West Brom's Steve Hopcroft working for club and kids

Ever since Albion’s highly-rated head of junior recruitment arrived at the Baggies back in 2004, he’s wanted to change that.

So now he’s plunged more than half his annual budget into a new boys’ club called Soho Albion.

What makes it different is it’s completely free to attend, so no families will be excluded on financial grounds, West Midlands Police and a church missionary are involved and, crucially for Hopcroft, there’s a pathway to the Albion academy.

More than 1,000 boys from the Soho area have been watched since February, and they have now been whittled down into four teams from under-sevens to under-10s that will be entering the Sandwell Minor League this September. Some 50 of those boys are already on the academy’s radar.

“I was brought up in a single-parent family,” said Hopcroft. “My mum’s first priority wasn’t to get me into a football team, so it wasn’t until we moved out of Winson Green and went to a new area in Northfield that I realised some of the boys were playing organised football.

“I was lucky enough to play organised football, and got signed by a professional club, Shrewsbury Town, when I was youngster.”

Although Hopcroft never made it as a professional, he knows Shrewsbury wouldn’t have spotted him as a schoolboy if he wasn’t in an organised team.

Soho ward extends from The Hawthorns along the A41 to Hockley and encompasses parts of Winson Green, Smethwick, Bearwood and Ladywood.

There are 32 primary schools in the area with more than 6,000 boys in them. That’s thousands of potential young footballers growing up near The Hawthorns but there’s a lack of teams.

“I’ve always had it in my mind that I was going to try to work in areas that weren’t as affluent as others,” said Hopcroft. “Solihull, south Birmingham and Sutton are all well-funded. I wanted to support clubs in areas where its more challenging

“We’ve worked with Continetal Star in Handsworth for a long time, we did have a good association with Phoenix United in Newtown, which is where Saido Berahino came from.

“Then I started looking at where our academy players lived, a lot of the players that live close to the stadium in Ladywood, Handsworth and Winson Green were not picked up until they were 13 or 14 and they were playing junior clubs which were way outside of the area.

“They’re not starting to play football until later and they’re not playing where they live.

“So I went to the 32 primary schools in the ward of Soho. We invited all the boys aged six-11 to come to a day at the academy dome near the ground.

“We had over 1,000 boys turn up – around 950 had never been to a match. And we invited 200 to start a training programme, which runs every Saturday morning at Summerfield Park.

“It will be the first club of its kind any Premier League club runs exclusively. Over 50 per cent of my annual budget is going into it. We’re putting a huge amount of resources into it, so it can be free for the parents.

“The whole purpose is to find players for the academy at a young age, and to find them from close to where we are. The kids are unpolished items, but if you find them early enough it will be a fantastic recruitment arm for West Brom.

“It’s also to create future supporters, future coaches, analysts, physiotherapists. There are now so many professions within football clubs, kids don’t just dream about being footballers, they can get involved in a number of areas.

“We’ve been training for seven weeks, last weekend we launched it officially. In a couple of weeks we’ll confirm the teams, but those who don’t make it can still come and train for free.”

Although Soho Albion is only entering four teams this time around, the plan is to add a new under-sevens team each season and grow it year-on-year.

“We’re doing it because we want boys playing, it will hopefully create a feel good factor in the area,” said Hopcroft.

“The police are really on board with it, we’re engaging boys from local communities that historically have had problems in the past when they get older and become teenagers.”

It’s not just the police who are involved. Also helping out are Ash and Anji Barker, a pair of Christian missionaries from Australia who have spent the past 23 years travelling the world searching for urban trouble-spots that need help.

Ash is a director of Soho Albion, and the man who inspired Hopcroft to take the plunge.

“They go into areas for five or ten years and run projects,” said Hopcroft. “They lived in the slums of Bangkok for 10 years. He started football teams, they played on muddy pieces of wasteland but some of the players become coaches and some of them become professionals in Thailand.

“Anji taught the kids to read and write, and some of the kids became teachers. They get projects up and running in the poorest areas.

“He is the pastor at the Newbiggin Centre in Winson Green. In the recent riots at Winson Green prison he was the only person allowed across the line to speak to the prisoners.

“When I met him, he told me what he did in Bangkok and I said, this is what I want to do, I want to start a football team that address these issues. Boys in our area are not playing until much later, how many are we losing?”

Hopcroft is one of the men who makes Albion tick. He’s the man who unearthed Saido Berahino at the age of 11, spotted Jonathan Leko, and brought in Izzy Brown.

Last year, Manchester United came calling, but Hopcroft signed a new deal at the Baggies, and now he’s determined to make his mark on the area.

“If the legacy I leave at West Brom is Soho Albion, I’ll be as proud of that as selling Saido for £12million,” he said. “Those are the things that last a lifetime, memories of Sunday league football, kids talking about the finals they got to. Those things are important to me, especially being brought up right next to it.”