Inside the academy that built half of the league

On a Tuesday evening in October, on a pitch behind a supermarket car park, forty children in red bibs are playing a game with four goals and no goalkeepers. Nobody is shouting. The coach, a former bus driver called Dennis Mullan, is standing on the touchline eating an apple.

"Let them work it out," he says. "They always do."

This is the Riverside Rovers academy. Six of the players who started for Northern League clubs last Saturday came through it. It has one full-time coach, a budget smaller than some players' weekly wages, and a waiting list of three hundred.