Jamie's Story

Here at the Academy we offer a unique opportunity for young aspiring footballers to come and explore their potential, whilst benefiting from a holistic support package.

We have areas within the JLFA encouraging partnerships please feel free to contact us in regards to this.

JLFA have been featured in the Daily Mail, Times Online and Wikipedia! This coverage from within the media, has been greatly welcomed as positive.

Our purpose is to enable the opportunities for the young people coming through the JLFA. We welcome positive feedback and below are a few links to the pertaining.

Your game meet Jamie Lawrence

While Beckham's facility in Greenwich can boast being the largest in Europe, the set-up at the Nightingale School in Tooting is altogether more threadbare. Four temporary goals adorn a patch of grass that is home to the Jamie Lawrence Football Academy and its existence owes much to the former Bradford star's past.

Lawrence, who earned 42 caps playing for Jamaica and played for eight clubs in the four English divisions, spent two periods in prison but it was while inside that a prison officer spotted his ability and showed him the path to become a professional.

Now, the 38-year-old is offering similar guidance to a blend of expelled pupils, semi-professionals on the cusp of making it and, on occasions, players such as Crystal Palace's Clinton Morrison.

And the venture has also aided a turnaround in the Nightingale school's fortunes after years of decline.

From Prison to the Premership

Gurney proudly regards himself as a committed pupil of the year-old academy in Tooting, south London, that works with underprivileged young people.

Lawrence, who played for eight different clubs in all four English divisions and earned 42 caps for Jamaica, paces the touchline shouting encouraging words.

To an outsider it may appear an average match between some enthusiastic local boys, but the work that goes on here is anything but average. 'It can be a case of literally saving and changing lives,' said Lawrence.

And changing lives is something that Lawrence, 38 and born in nearby Balham, knows all about. Tales of gang violence punctuate his accounts of his teenage bad-boy years when he admits to being a one-man crime wave.

At 17 he was arrested for robbery and, once released, he only had three trouble-free months before finding himself back inside with a four-year sentence.

It was during this time, in Camp Hill prison on the Isle of Wight, that the seemingly absurd notion of success in professional football slowly presented itself.

With the encouragement of Dale Thompson, then player-manager of Cowes Sports on the island, Lawrence joined their team. On release he signed with Sunderland and then went to Bradford, where he made 156 appearances. The picture Lawrence paints of himself in his professional football days conjures a strikingly different image to the one that he presents today.

He had inhabited a world of champagne- fuelled nights, casual sex and general materialism. In short, a glamourised lifestyle which, to these teenagers, may only appear attainable through crime.

'I always tell them the bad-boy lifestyle is awful. You can't trust anyone and you're constantly looking over your shoulder, not just for police, but fellow gangsters as well.

Jamie Lawrence Studies

Movin’ On Up provides prisoners with an opportunity to hear from and meet a number of role models, drawn from football as well as other sports, music and the media, in a session designed to help raise motivation and achievement.

The events also look at the effects of discrimination both within football, sport generally and within the wider community. Panel members are on hand to recite and share experiences of discrimination with attendees urged to do likewise.