Interviewing a club’s owner can be tricky, and with Bradford (Park Avenue)’s Gareth Roberts, I wanted to make sure the T&A asked him all the important questions about the relegation-haunted first team, and where the struggling club sit financially.
But in the third and final part of our sit-down chat at the Midland Hotel, I wanted to ask about the club’s growing academy, and its importance to Avenue, as well as the relationship the club want to have with the Bradford community as a whole.
Without further ado, here are the question I posed American-based, but Bradford-born, businessman Roberts…
Q: Using young goalkeeper Liam Hall’s big move from Avenue to Wrexham in August as an example, is it the accepted situation at the club that any top prospects developed in the academy are more likely to be sold on for profit than have a future in the first team at Horsfall?
A: We don’t stand in the way of anyone wanting to take a bigger opportunity.
But we don’t need the players from the academy to be at an elite level to make a big contribution to our first team side anyway.
We’ve got the West Riding County Cup to play for each year for example, which I’m afraid we’ve not really focused on for the last few years.
But I’ve told our academy director (Thomas McStravick) that I want to win the thing.
Let’s got those young boys out there and take home the trophy and we’d put some sort of incentive in place for them too.
They could get a big meal out of it or maybe even a trip to Dallas.
These lads have to learn how to compete and be wanting to win, and the West Riding County Cup is a great local competition that we should be pushing to do well in.
Q: Thomas is a highly-regarded coach and technical director at academy level, and is still doing so much great work with Avenue’s youngsters, but is there a worry you’re spreading him too thinly, now he has been appointed as the club’s sporting director too?
A: The key here is getting Danny (Whitaker) up to speed, as he has that dual role of being first-team head coach and working with the academy.
We need to get Danny an assistant in to help out with the first team and that’s going to help Thomas have the time to focus on the bigger picture.
He has been stretched thin, that’s true, but we’re hoping that’s a short-term issue.
Q: How important is to keep regularly hosting scholarship trials at Horsfall?
A: We want to have a very vibrant academy and we want to attract the best candidates.
We don’t just want to take anyone who rolls up, because we’re not a babysitting service.
We’re keeping very high academic standards too for that course which is part of the scholarship, so that’s another reason why we can’t just take anyone on.
What we’re offering parents, I think, is a very safe environment with coaching and mentoring for these young people.
We’ve already got some 60 students signed up for next year’s programme (starting in September 2024) and we’re not done yet.
Thomas has been doing a very good job with that and I think at some point in the next couple of years, we’ll have over 100 scholars on our programme.
It’s great for the students and it’s just a good thing for the club.
Q: At Avenue, do you value the educational aspect of the academy and scholarship as much as the football side of things?
A: It is as important, because we’re not just about football.
We know we’re not going to be playing in the Champions League or anything like that, so what we can do is find what we feel is the right strategy for a club at our level.
We feel we really need to be engaged with the community, so we’ve made that a big part of our overall plan for the club.
Our current supporters, by and large, are getting on in years, and the next generation of fans are going to be youngsters who’ve been associated with the club from childhood.
They’ll be playing in our academy and hopefully will become attached to our club because of that.
Those are the people who’ll be following the club in the future.
Q: In terms of Avenue’s work within the Bradford community, what kind of plans do you have, outside of the football product on offer?
A: We’re working in a number of schools to provide the physical education component of the pupils’ learning.
That’s within the schools themselves, but we’re also going to be holding some school sports days at Horsfall this summer.
We’re also doing some work for social services in Bradford, and we have a facility for that, as well as young people who are well-qualified to help with that, so we’ve got a number of initiatives there.
We’ve also now got a hospitality suite at Horsfall, so we can use that for various things.
The community can hire it out for fitness classes or anything like that, and we need to make the venue part of the community.
That will help Horsfall pay for itself and take the pressure off the football having to do that on its own.
The goal is to continue to get the stadium busy every night of the week.
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