The descent of former Liverpool and England youth footballer Jamie Cassidy into drug-related criminal activities has cast a spotlight on the less glamorous paths of football academy dropouts who fail to progress to professional playing careers.

Cassidy played alongside future stars Michael Owen and Jamie Carragher in Liverpool’s 1996 FA Youth Cup winning team, beating a West Ham side that included Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand, who later played for England.

The budding attacking midfielder was earmarked to star in both club and country, having also won a place at the English Football Association’s centre of excellence as a teenager, ahead of future England and Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard.

But while Cassidy’s former teammates and adversaries on the pitch have built illustrious playing careers, the 46-year-old is now facing the prospect of a lengthy spell in prison.

On March 20, Cassidy and two of his associates, one being his elder brother Jonathan, will face sentencing in Manchester for crimes involving the supply of drugs worth several millions of dollars and the laundering of drug money.

Drug conspiracy

The three men were arrested in 2020 after the police infiltrated the group’s communications on EncroChat, an encrypted platform favoured by criminals who assumed their messages were difficult to intercept.

That assumption proved inaccurate when the platform was cracked in 2020 by French intelligence services, who shared what it found with British law enforcement agencies, The Times of London reported.

Evidence from chats over a six-week period helped British prosecutors to establish that the Cassidy brothers and their business partner Nasar Ahmed masterminded a conspiracy that culminated in the sale of narcotics in Britain.

The elder brother was said to be an established top-tier importer of cocaine, while Cassidy was responsible for its distribution to northern cities including Liverpool, Manchester as well as Glasgow in Scotland.

The online chats helped prosecutors to trap the trio, who brought 356kg of cocaine from South America into the United Kingdom via Amsterdam. According to the National Crime Agency, the drugs had a street value of more than £28 million (S$48 million).

Cassidy, who would have previously been more preoccupied with the statistics of assists and goals, was in charge of bookkeeping and balancing the books for the criminal operation, and keeping track of cocaine sourced from cartels in countries like Colombia and Brazil and delivered to Europe for millions of pounds.

The three have been remanded since 2021 while awaiting trial. In February 2024, they pleaded guilty on the eve of their trial.

A promising career shattered

While many young footballers fail to reach the heights of playing in the English Premier League, Cassidy had been tipped to make the cut, according to his former teammates and coaches.

Former Liverpool defender Carragher, who won the European Cup with the Reds, wrote in his autobiography that Cassidy would have been a “certain Liverpool regular if he hadn’t suffered so much with injuries”.

Cassidy played for England in the Under-16 European Championship in 1994, scoring three times. Then in 1996, he was among a number of promising players to be offered first-team contracts after helping Liverpool win its first FA Youth Cup.

He was also invited to the senior England set-up by then manager Glenn Hoddle, after being recommended as a “future international” by a club coach.

But Cassidy suffered a series of injuries that heavily hamstrung his career, eventually leading to him being released by Liverpool without appearing for the Merseyside club’s first team.

He played in England’s lower leagues, including a stint with Cambridge United, and last played for Burscough in 2001. He retired at the age of 29 because of injury, according to The Times.

While it was unclear when Cassidy started his forays into the drug trafficking business, the Cassidy brothers were named in 2016 and 2018 as co-directors of building developer companies by the British government. The companies, which have since been dissolved, bought land sites and also a cinema.

Cassidy’s candid sharing in Men In White Suits, a book about Liverpool players in the 1990s, revealed an insight into his mental health after he left Liverpool.

“You lose what you had before. When you play football, it masks a multitude of problems. You get up every day, you’ve got that drive and happiness, a routine,” he told journalist and author Simon Hughes.

“You swipe that away and you’re left with frustration. You’re left with a lot of unused energy because your body is used to blood running through it. It can be very destructive. It feels like you’re floating or drifting along with no purpose.”

While footballers like Gerrard and Carragher went on to become Liverpool icons etched in club folklore with their playing exploits and trophy-laden careers, others like Cassidy dropped out of the professional football system at various stages of their careers, shutting the door on their dreams overnight.

The English Football Association estimated in 2023 that of the 1.5 million youth footballers in England, only around 180 or 0.012 per cent of them may make the grade as a professional in the Premier League.

Current Liverpool vice-captain Trent Alexander-Arnold, another home-grown Scouser who came through the local academy, in 2023 launched The After Academy, to help provide career opportunities to former youth prospects who are released by their clubs.

“I want any kid or any footballer who gets released from a football club to have somewhere to turn to,” he told the BBC, as some of these players are ill-prepared for life outside the sport that they have immersed themselves in.

The career opportunities that await these young, rejected players may still be some distance away from the glitz and glamour of the top-tier Premier League and its accompanying multi-million pound contracts.

But the hope is that they would steer them further away from the paths that some like Cassidy have chosen.