Six months. That is how long it took Iyiola Adebayo to go from captaining West Ham United's youth side to delivering pizzas for Domino's just to make ends meet, a fall from a promising academy career that ONE has revisited as part of a wider look at how football deals with the players it discards.
Adebayo joined West Ham's academy at the age of eight, entering the same production line that had already turned out Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole and Declan Rice. He was talented enough to be handed a development scholarship ahead of the rest of his age group, a marker the club reserves for its most promising prospects.
The trajectory changed in his very first year on scholarship terms, when a dislocated shoulder derailed his progress. He still managed appearances for West Ham's under-21 and under-23 sides and wore the captain's armband for the youth team, but at 16, and while still not fully recovered from his injury, he was released.
What followed was a familiar but brutal cycle for released academy players: trials at other clubs while operating, by his own estimate, at only "probably 50-60% of what I was capable of" because of the lingering injury. Nothing came of them.
"Sometimes I didn't want to be there, I wanted to go home. It was very difficult," Adebayo has said of that period, describing how deeply his sense of self had been tied up in being a West Ham player. To get by, he took a part-time job delivering pizzas for Domino's.
The turning point came through the Premier League Futures programme, launched in 2017 to support players released between the ages of 18 and 24, as well as academy prospects under 16 who are let go without a professional contract. Adebayo was initially reluctant to take part, but a former head of education at West Ham pointed him toward it, and he eventually engaged with the scheme.
Now 23, Adebayo is completing a sponsored degree in football business and marketing at the University Campus of Football Business. He has also begun delivering mental health and lifestyle workshops to current academy players through Sporting Chance, the welfare charity founded by former Arsenal captain Tony Adams.
His plan is to move into player care within a club before transitioning to the business or commercial side of the sport, a route that keeps him inside the game he grew up in without needing a professional contract to justify it.
It is a story ONE frames as a reminder of English football's brutal release rate at academy level, and of the small but growing infrastructure, in programmes like Premier League Futures and charities like Sporting Chance, built to catch the players who fall through.
