academy

A member of Howe's backroom team previously urged Shelvey to contact his former manager, to ask to watch training or do some coaching in the academy.

He was so precociously good that when he was 13, Doncic’s mother, Mirjam Poterbin, took her son to Spain to enroll in an athletic academy that would change his life: Real Madrid.

He’s also become the pale face of the academy, which also houses a 93-year-old fish named Methuselah.

Although he is a native Spaniard, his English is so fluent it sounds like he has not spent a day away from north London, where he moved aged 16 to join Arsenal's academy.

That change is a gradual process, one which Bellamy himself says is still ongoing, and his first foray into coaching at Cardiff's academy was a lesson.