he says. “It happened in the final year at Trowse (the old training ground), which was old school. The next year we moved to a new state-of-the-art training centre and the ethos of what being an apprentice meant changed. We didn’t have to do those jobs. We went up in class. All those things were left behind. ” His former Norwich team-mate Josh Carus, now a firefighter, is one of several who support Mitchell’s account and back the need for his new initiative. “It was designed to make boys feel small, ” Carus says. “Mitch had much more ability than most of us, including some of the first team players, so he was respected. It was common how YTS boys were treated then, like locking people in cars, sending them to shops just to embarrass them. But that was extreme, that was a different level. To know he felt that insecure and that he felt he wouldn’t be accepted makes me sad. It doesn’t sit right with me. “I never encouraged my son to go into football because I didn’t want him to be near that world with such a high potential to be let down, damaged and feel worthless. It makes a few but breaks hundreds of thousands. ” When Norwich City were made aware of Mitchell’s account of what happened they sent a statement in which they said they “continue to work tirelessly to prioritise player welfare. Our Safer Sport department has embedded safeguarding and player care at the heart of the academy experience. We are regularly inspected in this area by regulatory bodies and meet strict standards of professional practice. Advertisement “All Academy staff receive significant training in this area, including the threat from maltreatment and bullying. Our industry-leading alumni programme provides a three-year support programme for all released players from over 12 years of age. ” Those scarring years as a scholar and apprentice at Norwich are part of the motivation behind Mitchell’s new venture, Edge Futures. The organisation aims to design bespoke digital badge qualifications in conjunction with a range of private companies that will offer the 99 per cent of youngsters released from British academies alternative employment pathways. Formed in partnership with Dr Clare Daly, a director in educational psychology at the University of Strathclyde, Motherwell are the first club to pilot the service. One of the strategies they hope will help players navigate their academy journeys is a digital scrapbook, inspired by Mitchell’s old-school version. It will serve as a portfolio in which they can keep every match report, picture and achievement but will feature diary prompts that will screen for negative self-talk. It is a resource Mitchell believes would have helped him navigate his troubles in East Anglia, rather than suffer in silence. It would, he thinks, have helped him deal with how rudderless he felt when football, twice, left him isolated without an education to fall back on. The first came as a 19-year-old at Norwich in 1996. Mitchell had felt the culture become less toxic after Martin O’Neill arrived the year prior and he was performing well for the reserve team. Only he and Danny Mills had made it to this stage from the group he joined seven years earlier and he was being asked to train with the first team with increasing regularity. Crucially, his body had fully developed by this point. “It was such a good feeling. I ran through to my mum shouting, ‘I have a hair under my armpit, look! I can grow a beard! ’. I had thought I wasn’t normal until then. ” Advertisement When Gary Megson took over later that year, Mitchell thought he was on the verge of a breakthrough. They had such a good rapport that some first-team players nicknamed him ‘the manager’s son’. So he was astonished when Megson informed him he was being released. His team-mates were shocked too. They assumed he was nailed on for a long-term deal. But the club was struggling financially and his parents were living in a house that the club had to sell. They could not wait on him to develop physically. Having had the guarantee of becoming a professional footballer since the age of 14, his schoolwork had fallen by the wayside. “One day a week we’d go to college in our tracksuits and it was a free-for-all. It was a leisure and tourism qualification. It wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. There was nothing we could do with it. ” After being released by Norwich he joined Scarborough in what was then the Third Division (now League Two) and managed to build a career in which he played for Partick Thistle in the top flight of Scottish football in the early 2000s, facing up against Mikel Arteta of Rangers and Henrik Larsson of Celtic. But his career ended prematurely when persistent groin problems eventually resulted in the diagnosis of a degenerative right side. “I couldn’t open up my foot or run properly. They told me to retire straight away, but I had just signed a new deal and had three years left. I continued to play and just not train but I knew I was making it worse. The pain was just too much and I knew I had to stop. It was game over. The physio saw me for 10 minutes and said it was the right thing for my quality of life. ” Mitchell had delayed the inevitable by a year, but on that Thursday afternoon in 2005, at the age of 29, he was officially an ex-footballer. Mitchell was confronted with the same cliff-edge he had faced in 1996 when released by Norwich. Only, this time, he had a wife, children and a mortgage. Advertisement “I was lost. For six months I woke up every day thinking, ‘What am I going to do, what am I going to do? ’. I fell out of love with the game and wanted to get away from it. ” After building a career in business and working across commercial partnerships in sport, Mitchell began to see the gap from both sides for young people with no pathway, and industries crying out for resilient, coachable talent. “That’s why I want to change the outcomes of so many boys who are left high and dry, ” says Mitchell. Two in three employers say real-world skills like teamwork, resilience, and communication matter more than academic grades, so these are all things that are part of being a footballer. But often they don’t know they have these skills and two out of three employers reject candidates simply because they cannot explain their strengths. “We’re going to capture those transferable skills and create pathways to employment across different sectors. ” They are in discussions with several nationwide companies about funding their own digital badge pathways, providing the content that Edge will translate into online recognisable qualifications at a far lower cost than apprenticeships. “We want to be the leading platform for companies wishing to have access to the pool of athlete talent, ” says Daly. “There is a societal point too. Rather than the companies having to start from scratch at 18 when they leave school, the academy players will have already done the digital badges which shows they have an interest in pursuing a job at the end of it. ”

Edge Futures are using the Motherwell experience to shape the platform with plans to roll out to academies across the UK. The ambition is to ensure that young players do not end up on the scrapheap, but leave the game armed with their own scrapbook of skills and qualifications. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Jordan Campbell is a football writer for The Athletic, who regularly covers Manchester City. In 2024, he was named in the 30 to Watch journalism awards. He previously covered Glasgow Rangers and was twice nominated for Young Journalist of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards. Follow Jordan on Twitter @Jordan C1107