Careers Advice

“When I grow up, I want to play football for Manchester United!”

For an eight year old boy growing up in rural Lincolnshire in the 1970s it seemed like an honest and rational response to an impossible question. No one else at my school wanted to play football for Manchester United. Leeds, maybe. Liverpool, definitely. Other kids said they wanted to be firemen, soldiers, doctors, and nurses. More of that later. Maybe their parents were firemen? Or maybe not. I didn’t know what my parents were. My dad went out before I got up every morning, and came home after I went to bed. At weekends, he told me stories about George Best, Denis Law (his favourite), Bobby Charlton, and the Busby Babes. About Manchester United and how they had the best team and had the best players. Not any more. That was all before my time. I was born in the year United had won the League for the last time, the year before they went on to win the European Cup. The Glory Days. Now, in my time, United were in Division Two (although I didn’t understand what that meant at the time). What I did understand was that I got to see highlights on Yorkshire TV occasionally, with a young and annoying Martin Tyler commentating on matches against the likes of ‘local’ teams Hull City, Sheffield Wednesday and York City. United were good that season. Stuart Pearson was my favourite then. Stocky and powerful, he played with the passion that I came to expect from United players. He was never the best, but he scored goals and looked like he meant it. I meant it when I said I wanted to be a footballer.

“Think of something realistic,” I was told.

“You’ll never make it.”

“Concentrate on your studies.”

I couldn’t wait to prove them wrong.

I got in to the school team. In games lessons and playtime, I was a stocky and powerful centre forward who scored goals. Our first proper match was against another village school.

Five years later, in big school, I’d had my chips pissed on, but I still wanted to make it. I wrote to East Stirlingshire Football Club (just before a young Alex Ferguson took charge) offering my services. I got a polite rejection letter back.

No one ever told me why. I was too upset to ask.

Later, in Art class, I put together a morbid collage of war and that terrible question in cut-out newspaper headline letters:

“Why?”

“Don’t be so childish!” the teacher scolded me when he woke from his alcoholic stupor.

Well, pardon me. I was a child. Surely I was allowed to ask, and expect an adult answer?

So instead, I told them I wanted to join the Army. Not because I wanted to, but because that seemed to keep them happy.

Later still, when approaching school leaving age, after filling in countless forms asking me what I liked doing and what I was good at, I was told by a ‘careers advisor’ to study chemical or electrical engineering at university. I didn’t know what they were or why they’d been chosen for me. I resolved to go on the dole.

(Has careers guidance gone off the rails?. Was it ever on the rails?)