Former Premier League striker Dave Kitson is launching his new football academy – The Dave Kitson Academy – in the Reading area.
Here, he talks about his vision for the academy – and how he believes his experience as a Premier League player for Reading and Stoke City will help young players from Under 9s to Under 23s develop their football and life skills.
What were your football dreams before you started your career in professional football?
To play football with my friends with every single spare second available in the day.
Everybody I grew up with wanted to be a footballer. Three kids from the same street in Letchworth of 36 houses became professional footballers. Nobody cared what level they played at, so long as they could call football their full time job.
How do you think you might have benefitted from having an opportunity to be part of an academy like yours when you were younger?
Quality coaching was not available to us in the 1990s. Even coaches at some professional clubs did not have the required professional badges to coach, they were in place because of friends within the industry that put them there.
The FA has identified that the UK was severely lacking in the kinds of numbers of people taking up coaching qualifications. For two decades, Spain, France, Germany and Italy were quadrupling the amount of professional coaches they produced each year compared to the UK.
Only now has professional coaching become available to the wider public and online videos, and makes it possible to get a chance to learn what elite coaching looks like.
However, we are still missing the most fundamental aspect of deploying what we have learned at the feet of the next generation of talent: Academies that are available to everybody.
There are only 28 Category One academies in the UK. These are academies that coach from under 9 to under 23 year olds. And so, learning the latest coaching techniques and having an outlet to teach children the latest trends is still, unfortunately, the privilege of a very select number of children, exclusively at professional clubs.
Describe how you feel now about your playing career and what you achieved with Reading and the other clubs you played for?
Immensely proud. Having spent five successful years at Reading, and not being from the area originally, the biggest lesson that I have learned as an outsider coming in is that you can still have an enormous impact on a community.
Reading is a big town, and a proud town, that has never been given the credit it deserves for a whole host of things – from the football club breaking the points record to the university being the world leader in climate change, to the many business parks operating as hubs for some of the biggest companies on the planet and being continually overlooked for City status despite much smaller and, frankly, less deserving towns being afforded that honour.
For years our infrastructure was sub-standard and our perception to the outside world was that of a dirty satellite town located somewhere along the M4 on the way out of London towards Bristol.
I can pinpoint the football club’s success in the mid 2000s as the turning point in Reading’s fortunes. It really did put the town on the map.
The train station is now one of the largest hubs in the UK, the university is finally getting recognition for its lead on environmental issues, and world class facilities such as the Shinfield film studios are close to completion.
The impact of the football club on the town cannot be underestimated.
Who is Dave Kitson now?
I am someone who recognises the opportunity to continue the improvement in opportunities afforded to the people of our town.
I am in a position to help and give back and help to lay out a road map for the future of the town in a number of areas. I want to get across the importance of having pride in the community and bettering ourselves with each generation.
I am someone who loves football more than most and wants to turn Berkshire into the footballing hotbed that it should be – a destination for young talent where opportunities exist to benefit individuals and the wider community.
What are your ambitions?
I want to help Berkshire become a footballing hotbed that provides good opportunities for young players to develop their football and life skills – and to be part of developing the best talent that the county has to offer.
There are a huge number of grassroots clubs with tens of thousands of people playing football every day of the week. In terms of provision for quality, elite coaching, Berkshire does not currently have the footballing cache, nor the numbers of qualified high level coaches that have played at the highest level, that can implement the very latest coaching techniques enjoyed exclusively by the elite category one academies in Britain.
My primary ambition is to establish an equivalent category one academy in Reading, with other hubs across Berkshire, that is accessible to every relevant age group.
What are your main objectives and aims for The Dave Kitson Academy?
The ‘holy grail’ would be to produce a professional footballer and I believe there is no reason why we can’t achieve that.
But more importantly, the academy will have at its core the mantra that we produce well coached, well- rounded individuals who are ready for the world once they have finished their time with us.
What is your vision for how you’d like the academy to grow?
Starting in Reading, I would eventually like to see The Dave Kitson Academy represented in multiple countries worldwide.
Who is The Dave Kitson Academy for?
The academy is for boys and girls – and young men and women – who want to enjoy elite academy-quality coaching. The academy is open to anybody that wishes to sign up, as well as those players that qualify for an education both at home and abroad and which is subsidised by the government.
What is your motivation and inspiration for the academy?
As a player who did not come through an academy set-up, there is no doubt that I have missed out on the opportunities to progress faster and with better coaching than the route that I did come through.
The opportunities for players that were not based in a densely populated area for elite academy coaching, did not exist when I was growing up and I have been both surprised and more than a little disappointed that with all the investment in football and the money in football, the situation remains the same today.
Huge amounts of talent is being let down as a result. But, initially, we can at least do something about that in Reading and Berkshire.
What are your short, medium and long term aims for the academy?
Initially, we will provide group coaching and one to one coaching for 8-23 year olds in the Reading area. Each young person who attends The Dave Kitson Academy will already be part of a team. Our aim is to provide a supplementary coaching academy, designed to improve you as a player.
In the medium term, the aim is to expand on the foundations of the academy and to operate boys, girls, womens and mens teams at every age group from under 9 to under 23. In some cases, multiple teams within an age group, potentially operating as A and B sides.
Our long term vision is to develop home-grown talent, as well as international students for education and academy football.
The aim is for The Dave Kitson Academy to provide an education, likely partnered with a local school, which will also help to attract international students. These students (both homegrown and international) will then take their education alongside their academy football. Our longer term vision is that every academy team will be operating in leagues by this point.
What does your academy stand for?
Pride. Integrity. Professionalism. Education. It is important that anybody that comes to play in the academy feels that they have improved on the above qualities, that they have grown as individuals. Whether they become footballers or not, these qualities can be applied to any walk of life going forward.
What are your own core values?
Community, honesty, integrity, improvement, education, communication.
What are the core values of your academy?
Community, teamwork, responsibility, reliability, innovation, passion, integrity, safety, development.
ABOUT DAVE KITSON
Dave Kitson is a former Premier League footballer for Reading and Stoke City.
Having started his career with Cambridge United, he moved to Reading in 2003, finishing as player of the year in 2004 and the club’s top scorer in both 2004, 2005 and the club’s record breaking 106 point title winning season in 2005/06.
He was twice included in the PFA team of the year and holds the record for the most goals ever scored at the Select Car Leasing Stadium.
Dave scored the first top flight goal in Reading’s 150 year history when he netted in a 3-2 home win against Middlesbrough on the opening day of the 2006/07 Premier League season as the Royals finished 8th, their highest ever finish in English football.
After five successful seasons with Reading, Dave moved to Stoke City for a club record £6m fee. He spent the next two seasons in the Premier League, famously scoring against Manchester City in an incredible 3-2 win at the Britannia Stadium.
Dave also played for Portsmouth, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United and Oxford United in a career that saw him score more than 160 goals. He remains one of only a handful of players to score in every professional division and in every professional domestic cup competition.
In 2019 Dave was inducted into the Reading FC Hall of Fame and, in 2022, he was inducted into the Cambridge United Hall of Fame.
Dave is well known in Reading. His children are all schooled in Reading and he and his wife both work in teaching in Reading.
