Who's your daddy?

Nepo babies come to football

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
Kalvin Phillips being subbed on for Erling Haaland, both wearing blue shirts due to some sort of administrative error

It’s not nepotism that puts Alfie Haaland’s son at the point of Manchester City’s deadly — although it was only painful against Illan Meslier — attack. Any footballer who looks like Erling, who thinks like Erling, who plays like Erling, would have the GDP price tag and the super world star reputation because he’s just built too different to resist. And he scores a lot. But would Erling Haaland be all of those things if he wasn’t Alf-Inge Haaland’s son? He’d celebrate against Leeds if he wasn’t born in Leeds, that we know. The rest is a question of how else he could have got it.

Nepotism babies were all the rage before Christmas, when New York magazine’s cover feature declared 2022 the ‘Year of the nepo baby‘. For twelve trending months, people had been googling the stars of their favourite movies and shows and finding out, with either irritation or pleasure, how many of them had famous forebears. ‘A short film called The Rightway — directed by Steven Spielberg’s daughter, starring Sean Penn’s son, and written by Stephen King’s son — spurred days of online controversy’, the article notes. Other controversies went in reverse, ‘millennials and Gen-Xers incredulous that someone had gotten to Judd Apatow through Maude Apatow’. Even if you don’t think nepo babies are controversial or bad, there’s been more of them around than there used to be back when Hollywood was young.

It’s a theme that can be carried across to football, with Haaland & Son the more impressive headliner than the shenanigans at Inter Miami, say, where club president David Beckham and head coach Phil Neville deny any favouritism towards young squad players Romeo Beckham and Harvey Neville. And Leeds United have enough names to make us wonder if we’re the most on-trend nepo baby club around. We’ve got Robin Koch, son of Kaiserslautern stalwart Harry. Leo Hjelde, son of Nottingham Forest’s Jon Olav. Charlie Cresswell is son of former Leeds striker Richard; he has a younger brother, Alfie, in our youth team. Our League One winger Seb Carole’s son, Keenan, plays for the Under-21s; and 1980s youth team hopeful Vince Brockie, who played alongside David Batty and Gary Speed, has a son, Devon, in our Under-16s. Archie and another kid brother, Harry, are carrying on the fine Gray dynasty begun by their great-uncle Eddie and grandad Frank, whose son Andy had two spells with Leeds, prodigal returns of two different kinds, before we switched our hopes to his sons.

What’s common among this excess of dads, especially Papas Haaland, Hjelde, Cresswell, Koch and Gray, is that while none of them were peak stars of football, they all had a place among the first generation of Premier League or close enough footballers who could retire comfortably in wealth. The change of the 1990s into the 2000s, when these guys were playing, was a change in the commercial promise of football and what it meant to become a retired professional.

If Charlie Cresswell had been born twenty years earlier he might have grown up as the son of a pub landlord, or an insurance salesman, or a postman, or whatever respectable post-playing career his father’s knees could have supported for the majority — far longer than football — of his working life. Instead his dad dabbled in academy coaching and administration jobs, running things for Leeds at Thorp Arch for a while, resisting speculative links to the job of managing York City. And as shown in a video clip of the two of them bickering in a cart, Richard has enjoyed the leisure time necessary to make his son into his serious rival at golf. He has also, crucially, had the time to take his sons to football practice, and to give them kickabouts with a former Premier League player — him — in the garden where he raised them since retiring in 2013.

The most astute takes on Hollywood’s nepo baby patterns apply to football this way, identifying that it’s not the name that is giving the children of actors or footballers a better than average chance, but the money. If Erling Haaland couldn’t kick straight, his dad’s name wouldn’t have been enough to get him a £50m transfer to Manchester City. But the reason he can kick so well is that, since birth, his father has been able to give him the access to training, and the time and resources to take everything from it, that Kalvin Phillips’ mum working two jobs never could. Lindsay and Alfie have in common that they both made their son’s careers the focus of their own careers. The difference is that Alfie, as a rich retired footballer with not much else he had to do, was much better resourced with time and money to make Erling into the best.

Kalvin and Erling both made it to the Premier League, and Phillips beat Haaland to the World Cup, so there is still more than one way to reach the top. But Phillips was a late entrant to an academy system that could, if the trickle of famous re-gens raised in leisure rises to a flood, become much harder for a kid from Wortley break into. Leeds already feels full o’sons, with its Koch, its Hjelde, its pairs of Cresswells and Grays. I dread to imagine how many children Erling Haaland might be capable of producing, but if one day there’s a Haaland Junior for every Academy age group at Manchester City, what aspirations will be left for the young strikers of Moss Side?

Football could be even more ready to be jammed up with rich kids than Hollywood. Hollywood takes in a grand spread of industries from films to music to fashion, and an aspect of the nepo baby storylines there is the breadth of occupations. Getting through the door can be enough, and for that, a parent need only be a movie studio accountant, not a leading star, as long as they were paid enough to bring their kids to the next level of access. Once the door is ajar, the number of attractive jobs a kid-with-backing can fall into is almost numberless — if acting doesn’t work out, they can try modelling, or singing, or just being paid to be famous on Instagram.

Football doesn’t work like that. His father was the most famous player on the planet, but Brooklyn Beckham didn’t make it through Arsenal’s academy, which is why he ended up modelling, publishing a book of blurry photographs of elephants in silhouette, and fronting an online cooking show. There are only eleven starting slots available at every Premier League club, and if a kid isn’t good enough to be a star, there’s not much else for them to do around the place. There’s not much enthusiasm on either side for giving an ex-player’s lad a job as kit-man, anyway. The boy’s been born a millionaire, so if he decides to follow his dad’s route to riches, it has got to be first team or nothing.

The problem is that those opportunities will always be few, but the number of kids from every walk of life dreaming of taking them never reduces. Football has always had a problem dealing with the teens its youth academies use up and discard along the way. Is there a plan for all the hopefuls who could be elbowed out onto the streets by the wealthy sons of wealthy ex-pros, using the advantages of their birth to reach the top, and only the top? Or for young fans, already made distant by ticket prices, who feel even less connected by learning that without a footballer dad of their own, they’ve a vastly reduced chance of becoming a footballer themselves, and even less in common with the players they watch?

To an extent this doesn’t matter. It even creates interest. Erling Haaland wouldn’t fascinate me if he wasn’t Alfie’s son. Robin Koch’s dad’s playing career is a mystery to most of us in Leeds, so I focus on the player here now. I doubt that Vince Brockie’s career — two games for Leeds, fifty-odd for Doncaster, fifty-odd for Hyde, coaching at Guiseley — gave his son any great wealth advantage, so hearing that Devon Brockie has been a standout in the Under-16s, called up to the Under-18s, gave me a twinge of excitement when I worked out he’s his dad’s lad. Googling player names, when I notice them for the first time on Match of the Day, is a fun pastime (I’ll save you one: Amario Cozier-Duberry, of Arsenal, is not Michael’s son).

And some families are born to the game. Leeds United would not be Leeds United without Eddie and Frank and Andy, and hopefully Archie and Harry, and I hope in the future for as many more as their family tree can bless us with. But dynasties used to be the exception, not the norm. In a way, it speaks to improved conditions that footballers of Eddie and Frank Gray’s era deserved but never got, as the game’s riches never used to make it to them. Once, sons would look at their fathers, sad in their post-euphoria era, agony in their joints, empty in their bank account, lost in their second careers, and declare a firm ‘no’ to following in their stud-steps onto a pitch. Football was a game to be taken up by naive dreamers who didn’t anticipate how cruel it would be. In a way that now feels shameful, this ugliness made the game more romantic. It also made rich the chairmen we hated, not the players we loved paying to see.

Nepo babies aren’t really new, and the current focus is just a trend, but the next generation is something to think about. The people we meet in the stands at football grounds have changed dramatically since 1992, since ticket prices went up and the game marketed itself to richer new fans to pay them. But most of the players’ stories remained tales of working class kids making good. And then, in the 2000s, very good. Football wasn’t attractive for rich people to play, until it worked out how to make the players rich. Now the moment when kids can look at a modern footballer and start dreaming that maybe, one day, they too will be offered a multi-million pound post-playing contract to be a roaming ambassador for a murderous regime, is the moment when football is pulling up its drawbridge and finding ways of keeping its ease and wealth for itself. Erling Haaland is a brilliant footballer with a fantastic dad. But the best thing is that someone with his background can play on a team with Kalvin Phillips, with his. ⬢

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