Millions of children want it, but very few get it: a professional football contract. But what do modern football apprentices go through?

Owen Amos visits Hartlepool United’s training ground to find out.

AT Hartlepool United’s training ground, at Maiden Castle, Durham, there are 16 young footballers, and countless dreams. The feet tap balls, the legs dance round cones, but the heads dream of fame, fortune and football.

They dream, of course, of being the star: David Beckham, or Steven Gerrard. But they also dream of being Tommy Miller, the Ipswich Town midfielder, or Adam Boyd, the Leyton Orient forward. In football, even the supporting cast drown in cheers and roses.

Miller, 29, and Boyd, 26, started here, tapping balls and dancing round cones in Hartlepool’s youth team. Now, they live every boy’s fantasy: they are paid to play football. If Beckham is one in a million, then Boyd, Miller and the other lucky lads, have beaten long odds too. In England – as we know – millions play football. Yet, in the Football League and Premiership, there are fewer than 4,000 professionals.

Even the 16 apprentices in Hartlepool’s youth team, the final audition, have slim odds of making the big stage. Of the 16, four are second years, meaning they learn next year if they join the 4,000 and become a full-time pro.

“If we can get one of them a professional contract, training with the first team, I will be quite happy,” says Michael Barron, 33, the youth team coach who played more than 300 times for Hartlepool. “In the past we have had six or seven get contracts, but now we have raised the standard.

The manager says they must be good enough to go straight into the team.”

Before the youth team, for 16 to 18-year-olds, Hartlepool’s centre of excellence runs a development centre for Under-8s, and sides from Under-9 to Under-16. Many come all the way and still face a one-in-four chance at the last. And you thought X Factor was hard.

“Some make it all the way, but most don’t,”

says Chris Turner, Hartlepool’s Director of Sport. “To get all the way through is a massive achievement – and even then they haven’t made it. People don’t realise how difficult it is.”

And Hartlepool offers more chances than most. In their first team squad, regulars James Brown – one of the Football League’s best young players – David Foley, Matty Robson, and Antony Sweeney came through the youth system.

Brown, though, didn’t arrive from Cramlington until he was 17 – proving that, even now, the competition doesn’t ease up. “Young lads in the system can still be leapfrogged by lads coming in,” says Turner.

Others, having shone at Hartlepool, moved on. Boyd went to Luton for £500,000 in 2006; Miller went to Ipswich for £750,000 in 2001. But selling isn’t the aim – even though the centre of excellence costs around £250,000 a year and, after £160,000 from the Premier League, Football League and the FA, is subsidised by IOR, the company that owns Hartlepool. This club are star-makers, not star-merchants.

“It’s not about the selling of players – we have turned down bids for James Brown – it’s to develop our own players, so we don’t have to go into the transfer market,” says Turner. “It also promotes the club in the local community when you’re giving local youngsters a chance.”

So could Hartlepool ever compete in League One – England’s third tier – with a squad of home-grown players, jewels found at Maiden Castle?

“It would be impossible,” says Turner. “We could field a side full of local players, but it would struggle. With no disrespect to local lads, we haven’t got 16 of the quality needed. For supporters, as much as they love seeing local players, they want results. It would be managerial suicide to have a team of local players, but we want as many as we can.”

Celtic’s Lisbon Lions, who won the European Cup in 1967, were all born within 30 miles of Glasgow. It wouldn’t happen now. Celtic’s current squad, for example, has players from Australia, Germany, Guinea, Italy, Poland, Spain.

Their best player is Japanese.

Football, since Sky swanned in, has gone global.

Thirty years ago, young players’ competition was national. Now, it’s international: making it has never been harder. Even Hartlepool have a Danish keeper and an Australian forward.

Before 14, Hartlepool can only recruit players from a 60-minute radius of Victoria Park; from 14 to 16, it’s 90-minutes. With Middlesbrough, Newcastle, and Sunderland nearby, and half that radius in the North Sea, finding players isn’t easy. They start early – Football in the Community officers spot talent in primary schools – but Hartlepool may soon widen their net. Only one apprentice, a Welsh goalkeeper, is from outside the region, but more may follow. A bigger pond equals bigger fish.

The apprentices, except the Welshman, live at home. They’re paid £60 a week, plus expenses and spend one-and-a-half days a week at college.

Both Turner and Barron would like them to spend more time training, but grants from League Football Education – set up to “promote and enhance educational and vocational training for apprentice footballers aged 16 to 18” – means not. He who pays the piper, and all that.

Barron – who came through Middlesbrough’s youth system before joining Hartlepool in 1996 – spent more time with a trowel than a textbook.

“My first three days (at Middlesbrough) I didn’t touch the ball,” he says. “I dug weeds out of the pitch round Ayresome Park. It was good – it puts you in your place. It brings you down to earth.”

HE makes apprentices do some jobs – “Sort the kit, clean the balls, wipe the boots,”

says Barron – but even this 33-year-old sees a generational shift. “We used to spend 45 minutes cleaning boots before every training session. It’s a generational thing. I think a lot of kids get everything given to them on a plate.

Throughout their life, people look after them.”

And those people – parents – can pose problems, too. In the mid-1990s, Turner was Wolverhampton Wanderers’ youth team coach, when a parent came to see him, demanding to know why his son wasn’t playing.

“His son was a centre forward,” says Turner.

“He told me ‘That Irish boy, he’ll never make it.

Even the other dads think that – why does he get picked?’ I said ‘We happen to think Robbie Keane will become a top professional footballer’.”

Since leaving Wolves, Keane has played for Inter Milan and Tottenham and now plays at Liverpool. Oh, and “that Irish boy” is his country’s record scorer.

“That sums some parents up,” says Turner, 50, who started at Sheffield Wednesday and also played for Manchester United and Sunderland.

“My dad, for instance, never spoke to managers or coaches of a team I played for. Now parents shout advice when they really haven’t got a clue.

It’s them trying to be a footballer through their son. That’s a massive problem for coaches throughout the country.”

Back on the training pitch, the 16 young footballers, head down in the wind, play on, and dream on. Making it – to become a Beckham or a Boyd – is a lottery. But at least their talent, and tenacity, has bought them a ticket.