'To my left, youngsters with nothing to do but cause trouble. To my right, youngsters totally engaged in football'

 
The London United coaches with young players

The seven police vehicles skirted the QPR stadium in west London and turned stealthily on to the White City Estate.

As officers clambered out, brandishing guns, shields, flak-jackets and helmets and prepared to execute a warrant against a local drug lord, word spread like wildfire that a raid was imminent.

A crowd of agitated youths gathered. “What’s this pissing about, then? Why can’t I walk here? What yous lot doing on our turf?” they wanted to know, volleying abuse at an officer who was cordoning off the street as the thud of police battering down doors echoed across the estate.

Half a block away, on the caged all-weather pitch of the White City Youth Club, a different sound — of boot on ball — punctured the air as football coaches employed by QPR in the Community Trust put a dozen young people through their paces. “Pass and move, good stuff!” they shouted their encouragement.

Watching from the side, Andy Evans, 45, the chief executive of QPR in the Community Trust, shook his head and said: “If ever you needed a graphic demonstration of what we are up against and why we need positive interventions like football, this is it. To my left, youngsters with nothing to do but cause trouble. To my right, youngsters totally engaged in a game of football.”

Mr Evans, who co-founded the QPR social inclusion programme 20 years ago, pointed to three QPR in the Community coaches who accompanied him — Landry Ntake, James McLynn and Joao Brunetti. “For me,” he said, “social inclusion is not some abstract concept but starts directly outside the entrance to our stadium with estates like this one and inspirational youngsters like these three.”

The programme now reaches 1,200 young people a year. The most famous person to benefit has been Raheem Sterling, who lived nearby on the notorious St Raphael’s Estate and was fast-tracked on to the QPR Academy programme at 10 before leaving for Liverpool four years later.

But most of what they do, said Mr Evans, goes under the radar. “We help deprived kids reach their potential, irrespective of how good they are at football. That is why when we saw the Evening Standard had launched a campaign to use football to change lives, we wanted to support it.”

QPR has pledged to employ two coaches trained by our London United campaign, the first Premier League club to do so. Our initiative seeks to train 100 disadvantaged young people as FA Level-1 coaches by Christmas, and is funded by Vitality, the healthy living rewards programme offered by insurers PruHealth and PruProtect. Twenty of the cohort of 100 will be chosen to tackle FA Level-2, and two of them will join a team of 20 coaches already employed by QPR in the Community Trust to tackle social inclusion.

Earlier Mr Evans had given the Standard a guided tour of the QPR home changing room where bite-sized motivational messages — such as “disrupt their flow” and “clean sheets” — are stuck above the player’s cubicles. For these highly paid players surrounded by the glitz and glamour of the Premier League, the poverty of the sprawling White City Estate, home to 7,000 people, many on benefits, must seem a world away.

But for QPR’s coaches in the community, it is a different story. Landry Ntake, 25, came to London from Burundi when he was six. Four years later his parents split up.

He said: “The only thing I had going for me was my football, but some guys on our estate came to me and said: ‘give up football and come chill and do robberies with us’. I was 11, but already my friends were doing house burglaries and could buy themselves nice clothes and trainers. I desperately wanted to join them.”

What stopped him was his friend’s father, a football coach who ran a local youth centre. “Every time he saw me chilling with the older bad boys, he would pull me aside and drive me to the youth centre to play football,” Landry said. “He told me about his own life, how he had been down that road of fast money. I saw he had a nice job, a nice car and a son who worshipped him and I thought, if he can make a good life for himself, so can I.”

Inspired by his friend’s father, Landry decided to join QPR in the Community where he helps deliver their “sport and thought: football as therapy” programme to at-risk young people. “We use football to help children control their anger and think before they act, both on the field and in life,” he said. “Recently I got feedback from a girl I coach at Fulham Cross Girls School who wrote that she was inspired to play football because of my mentoring. I felt so good about myself and my mother is so proud of who I have become and what I do.”

Another coach delivering football therapy for QPR in the Community is 23-year-old James McLynn. “I grew up with two violent, alcoholic parents so my home life was horrible before I was taken into care and placed with foster parents at 16,” he said.

“As a teenager, I was not a nice person at school and was regarded as ‘trouble’, but when my home situation became known, my teachers started to support rather than punish me and from that point my life turned.”

James was assigned a mentor at school who paid for him to get his FA Level-1 coaching qualification. Later James earned a university degree in psychology before joining QPR.

“This club provides opportunities for a lost generation of young people who, like me, would otherwise switch off,” he said. “We take the kids that society ignores and we allow them to feel accepted and understood.”

For Joao Brunetti, 22, who came from Brazil at 18 with a dream of becoming a professional footballer, coaching has rejuvenated his life. “I was promised a trial at Watford that never happened, so I went to Werder Bremen in Germany but I injured my knee and returned to London with shattered dreams,” he said. “I sat at home, depressed, my parents helpless and worried about me.”

By chance Joao met someone at the job centre who introduced him to the QPR workfit programme, which gave him the chance to do his FA Level-1 coaching. “That was the day I got my life back on track,” he said. “I became a volunteer for QPR in the community and six months ago I was employed to coach on their after-school programme. QPR changed my life. Now I try to do the same for others.”

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