With the prospect of professional soccer in his sights, David Robson, 13, is moving across the Atlantic Ocean to play in the Heart of Midlothian Football Club (Hearts) academy in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The teen is a goalkeeper and went on multiple trials throughout the United Kingdom before deciding that Hearts was the club for him.
“Hearts seemed to be offering the best opportunity for him, the best coaching, the best development for someone in his position,” explained David’s father, Jeremy.
David has been playing soccer since he was just five years old. He started out in England and continued to play when his family moved to Fergus in 2008 for his father’s work. Though he wasn’t always a goalkeeper he began playing the position when he was just six years old.
“I became a goalkeeper when our team goalie left and the coach said ‘who wants to go in goalie’ and I put my hand up and he chose me,” David explained.
The teen said that from the time he started playing he knew that he wanted to play professionally, but he never knew what it would take to get there.
The European soccer system is different than the Canadian system, Jeremy explained. Instead of having a citywide club like Guelph Soccer, for example, with house league teams, in European countries a city that size would have a dozen professional clubs, he said. They would all be running independently but would be part of a league. Each of the professional clubs has an academy to develop the most promising young players.
“Under a professional environment in a professional club, the kids are more likely to reach their true potential,” Jeremy explained.
In David’s case, he was offered a one-year contract with the Hearts football academy. This means his family will not pay anything for him to play for the team or receive training, but he is tied to the team until it he’s traded or his contract is not renewed.
If Hearts does choose to trade David, the team he goes to will have to pay a fee to Hearts so the club is reimbursed for all of the training and investment put into David’s development.
The goal for the Robson family though is for David to continue with Hearts year after year, receive a scholarship when he turns 16 so he can become a full-time trainee soccer player and eventually earn a spot on the first team and become a professional player for the club.
David and his family went to the United Kingdom for trials for the first time in November. At that time he went to five clubs but only two of them were contenders, Hearts and Liverpool Football Club, Jeremy explained. Hearts offered David a contract in November for the next season and said they would hold the position until August. On that same trip, David had a training session with Liverpool and after playing a game the team invited him back in February for a one-week trial.
Ultimately the family thought Hearts was a better fit for David and it appeared to have a better track record of bringing players up through the academy onto the first team than many of the British clubs.
Both David and Jeremy were adamant that Hearts had a record of producing great goalkeepers.
David said he wants to return to the United Kingdom to play “because the standard’s better and I have a good chance to get on this team,” he said.
“The first time I played it was in Scotland, I played for Hearts, it was against an U-14 team and the pace shocked me. I had the worst game of my life and I just didn’t expect the pace to be that fast.”
Now David is a Grade 7 student at Elora Public School and is a player on the Oakville Soccer Club’s U-14 team.
Come August he will be living in Edinburgh, playing on the Hearts U-14 team and be in Grade 9 at school, the Scottish education system is structured in such a way that he will be skipping Grade 8.
Both Jeremy and Mary, David’s mother, said an opportunity like a contract at Hearts wouldn’t be possible in Canada.
“You wouldn’t have the same career here in football as you would in England because there isn’t the same league system,” Mary said. “You haven’t got the same number of professional clubs. It’s like going to play hockey in England. A Canadian would never go play hockey in England.”
David is fortunate he was born in the United Kingdom and meets the residency requirements for joining a professional academy. The family hopes to finish most of David’s soccer season in Oakville, but will leave for Scotland when their Fergus home sells.
