Where Have All the Street Footballers Gone?

There’s a reason so many of us of a certain age look back at the Shearer era and just shake our heads at the amount of forward talent knocking about. Alan Shearer was the headline, sure, but he wasn’t even standing alone. You had Andy Cole, Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Teddy Sheringham, Les Ferdinand, Ian Wright. Proper variety. Different shapes, different strengths, different ways of deciding a match.

It’s tempting to do the modern thing and talk price tags, and I get it. In today’s market, with how clubs value goals and how scarce top forwards feel, those names would have people throwing silly money around. Not because football was “better” back then, but because proven finishers have always been gold dust.

Not just England, the world was stacked

And it wasn’t only England either. The wider world game had its own gallery of heavyweights: George Weah, Ronaldo, Roberto Baggio, Marco van Basten and plenty more. It felt like every league, every European night, had someone you genuinely feared. Someone who could do nothing for an hour and then ruin you with a touch, a run, a finish into the side netting.

That’s maybe the bit people miss most. The unpredictability. The sense that forwards were allowed to be a bit chaotic, a bit individual, a bit themselves.

Have academies helped, or tidied it all up?

I’m not anti-academy, not even close. Liverpool’s academy means a lot, and getting young lads coached well, looked after properly, and given a pathway is a good thing. But it’s fair to ask whether pulling players into structured systems earlier and earlier can be counter productive for certain types of talent.

When kids are scooped up young, you can lose that free-for-all development you got in local city set-ups. Those games where positions were a suggestion, where you learned to ride a tackle, where you tried things because nobody was filming it for analysis later. Technique and decision-making were built in chaos, not in cones.

The quiet parks say a lot

The other point feels obvious but still hits home: technology has changed childhood. When we were young, the park had a game on. Always. You’d turn up and find jumpers for goalposts and a row about whether it was “next goal wins”.

Now, even when it’s perfectly safe, you look around and it’s dog walkers and joggers. And that’s not nostalgia talking, that’s just what many of us see. If fewer kids are playing unorganised football, it’s no shock if fewer grow up with that street edge that made some of those old forwards so hard to handle.

Written by Hugo Spritz: 23 December 2025