At 7.40 on a Saturday morning in March the car park behind Millfields Road is already full. The league secretary has been there since six. The groundsman has been there since five. By nine, ten matches will kick off on the pitches that wrap around the reservoir, and 440 kids between the ages of seven and fifteen will play football for clubs whose entire annual budget is less than a set of season tickets.

This is the Hackney and Leyton Saturday League. It has been running, under various names, since 1956. It does not have a website. It does not have a sponsor. It does not, as of this season, have a single paid coach. Between September and April it has also sent three players to Premier League academies, more than any other grassroots league in the capital.

I spent five Saturdays there trying to work out why.

The league

Thirty eight clubs. Seventy two teams. Seven age groups from U8 to U15, boys and girls running as separate divisions above U11. Most clubs field one team at each level; a few run three or four. The fixtures are drawn by hand every August by a retired schoolteacher called Beverley who has been doing it for twenty one years and who, when I asked if she had considered using a computer, said "I used one in 2009, it made more work, I went back."

The kit the teams wear is a mixture of charity-shop hand-downs, parent-bought, and, for four of the bigger clubs, sponsored by local businesses. There are no agents, no scouts credentialled at the gate, and no league table published anywhere online. Everyone knows where their team is because Beverley rings the managers on Friday evening and tells them.

The three players signed by academies this season are:

  • A ten year old right back from Leyton Athletic who joined Tottenham's development centre in November.
  • A nine year old left winger from Lower Clapton Rovers who signed pre-academy forms with West Ham in January.
  • A fourteen year old centre midfielder from Victoria Park United who went in at Arsenal in March.

All three are still playing Saturday mornings in the league. That is a condition of the deals their families agreed.

The coaches

I watched Leyton Athletic's U11s against Lower Clapton Rovers on the first weekend in March. Thirty minutes each way, heavy pitch, nine a side.

Leyton Athletic's coach, Marcus, is a black cab driver who has coached the same group for four years. His squad includes the future Tottenham right back. Marcus's session the Thursday before had been thirty minutes of rondos and twenty minutes of passing drills. "He has been better than the rest of them since he was seven," Marcus says about his now-Tottenham player. "I have not done anything. All I did was make sure he stayed in love with it."

Lower Clapton Rovers' coach, Aisha, is a social worker who played at county level as a teenager. Her squad is half girls, and two of them are better than the boys she is standing next to on the touchline. She spends most of the match saying one word. "Scan." The girls scan. The boys, mostly, do not.

Victoria Park United's U14s are coached by a retired referee, a painter-decorator, and the painter-decorator's son, who is twenty and plays for a semi-pro side in the Essex Senior League. Their Arsenal-bound midfielder, Destiny, has been with the club since she was six. She still plays for both the girls' U14s and the boys' U13s on alternating weeks because her parents decided she needed the level of the boys' game and the support of the girls' team and the three coaches worked out a rota.

Why the academies keep coming back

Nobody I spoke to had a grand theory. The reasons I heard, over and over, were small.

The coaches know the families. The families trust the coaches. The kids turn up every week, even when it is raining, because their coach will notice if they do not. The pitches are not good, which means the players who come through the league have to move the ball quicker than they would on a 4G surface. The league has, over two decades, built relationships with three Premier League academy recruiters who come quietly on Saturday mornings and who respect the families enough not to poach a player before the coach has had a conversation with the parent.

And this: nobody in the Hackney and Leyton Saturday League, in twenty one years of Beverley's tenure, has sold out a coach who did not want to let a player go. "The academies know they cannot do that with us," she says. "We would stop ringing them back. And if we stopped ringing them back, they would lose the kids."

What we want you to take from this

If you run a league like this, the three academies are already watching you. Do not change anything on their account. Keep the pitches unfashionable and the coaches loved.

If you run an academy, the kids you want are already being coached by people who will not take your call if you are rude to the parent. Be the academy that rings the coach first.

If you are a parent looking at a local league and wondering if it is serious enough, it is. The players coming through this season have been developed by volunteers on the same pitches your child is about to stand on.

The Striver news desk will be back at Millfields Road for the finals in May. Beverley said to bring an umbrella.