PUTTING everything on the line from childhood to adolescence, the challenge of getting a professional contract at any club is an incredibly difficult one.
One Independent analysis found as few as 30 per cent of academy players, many joining their clubs as early as eight-years-old, will land one at either Premier League or English Football League level.
Right now, Saints are blessed with high-profile youth talent – many filling St George’s Park from England’s schoolboy age groups and up.
Keeping track of them all – especially one that has not kicked a competitive ball for Saints since October 2020 – can be difficult.
But 20-year-old defender Sam Bailey probably spends more time at Staplewood Campus than any of his teammates – which now includes the likes of Dom Ballard, who scored for the first-team at Cambridge United.
That is because his injury rehab programme kept him in from 8:30AM-4:30PM. Not the lunchtime finish a lot of footballers can find themselves getting used to!
“It’s a full day. It’s a really full day, not like the other lads going home at 12,” Bailey joked, now back running on grass and hoping to return in around 10 weeks.
Humble lad Bailey has had a tumultuous and, if we’re being honest, unimaginably tough two years. At 16 and 17-years-old, Bailey was a rock in the back for the under-18s and breaking into 23s level.
Before the COVID disruption – which wreaked complete havoc on youth football even moreso – former coach Paul Hardyman was going to recommend Bailey for an early professional deal.
On youth football’s return in October 2020, Saints smashed Leicester City 8-2 in an under-18s Premier League game. There was no cause for Bailey, who started the match, to celebrate.
Just before half-time, he thought he had jarred his knee but was okay to carry on. When he got up, dusted himself off and took his next step, his knee collapsed and with it him to the ground.
“Deep down I knew it wasn’t right, my leg was shaking and I was limping. I’ve just gone to step back up and my whole knee has collapsed,” he recalled.
“From that day on, I’ll never know if I did it in the first bit or the second bit. I walked off the pitch knowing it wouldn’t be good but I had no experience of a bad injury like that.
“I rang my dad and broke down in tears, to be fair. He saw on the Premier League app I’d come off and asked me if I was injured. I said ‘yeah, but this time it’s bad’.
“It felt like the world had ended. I had never been injured before, let alone a big one like that. I thought, like every footballer does, it will never be me. It really hit me when I got home, took my trackies off and my knee was just massive.”
Bailey added: “I had the scan and when I got the results, on a Zoom call, they told me ACL, lateral meniscus – it broke me. I held it together on the Zoom but as soon as the laptop was closed I broke down.”
Having previously only had minor tweaks and concerns since the age of 12, this injury sidelined him for 11 months until September 2021.
After battling back, needing the aid of keyhole surgery, Bailey heard another crack in his knee training. The next morning it blew up. He was told his ACL was lax, but it was only a warning sign.
A course of injections and an eight-week gym programme suddenly, due to further complications and niggles, turned into March 2022.
But at last, Bailey could put the concerns behind him and focus on playing his comeback game. Ahead of Sunday’s return, match preparation began on the Tuesday.
“They proposed two options, to get injections done which would stiffen up the area and do a gym block to strengthen the muscles around it, or for a surgeon to go in and redo the whole thing,” he added, looking back to the September.
“I just thought there was no need for that surgery, so I did the injections. I don’t know where the weeks went but niggly things mean it somehow ends up in March.
“I’d been training for over a month to play my return game on the Sunday. That was when I went out to train on Tuesday.”
Feeling the “twists and pops” again to the same mechanisms of the knee as the last time he played, 18 months ago, Bailey knew there was no way he would be in action for any of the crucial time left on his scholarship deal at Saints.
“The first thing I said was, and excuse my language, ‘I’m f*cked. I’ve got three months left on my contract and I’m f*cked’. Straight away I knew what I’d done,” he said.
“But I tried not to get too upset because this time I knew I could get back. I know I can do it, it was just frustrating. It was just a setback, but I’d have preferred a minor setback.”
Going under the knife is something that, hopefully, many of us non-athletes seldom experience. Bailey talks about it in a positive light, knowing you only make real progress in your recovery once it is out the way.
He showed me his scars; the two keyholes from his first surgery and the remnants of much more invasive looking repair-work across the patella tendon and torn MCL the second time.
Saints deserve credit for the way they have handled Bailey as a player and person. Still deep in his recovery, he is not likely to play again until after December. It will be well over two years since his last appearance.
However, Saints still rewarded his efforts with his first one-year professional contract in July – and took him out to Spain for the B team’s pre-season tour to feel part of the group.
“I went for the full week. Dave Horseman told my physio he wants me to come and my first thought was ‘it’d be no good for me, all the travelling’. I was still a bit swollen,” he admitted.
“They say a change of scenery is good for you, but I didn’t think it would help me at all. Now, I’m really glad I went and it made me feel much more a part of the team.
“With my first injury, I didn’t feel part of the team. By the time I’d do my physio, all my teammates would all be gone. Joining in with the sessions and taking some warm-ups was great.
“Dave even said about going with the group to some of the away games this season to feel like part of the group.”
It is a show of class from Saints, but those close to Bailey are keen to stress to him this deal was earned, and not given, for how much he impressed up to making his B team debut in February 2020.
“It’s nice to know what I did before has rectified the situation, what I did before October 2020 and before COVID,” he insisted.
“It shows the club believe in me and hopefully I’ll get the six months to prove myself in the second-half of the season.”
Bailey arrived at Saints when he was just eight years old, initially signing up for the Abingdon talent centre but being offered a six-week trial after just one session.
Bailey’s father, whom he has given immense credit to for his achievements since kicking a ball as a small boy, managed his team at kids' level. Bailey, then up front, scored the goals.
He recalls one particular opposition team with a striker who they’d always meet in the finals of local competition. Bailey has loads of medals from those times still at his parents’.
Bailey also inherited something else from his family, though. The youngster has a slight bleeding disorder that has thrown his injuries into further complication.
“My body will swell up and bruise excessively from something where someone else wouldn’t, and no surgeon will want to operate on a swollen knee,” Bailey explains, estimating the disorder adds up to eight weeks onto his recovery times.
“I had some final blood tests done but it takes ages to get the results. It’s nothing huge but for example a normal person doing their ACL might have a bit of swelling but mine was the size of my head.”
There is a big difference between the injury this time and last, despite impacting the same mechanisms on the same knee.
Bailey has the belief he can come back now. Last time it was the end of the world, but now he benefits from knowing exactly what he has and will have to experience to stay on grass.
The youngster benefits from the increased exposure to one-to-one coaches and physios that comes with being a B team player – the final age group before the firsts at Saints.
Especially designed nutrition plans keep him in better shape, all with the task of getting back out there alongside many of the same teammates he has played with for over 10 years.
Bailey currently lives in shared, independent accommodation with Sam Bellis and Fedel Ross-Laing, after they were granted the opportunity to move out in summer 2020 – the season they turned 18.
He lived with Bellis and Jack Turner last season, but was grouped with Turner and Will Tizzard in family digs until those permissions were granted. The strong relationships you see on the field are formed in these times.
“It is a good laugh to be fair, it’s chilled,” Bailey said. “There’s no curfew, which doesn’t really make a difference anyway as you’re never doing anything in the week, but if you need to nip out to the shops you can.
“You’re on your own, and as you can imagine you do get sick of each other every now and then! But on the flip side it was a lot harder in the brace and crutches because they’ve got their own lives to live.”
He added: “But I can’t thank the boys I live with and the lads at the club, and the staff, enough, as they’ve made it all as smooth as it could be for me.”
Saints B are looking to make a promotion charge back into Premier League 2 Division One this season, having missed out on the play-offs by just goal difference in May.
It is a group buoyed with the best of the Premier League South title-winning under-18s of last campaign.
They are widely considered one of the most exciting groups of young players to come through Staplewood in recent years – despite getting battered every week up to U16s.
“As you’re younger you’re just renewing contracts, it doesn’t actually mean anything,” Bailey explained. “Then we got to under-16s, our team went on a 15-match winning run and all through the younger ages we’d been smashed!
“We always had a small team, everyone matures at different ages and we were really late to mature. You had the likes of Reading, who were massive. Double the height.
“They’d smash us 6-0 every week from under-13s to 15s, and it is quite challenging for a young lad mentally, thinking ‘what are we doing wrong?’.
“But the club was nailing it into us that it’s not about now, it’s about later down the line. It’s worked out because we’ve got that technical side, the club philosophy.”
The defender, who stands at just under six-foot tall, was a midfielder at Saints until he was 12 and always idolised Steven Gerrard. Since moving to centre-half, he says Virgil van Dijk.
He admires his one-versus-one defending and ability to play with the ball, but recognises he does not have the physical gift the Dutchman does.
Instead, Bailey has been watching defenders more closely matched to his profile to learn. John Stones, and the way he plays out from the back, he reels off with enthusiasm.
The next step for many of this group of players is bursting into the first-team over the next couple of years, while Bailey’s targets are all – obviously – short-term concentrated.
“Before I got injured again, I was picking it up quite quickly,” he says. “The surgeon told me I might not feel 100 per cent until next season.
“So it’s just a case of maintaining fitness, playing minutes, getting back to where the other lads are, there should be about 10-15 games of the season left hopefully.
“My targets this season are getting back to how I was before, getting into the team – which I’ll have to earn – and of course, earning the next contract.”
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