The name Clancy Osei Konadu may not mean a lot to Tottenham fans, but the former right-back spent two years at the club between 2015 and 2017.
He arrived from Reading’s youth team before leaving for Italy to ACR Messina, where he played for just one year before heading to Belgium and then back to his native Netherlands, where he set up the academy 4ThePlayers.
He’s still only 26, but the former Tottenham youngster has given up on being a player, and is now focusing on developing a new generation, as explained in an article covering him over at SoccerNews.
It’s revealed that he lost the desire to play football ‘after the death of his father’, but the Rotterdam native has now ‘found a new mission’, which is helping amateur footballers becoming professional ones.
His aim? Seeing one of his players feature at a World Cup.
First, he recalls his own career: “I played quite high myself. In the Netherlands, I didn’t start at DEHMusschen until I was 12, but after I went to England, it moved quickly. I was scouted by Reading and then went to Tottenham Hotspur. I was in the U18s and occasionally trained with the first-team.
“There were players like Toby Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen, Christian Eriksen and Harry Kane there. I saw what they do to play at that level. Every young player thinks: I’m going to make it to the Champions League and score the winning goal at a World Cup, but most don’t realise how many hours you have to train to pursue perfection. I am not going to promise that they will play at that level, but small adjustments can make big steps.”
After he left Tottenham and headed to Messina, things went downhill, and the former player struggled to get back on his feet.
He added: “I had no good guidance around me. No one to explain to me how football works and then you end up in the hands of agents who want to fool players. They lie and make false promises that they do not keep. An agent I knew bought a club in Belgium, Patro Eisden Maasmechelen.
“He promised me everything and I trusted him, but that club almost went bankrupt and money was embezzled. My career suffered as a result. At one point I stopped playing and found myself without a club. I had to make those mistakes so that other guys don’t have to make them.”
Handed one last chance right before Covid with a trial at Werder Bremen after a year and a half without football, he never got to play a game for the German side.
His father fell sick with Covid and was ‘one of the first people to die from it’, passing away eight days after being admitted to hospital.
This was ‘the beginning of the end’ for Konadu, who quickly decided to leave the player life and ‘immediately started with 4ThePlayers’.
As an example of well things are going, the academy organised a friendly against the second team of Aalborg BK in Denmark, and won 3-1.
Five of those players ‘were immediately hired for the rest of the season’, and the dream is to end up like the Right to Dream Academy in Ghana, who have a partnership with FC Nordsjælland.
Konadu added: “The best youth players go to the clubs and can put themselves in the spotlight there. That creates opportunities for the footballers who do not play in a youth academy, but do have potential.
“Think of someone like Denzel Dumfries. He worked with a transfer who also trained me when I was clubless, Toni Varela. Because of him, I got the idea to set this up.”
