Written by
Ian Westbrook
May 8, 2025
Brentford have set themselves the ambitious target of developing the most caring and progressive Academy in the world – and their use of the Routes app, the ‘CV for Gen Z’, is one of their ways towards achieving this.
Routes enables young players to record and showcase their development journeys, which helps them during their time within the Academy and beyond. The app was the brainchild of Ansoumane Konde, an aspiring pro who dropped out of the game in his early 20s and needed to create a ‘football CV’.
Brothers Phil and Andy Clarke – the duo behind The Sports Office – helped to develop the product, along with Project Lead Stuart Green. Former Bolton, Newcastle United and England Manager Sam Allardyce is among the investors.
Clubs are able to sign up for a subscription package to Routes, enabling their scholars to utilise the app and for assigned staff to oversee their progress. Brentford, a club renowned for their innovative approach in so many different areas, are one of the early adopters of Routes.
Sam Bayford, the club’s Head of Academy Safeguarding, told TGG: “For us, it’s a tool that presents quite a unique opportunity in that we can use it for dual purposes.
“It has the functionality where you can pick and choose the elements that you include at different times. That allows us to build essentially two different CVs.
“You have your football CV, as a young man coming through as a scholar, and then you have your life CV. The tool allows us to mine the information and keep those live updates on strengths and skills development, clips of footage of how they do it, live across their journey.
“[That means] it’s far easier for a coach to take an interest in a player, so they can dip in and have a look at that young person’s clips and strengths alongside the significant amount of data that we have.
Brentford Head of Academy Safeguarding Sam Bayford
“It also helps those coaches understand young players’ character and interests, because the boys have constructed it themselves. It’s a learning tool for them too, in terms of off-the-field football skills and development which are going to help them.”
The app is crucial in helping players transition out of the game, too. After all, most will not make it as professional footballers.
Clubs have been criticised for not doing enough to track and help players who leave their Academy programmes.
In 2022, Crystal Palace became the first club in the country to offer a three-year aftercare programme to help scholars cope with the “trauma” of being released.
Routes is designed to capture and showcase all the skills that scholars have learned during their Academy journey, helping them to progress in careers outside of the game.
“Because there are so many transferable skills you learn in football, and there’s so much more to the programme that we’re developing here beyond what they actually do on the grass, we’re able to capture those skills developments across their Academy journey,” Bayford explained.
“So whenever there is that point of exit, we have ready-made tools to support them on their journey onwards – be that to another club or into education or higher education or into employment. They have a foot up in the effort they need to go to advertise themselves or to sell themselves to future employers.”
Brentford relaunched their Academy at Category Four level at the start of the 2022/23 season, having closed it in 2016. They are now at Category Two and aspire to go to Category One as soon as they can.
Their use of the Routes app – like the Academy itself – is relatively new.
“We are in our second season using it,” Bayford said. “We started trialling and figuring it out last season and it’s going to be from the beginning of pre-season this year that we integrate it into the IDT (Individual Development Training) and education processes, so we can have it as a tool that’s embedded within the structure.
“It will become a bit of a makeweight for the players across their journey to track it and build up. We’ve officially ‘used it’ this season, but the real work starts in earnest next year. It’s been about socialising the use of the tool, but we’re ready to do that and we now have that ready to go.
“At the moment, we’re going to run it with our first and second year Scholars – that’s our Under-17 and U18 age group. They are predominantly within our B-Tec education programme or off doing A-levels or an IB (International Baccalaureate) in different institutions.
“They’re the ones that have the intensive personal development and life skills programme so they, if you like, are the best play testers to get this embedded within the cultural framework.
“The nice thing is that we can maintain access to those CVs, so even if we have a young person who is outside of those age groups, they would still be able to keep those live and updated.
Brentford's U18s, their second year scholars, are using the Routes app
“We’re going to make it an integrated part of their personal development life skills programme. There are blocks and periods of reflection where we’re working with those young people to update it.
“They can update it at any point, we’re just very conscious that they’re very busy trying to be professional footballers, trying to do full-time education, and actually they need a bit of guidance and support to get those bits and pieces done.
“It’s really important to socialise it, because every young person at that age thinks they are going to make it [as a pro] and it [using the app] is not going to be necessary, but the harsh reality in football is that most of them won’t.
“If we can help them now to demonstrate and understand the skills that they are showing, we can help them into the longer term. That’s why we’re putting this emphasis on using it as a tool to achieve the goals that we want, which is for readily-available football understanding of that player but also their transferable skills, their achievements, so that we can support them in whichever journey they end up taking.
“It’s part of our player support package that they’ll be able to come at any point in order to check in on that with us and we’ll have the reviews built in within our programme to see where boys are up to in it, so some gentle cajoling and encouragement I’m sure will be required, but I think the longer-term benefits for the boys will be worth it.”
Yes, football’s really important, but it’s not all of who you are.
Sam Bayford
“Part of our aftercare at the end of your Academy journey is we will maintain access to Routes and hope they’ll keep it up and maintain it. Access to that won’t go away as part of our aftercare package – potentially until those boys are 23, 24, 25.
“In the longer term, we want to build a really extensive alumni network and it will actually be through the strength of that network that future aftercare options come up.”
Being a new Academy – in this iteration at least – Brentford have been able to start from scratch in terms of aftercare.
“We’re in a really unique position,” Bayford explained, “and because we’re so young as an Academy, we haven’t had the same volume of young people leaving our programme, but know that we will.
“We want to be really ambitious and want everyone who has been on their Academy journey with us to talk proudly of their time with us – and part of that is about that continued support.
“We know a lot about the fallout from football and the implications it can have for young people as they become adults and even into later adulthood with the loss of identity around football.
“This is one of a series of tools that we are going to use and approaches that we are going to make. Yes, football’s really important, but it’s not all of who you are and this leans really nicely into that in the aftercare space.”
The life skills the club are teaching the players go beyond football, including things like cookery classes.
“You’ve got to prepare these young people for life,” Bayford said. “The vast majority of them, even if they stay within football, may not be in a position to have that personal chef or a meal delivery service.
“If you’ve got a young man who you know is going out on loan, for example, and you know that he can cook himself four basic meals, there’s a level of reassurance that they’re going to be alright and we’re not going to get calls about flats full of smoke and stuff like that!
“Those sort of things are really positive steps to take and the nice thing is that, as a tool, Routes allows us to capture what those are going to be, to demonstrate to the boys what they are capable of. It can be really positive.”
It was Stephen Torpey, who became Academy Director in January 2024 after a decade at Manchester City, who set the target of developing the most caring and progressive Academy in the world.
Bayford said that ambition has “kept us all going, kept us on track.”
“To be caring is fundamental, because if you feel cared for, if you feel safe, then you are willing to be brave, you are willing to take risks, you are therefore willing to fail,” he said.
“It’s a lynchpin that sits underneath everything we try and do. As Thomas Frank says quite often, it’s about ‘having brilliant basics’.
“If, every time a young person walks in, they are greeted by their name, with a smile, then we are creating the right environment for them to go on and be in a state of mind and body to achieve the best they can.”
To find out more about Routes, contact sales@routes-app.com
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