Glamour in football is often the assumption those on the outside make: all the money, fame, adulation and free time you could wish for while making your favourite hobby a job. Yet Leeds United’s new documentary goes some way to shining a light on what life can be like for the club’s players away from the floodlights.
Academy Dreams is released today, telling the story of last season for United’s under-23s. The likes of Joe Gelhardt, Sam Greenwood and Charlie Cresswell are captured from all angles with access to cameras in the dressing room, their homes, the training ground and the team bus.
How the players interact with one another away from the pitch is one of the key perspectives viewers will see for the first time in this documentary. Ahead of the six-parter’s release, Gelhardt explained how that social time with one another has been so crucial for new recruits moving away from their families for the first time at 17 or 18-years-old.
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“Everyone's moved away from their families and most people get their own place and when you finish at two o’clock and you’ve got nothing to do until bed, you can't just sit there, you’ll crack up on your own,” he said.
“It's good you have lads close and you can go and socialise, you can go to their place or go for food or something. That's the main thing, the lads are all sound, so you can get on with any of them.”
One such relationship laid bare on the show is between Lewis Bate and Sean McGurk. Most will have seen the social media videos of the latter scaring the former in the dark at the home they shared together, but Academy Dreams gives more insight.
Gelhardt admits everything you see in the documentary about those two is real and repeated every single day they had together before Bate was loaned to Oxford United. One of the key links explored for the Liverpudlian was his family and his home.
Mother Lynne, well-known to many Leeds fans on social media, gets some deserved time in the limelight given the upbringing she gave her son in his formative years on Merseyside. It’s a touching section of the documentary, but Gelhardt says his mum needed some reassuring before the cameras rolled.
“She was proper nervous when the cameras came around,” he said. “She hated it, she doesn't like all that stuff, but it was just good to show appreciation for everything she’s done for me growing up as a kid, taking me to every single game, supporting me, so I’m made up we got that in.”
The cameras were also at Liverpool’s training ground when Gelhardt happened to hit one of the finest braces Premier League 2 has ever seen. His family, living locally of course, were there to see them go in.
“I was released by Liverpool when I was younger so it’s always nice to play against them and try to score a few goals,” he said. “My mum always gets excited when we play there, so she was made up as well.”
Despite his tender years, Gelhardt must be finding it hard to avoid the sheer weight of praise which has come his way since he began playing football. At several points in the first two episodes of the documentary, it’s clear just how highly the striker’s own team-mates feel about him.
He is described by some as the best finisher in the side while others like McGurk can’t help admitting he has the background, stature and quality of a Wayne Rooney, with the England future to boot. Gelhardt said: “It's obviously nice to hear when someone praises you, especially coming from lads who you work with every day, and when you know they think highly of you, it sort of helps build the relationship on and off the field.
“To hear stuff like that is always nice and that's the game, isn’t it? You need to be as close as you can to your team-mates off the pitch so you get the best on the pitch.”
You can watch all six episodes of Academy Dreams: Leeds United on Amazon Prime Video from today.
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