Young man seeks position at Old Trafford

Jami Puustinen's stint with Manchester United's Youth Academy could produce a rich dividend

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By Heikki Miettinen in Manchester
     
      Promising Finnish youth footballer Jami Puustinen well remembers the first time he encountered the Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Puustinen was taking part in a training camp for the Man Utd youth side in the late summer of 2003.
      Ferguson came over to chat to the Finnish teenager, then 16, and to ask him if he’d be interested in coming to United’s Academy.
      "Basically I only understood a word or two here and there. I had to give some kind of reply in order to make a polite impression", recalls Puustinen, now just turned 18, as we stroll through the vast spaces of the Trafford Centre shopping mall.
      Old Trafford, the 68,000-seat "Theatre of Dreams", is a few kilometres away from this January-sales paradise.
     
Eighteen months on from that first encounter, Puustinen’s ear picks up English appreciably better than it did, he speaks the language, and even life in Manchester is beginning to settle into a comfortable routine. He has also seen and met Ferguson - and his still sometimes impenetrable Glaswegian accent - since then.
      Jami Puustinen has in his pocket a relatively fresh professional contract, but he is continuing the steady maturation process of his career with the Youth Academy, a mix of going to school and football training.
      He has made a number of appearances for the Under-18s side, and a couple with the young Reserves squad in the Pontins Holiday League. He’s even scored a few goals. The Manchester Utd first team is nevertheless a distant dream somewhere on the far horizon.
     
Puustinen, who comes originally from Espoo, has so far trained on four or five occasions with the first team squad.
      The youth players have their own sessions on the other side of the fence, but at the same training complex at Carrington.
      "It was a great feeling when Ferguson came over and yelled out some names and we got to join the first team training", Puustinen says of his temporary hop onto the greener grass. The last time was just before Christmas.
     
Puustinen passed his driving test last autumn, and getting around is now a bit easier. At the weekends he often points the car north in the direction of Blackburn, where fellow-Finn Toni Kolehmainen, 16, is training on a youth contract. Visits from his parents also provide a change of programme.
      But how did he cope with the change of scene back at the beginning, in his first year at the Academy?
      Puustinen is now able to look back on those early weeks and dares to talk about his homesickness.
      "At the beginning it was a struggle, with all the changes going on - everything was new. I didn’t know anybody, and I had no friends to speak of", says Puustinen.
     
The Manchester United Academy is by no means a new establishment, nor is this the only club in the world that educates its junior prospects. The practice goes on in just about all strong footballing countries at large clubs. Few clubs, however, have the glamour to match that surrounding United.
      The current crop of pupils studying and training at the Academy come from six countries besides Britain: Denmark, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and Finland.
      The weekly routine features training on and off the pitch, a day and a half each week spent in schoolwork, and - if selected - a match in the U-18 FA Premier Academy League side or one of the other teams on Saturdays.
     
The youngster says that he would have got over the initial homesickness and general feeling-sorry-for-himself a good deal more quickly if his mother had accompanied him to Manchester.
      However, the club takes a diametrically-opposed view on this issue.
      "The United people argued on the basis of their experience over many years, and they said that they want players who are tough and independent", recalls Puustinen.
     
In theory, acceptance into the Man Utd Academy can be a route to the first-team sheet, but nobody is giving any guarantees.
      In fact Puustinen knows the statistical probabilities pretty well. In the course of the last decade, just three players have come up through the ranks in this way and established a place in the Old Trafford dressing-room.
     
Puustinen is a striker, and of the Premiership side’s eight first-string strikers, not one is a graduate of the club’s own Academy. Wayne Rooney, 19, joined recently from Everton, in neighbouring Liverpool.
      Despite his youth, Rooney was already a star on the world footballing stage, but Puustinen prefers not to make comparisons.
      "Every player is different, and I don’t want to compare myself with megastars. Besides, I’m still only a lad."
     
For the United Premiership side, success is everything. The club will go out into the transfer market and buy a suitable player if the Academy does not shape the finished article from the young talent in its care. Puustinen knows this well enough, but he does not let it trouble him.
      "Right now I’m just going to go as far as I can. I’m not planning to go back to Finland anytime yet. I’ll keep on trying as long as there’s even a small chance."
     
Do you believe you could sometime be putting on a Man Utd first-team shirt?
      "Hey, you can never know. You just have to keep training hard, hoping hard, believing, eating, resting, and getting a decent night’s sleep so that you are ready if the moment comes to turn out for the squad. And if the opportunity doesn’t come at United, then it might come at some other Premiership club", replies Puustinen.
      "I still have trouble myself getting my head around the huge opportunity I’ve been given. If I hadn’t taken it and come here, I’d have regretted it my entire life", says Jami Puustinen.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 29.1.2005

More on this subject:
 WHO? Jami Puustinen
 Pros and cons of the Academy route
 Life in a local family guarantees peace in which to train

HEIKKI MIETTINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
heikki.miettinen@hs.fi