With such a strong footballing bloodline, it seemed like destiny for Alexander Robertson to forge a career in the beautiful game, a feat easier said than done.
But that’s exactly what the Scottish-born, Maroubra-raised teenager is now doing.
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Alexander, the son and grandson of former Socceroos Mark and Alex, has the incredible fortune of rubbing shoulders with modern footballing royalty every day at Manchester City.
Look over one shoulder and Alexander sees Belgian midfield wizard Kevin de Bruyne.
Look over the other and there’s a goalscoring machine named Erling Haaland, with legendary manager Pep Guardiola overseeing it all.
Having earned a spot on the bench in Manchester City’s Champions League tie against RB Leipzig, Alexander is inching ever closer to his first minutes with the Premier League heavyweights.
Remarkably, he is also in the frame to become a third-generation Socceroo after being called up to the national team for the friendlies against Ecuador.
It is a dream footballing journey that has not been without its hindrances: a frustrating loan spell, a hellish run of injuries and a brutal home truth upon arrival in Manchester.
But it is also a journey his father and grandfather carefully mapped out in the strong belief he would succeed from as young as nine months.
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‘HE CAN’T BE JUMPING OUT OF COTS AT NINE MONTHS OLD’
In the middle of the night, Mark and his wife, Lucia, heard a noise.
They looked around the house for what it could have been, but nothing could be found.
All of a sudden, “a little shadow” appeared at the door: it was Alexander, who was only nine months old.
“He’d actually scaled out of the cot that he was sleeping in, jumped out and was able to manoeuvre his way through,” Mark told foxsports.com.au.
Alexander was then popped back into his cot, only for Mark and Lucia to scarcely believe what they’d see next.
“So he’s pacing up and down in this cot,” Mark said.
“Then, monkey-like, he’s just up and he’s over and then boom, he’s down on the floor.
“Then we looked at each other and thought, ‘He can’t be scaling and jumping out of cots at nine months old.’”
It wasn’t just his remarkable ability to escape the confines of his cot at such a young age either that had Mark thinking his youngest child had something special about him.
As an Australian footballer playing overseas in England, Mark had just about every bit of sporting equipment you could imagine in his backyard.
Footballs, cricket bats and balls, golf clubs and balls, trampolines; you name it, Mark probably had it.
A young Alexander took a keen eye to the golf equipment because, according to Mark, “kids tend to use their hands more than they do their feet.”
“He had this golf club and he was swinging a ball,” Mark said.
“90 per cent, 95 per cent of the time he was hitting the ball, whereas a lot of kids would just miss the ball. It was quite fascinating.
“I just remember thinking, ‘OK, that’s interesting.’”
At the time, Mark even thought he might have had a little Greg Norman on his hands.
But, as he’d learn in the coming years, his son would go on to forge a vastly different sporting career.
HOW ‘A LITTLE FEATHER’ BUILT THE FOUNDATIONS FOR A FOOTBALL CAREER
Mark’s playing days in the United Kingdom soon wrapped up, returning back to Australia in 2006 with Perth Glory before moving to Sydney FC in 2007.
The harbour city would then become where the Robertson’s would set up their roots, building a house in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
Mark knew he had to get his son playing some sort of sport, with football the obvious answer.
But he couldn’t enrol Alexander with the local club, Pagewood Botany FC, because children weren’t insured to play football until they turned five at the time.
Thus, Alexander tried his hand at rugby league with the Mascot Jets, with Mark hoping it would “toughen him up” given it was full contact, even at such a young age.
Yes, little Alexander, who Mark described as “just a little feather,” would attempt to take down significantly larger kids his age whilst also learning how to run in straight lines.
The multi-sport background continued at Bunnerong Gymnastics, a venue run by Mark’s parents, where Alexander would participate in various classes which helped to improve his balance skills.
Eventually the youngest Robertson would have a ball at his feet once he was old enough to play for Pagewood before moving to Maroubra United, Mark’s first grassroots club, for two years.
But it would be in Mark’s very own coaching academy, known as Mr. Soccer, where Alexander got endless amounts of time with the ball.
He would be at the afternoon session run by his old man every day of the week, no matter the level.
Then there was a select group of players, who Mark described as “the most elite footballers that you could get in the Eastern Suburbs,” that Alexander would train with.
Despite being a year or two younger than his peers, Alexander held his own in a group which included Zach Sapsford (now with the Western Sydney Wanderers), Oliver Jones (Macarthur FC) and Ryan Teague (Famalicao in Portugal) among others.
They would train four nights a week and have two games on the weekend, providing plenty of football for Alexander, who had also joined Hakoah Sydney City East’s under-12 team as a 10-year-old.
For all of the football Alexander was playing, it would prove to be nothing quite like the education he was about to receive.
WRESTLING, A CROSS-CITY DIVIDE AND THAT GUARDIAN ARTICLE
While Alexander enjoyed some time off from Westfield Sports High in the September school holidays of 2015, he and his dad went to English giants Manchester United for a number of training sessions.
It wouldn’t be long before all parties sat down for the conversation that would change the Robertson’s lives forever.
“They [Manchester United] said, ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news,’” Mark said.
“I was like, ‘Let’s start with the good.’
“United said, ‘He’s one of the best players that we’ve seen for a long, long time. The bad news is, you don’t live in the country.’”
As Mark says, “the rest is history.”
The Robertson clan made the full move over to England, but Alexander was unable to play structured football with the Red Devils just yet because he needed international clearance from FIFA.
So, how did the father keep his son fit?
By doing sessions on days off in the park.
Oh, and some sessions in the local leisure centre to improve his balance and core involving plenty of medicine and exercise balls.
As Mark says, “it was an important time for Alexander to really pick up on some of the stronger exercises” because he had to compete with boys far more physically mature than he was.
Yet there was another, more unconventional method, Mark employed to prepare his son for the physical rigours of English academy football.
“I just started doing a few different things with Alexander, then I started doing some wrestling with him, because I could see where it was going,” Mark said.
“He only had an older sister, he didn’t have any boys around him. It was just me and him.
“We’d start doing a bit of wrestling and grappling, not MMA, but it was quite full-on just to try and help him a little bit.”
Aside from a rude awakening on the physical side of football, Alexander had to rapidly pick up some technical aspects of the game too.
When Mark and his father, Alex, decided what would be the best way for the youngest Robertson to succeed, they decided it would be best if they “just allowed him the free ability to be on the ball” and “never, ever put shackles on him.”
He’d embark on mazy runs past two, three, even four opponents at a time which, by Mark’s own admission, “might have been a little bit frustrating for some of the players that played with him or some of the families that were standing on the sideline.”
But once he got to Carrington, United’s famous training facility, it was a whole different ball game.
“In terms of having the ability to scan fields and look for the next pass, Alexander was way off it when he got to Manchester United,” Mark said.
“That’s the biggest thing they said to me. They said he was an unbelievable player, but he just doesn’t have that understanding of where that next pass is going to go.”
Alexander wasted no time in picking up the technical skills needed to thrive and even though he was at a grand club like United, it didn’t stop the sharks from circling in the hopes they could prise him away.
As it turned out, it was United’s noisy neighbours, Manchester City, who convinced father and son to make the cross-city divide in 2017.
“They had a whole host of reasons why they wanted to sign him,” Mark said.
“They’d seen him on a nice pathway going through the academy and what he offered was a little bit different than to what they already had in the building.”
The switch has seemingly been the perfect fit to help Alexander realise his immense talent, although a number of lengthy spells on the sidelines due to injury at United and City have hindered his progress.
Primarily operating as a box-to-box midfielder for City who enjoys getting into the attacking third, he’s provided numerous goals and assists throughout the various age groups.
Such eye-catching form saw Alexander included in The Guardian’s list of the 60 best young talents in world football in 2020 alongside names like Jamal Musiala, Florian Wirtz and Xavi Simons to name three.
Did the praise ever get into Alexander’s head?
“He didn’t even give it a second look, mate,” Mark said.
“He’s never spoke about it, I’ve never spoke about it.
“I just said to him, ‘That’s what it is mate, it’s a newspaper article that no-one will remember unless you hit Google.’
“It would never, ever go to his head or my head, no chance.”
With plenty of hype surrounding Alexander, at least externally, there would be calls for him to move out on loan and log some minutes in senior football.
What transpired provided him with yet another brutal education in life as a footballer, but also one that perhaps taught him even more about himself as a person.
‘PROMISED THE WORLD AND DELIVERED AN ATLAS’
In July 2021, Alexander would get his first real taste of what it’s like to live out his dream, signing for Scottish Premiership side Ross County on a season-long loan.
By doing so, he became the second-youngest in the nation to go out on loan, beaten only by his City academy teammate Callum Doyle.
It also seemed like an ideal switch given Ross County boss Malky Mackay said he’d been tracking Alexander for “four years” upon signing the teenager.
For Alexander and Mark, they viewed the move as “work experience where you’re into a win-win situation,” but not purely for footballing reasons.
“You’re going to have conversations with men,” Mark said.
“If you’re not able to talk about music, if you’re not able to talk about cars or politics or fashion, if you can’t hold a conversation with adults, for me, you’re not going to make it as a footballer.
“There’s a lot of kids at Alexander and Callum’s age that couldn’t do that. They’d have crumbled if they were put in a changing room or cafeteria or a restaurant with adults, day-in, day-out.”
Thankfully, Alexander proved his value in the changing room.
“Everyone loved him, mate,” Mark said. “Everyone in the squad loved him. He really picked up some top, top friends that he’s still friends with now.”
Well, everyone but Mackay.
Robertson logged just five appearances in all competitions for Ross County for a combined 143 minutes in a deeply frustrating loan spell that was cut short in January 2022.
In the words of Mark, that was “a disaster.”
“For whatever Malky promised and for whatever he delivered, he may have promised the world and delivered an atlas,” Mark said.
“But hey, that’s football. You’ve just got move on.
“I’m sure later down the line Malky will say, ‘I’ve had a big part to play in his development,’ but at the time it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t nice.
“It was very difficult for the kid to be told that he’s going to have opportunities to play and, it’s public knowledge that if you go through the stats, he never actually got an opportunity to play.”
THE SOCCEROO COMPARISON DRIVING TEENAGER FORWARD INTO THE FUTURE
With Alexander now getting some needed game time and scoring goals for Manchester City in Premier League Two, the calls for him to go on loan may return in the summer.
An impressive cameo for the Socceroos, should he see any minutes in the friendlies against Ecuador, will only amplify those same calls.
The mere fact he’s in the Australian camp for these games is monumental given his international future has been a hot topic for a number of years.
Having played for England’s under-16, under-17 and under-18 teams there may have been a fear he could have stuck to the Three Lions pathway.
There were also loose reports in 2022 he had committed to Peru but those turned out to be incorrect, while Scotland were also on the table as an option.
Mark revealed his son had received a number of invites from different nations to train and perhaps even play for them, but there was one key issue: Alexander was never at full fitness.
“He’d always relucantly look at me when he was invited,” Mark said.
“I’d tell him, ‘You’d be crazy to join any of these because you’re not really going to give a good account of yourself.’”
Ultimately it was Australia who won the four-way tussle as Socceroos boss Graham Arnold’s persistence paid off.
Arnold was in contact with Alexander for “over 18 months” in his attempts to bring him into the national fold, noting it was “a matter of one step at a time.”
“It’s great that the kid, I do believe, is aligning himself with Australia,” Arnold said in his squad selection press conference.
“I’m pretty sure once he puts that Socceroos shirt on and feels the emblem on his heart, there’s only one nation he will play for.”
One player who Alexander would no doubt have been excited to speak with was Celtic midfielder Aaron Mooy, but he was forced to withdraw from the squad due to a back injury.
Mark, Alexander and his agent Paddy Dominguez, who used to count Mooy as a client, have used the Celtic midfielder as a case study to chart Alexander against to see where he was and how he looked at the City youngster’s age.
“We’ve always said that if Alexander ends up with a career of Aaron Mooy, we’d be totally stoked,” Mark said.
“Everyone’s got their own journey, but the three of us always talk about Aaron.”
In a twist of fate, Mooy’s absence may open up a spot for Alexander in the Socceroos lineup given Arnold planned to use the 32-year-old in a more advanced role compared to his usual position at the base of the Aussie midfield.
Whether Arnold’s team selection plays out in that scenario remains to be seen, as does Alexander getting any Socceroos minutes at all.
But, for the teenager who shocked his parents as early as nine months old, perhaps we must expect the unexpected when it comes to the career of Alexander Robertson.