What's the point of the academy?
Is it just a farm for the big 6?
Why develop the youngsters and let them make their mistakes in order to groom them for the big time especially when we're trying to get promoted?
I'm sick of it.
Whenever some on this board restlessly scream " play the kids!"
I say, why put them in the shop window so Spurs can play their game and we get left short with a depleted team?
Career progression is something that happens in all professions, not just football - most people would accept a better paid position with better prospects if it was offered to them and sites like Linkedin and recruitment consultants exist to facilitate this
The advantage that soccer clubs have is that they get compensation, a transfer or development fee, for successfully developing a player, in other walks of life employees just have to give notice before they leave without any compensation being paid
Playing the kids not only allows us to progress their development, which increases the fee we would receive, but also saves the cost of buying in players that other clubs have developed.
So don't feel bad about it - it's life
If we buy ready players and they're good they'll also go to a top 6 side, as seen with Saha, VdS, Dembele etc. Clearly the only solution is to get bad players.
:yay:
Quote from: Tabby on September 07, 2019, 09:38:35 AM
If we buy ready players and they're good they'll also go to a top 6 side, as seen with Saha, VdS, Dembele etc. Clearly the only solution is to get bad players.
Don't worry our academy is not that good, they don't produce Premier League quality players every season.
Now look at Southampton their fans really have reasons for complaint.
Quote from: Tabby on September 07, 2019, 09:38:35 AM
If we buy ready players and they're good they'll also go to a top 6 side, as seen with Saha, VdS, Dembele etc. Clearly the only solution is to get bad players.
Woops - please don't tell TK this
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Quote from: Roberty on September 07, 2019, 10:34:22 AM
Quote from: Tabby on September 07, 2019, 09:38:35 AM
If we buy ready players and they're good they'll also go to a top 6 side, as seen with Saha, VdS, Dembele etc. Clearly the only solution is to get bad players.
Woops - please don't tell TK this
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I am with you terry , it infuriates me , but it's how the game is now.
It makes me think we'll always be like it feeding the giants, we're not the only club doing it.
Big money has made the whole game/process like this now and at my ripe old age I feel I'll never see us as good as we were in the Los 1st division, mind you only a couple of seasons the rest of the time there we continually hanging on. How can we make serious headway when our better players are constantly nicked off us. For me it started when Allan Clarke went to Leeds.
Forgive me for possibly being dim, but how many of our academy players have been snapped up by spurs? I can actually only think of Sess and Sean Davis, though we got many years of service out of him.
Obviously Dembélé and Dempsey moves there but they were not academy players at the club.
Bobbo, I believe Allan Clarke went to Leicester before Leeds. Didn't we get a donkey called Frank Large in part exchange? Your point is spot on though. We let him go too cheaply. (Along with Rodney Marsh, Malcolm McDonald, Alan Mullery etc).
To me, the issue could be brought under control by limiting the size of a team and the number of loans a team can engage in. A team like the scum buy up every player they can get their hands on when the player is just beginning. They loan them out and the odd 10-15% that come good end up at the Bridge while they that don't, (Michael Hector) are sold to the also ran's. I suspect at a profit. The thing that keeps the top six on top is the control of the talent. The loan system helps the top six pay for that talent. Limit the squad size to say 25 with a maximum of five loans. The youth teams could remain as is but a player moving up to the "A" team would require some one moving down. A player could move up because of an injury or falling out of favor. Yes the best players would still be at the top teams but that third striker that the scum are hording would be some were else. It likely would make a Steve Sess think before moving, knowing he'd be stuck in the under 23's. He'd stay at FFC, learn his craft and either opt to continue to dance with the horse that brung him or move on at a higher value once he is an established star.
I agree
How many players would be in the PL if they weren't controlled by Chelsea?
They send them to teams who don't compete with them and simply farm them for profit.
I guess what's bothering me is that noises are already being made of Steve Sess leaving to Spurs in January.
Just like Levy with Man United - he will not sell it trade with, we should adopt it with Levy and Spurs
Quote from: jarv on September 07, 2019, 10:02:25 PM
Bobbo, I believe Allan Clarke went to Leicester before Leeds. Didn't we get a donkey called Frank Large in part exchange? Your point is spot on though. We let him go too cheaply. (Along with Rodney Marsh, Malcolm McDonald, Alan Mullery etc).
your right jarv, long term memory usually good it's what happened yesterday that fails me 👍
The feeder argument has been around for a long time but one thing has not changed since I have watched football. Successful clubs breed successful players and successful players breed successful clubs, a proverbial chicken and egg conundrum that is only satisfied by the rule that both are true.
At the top of team sport successful clubs win things but there are fewer things to win than there are successful clubs and so successful players will tend to migrate to where their chances of winning stuff are greater. Winning stuff generally means more income and greater affluence or security.
Younger players pick up those same notions both from the examples of their elders and via their own experiences as players winning a title, tournament, being picked to play for a national team and receiving praise from off field elders and betters. There are different ways young players respond to praise and success and it usually boils down to who has the greater influence over their particular mind set at any one time. Ambition can be indulged with or successfully tempered.
A youngster may have a terrific rapport with a successful coach or manager and then the team has a setback following success and the youngster's mentor is suddenly gone. The law of unintended consequence takes over and everything about the club may now be unsettling rather than enriching. That situation is soon circulating among those who are at least a step up the food chain.
The food chain these days has larger steps between its groupings and that simply emphasizes the attraction of the opportunity to move away from apparent instability towards something that seems more solid. That next step up may actually prove to be a fragile place but who could blame anyone for trying it?
If Steven is as good as his brother then he'll almost certainly move on at some point. But what if he proves to be much better than his brother – what then?
The way I see it is this; if the player is from the academy then they can't move till their 20. And when they do, they HAVE to be played buy the buying club and not loaned out. Guaranteed you'll see less of the old "buy a player and loan him out for 4 seasons and then sell him" malarkey.
The Brentford model is an interesting one.
Their academy was costing £2.5m to run and the competition from other London clubs more often than not meant that the promising ones would get snapped up elsewhere rather than turn professional and graduate to their first team.
So they closed their academy 3 years ago and switched the focus to picking up 17 to 20 year-olds who have been released by Premier League academies to try and bring them along via a B-team.
Has it worked?
Last season, four B-teamers played for the first team, more than the number of homegrown players who had made their debuts in any one season in over a decade.
It's certainly food for thought...
Quote from: Burt on September 08, 2019, 10:24:14 AM
The Brentford model is an interesting one.
Their academy was costing £2.5m to run and the competition from other London clubs more often than not meant that the promising ones would get snapped up elsewhere rather than turn professional and graduate to their first team.
So they closed their academy 3 years ago and switched the focus to picking up 17 to 20 year-olds who have been released by Premier League academies to try and bring them along via a B-team.
Has it worked?
Last season, four B-teamers played for the first team, more than the number of homegrown players who had made their debuts in any one season in over a decade.
It's certainly food for thought...
.
Did not know that, thanks Burt, it certainly is food for thought as they continue to produce good young players.
Brentford model is interesting and something is working well for them !!!! As for Spurs; hate everything to do with them but it's just natural selection. The best players slowly find their way to the bigger teams.
We do our fair share of snapping up young players from smaller clubs than our own but I don't want SSess to go to Spurs... however they now have the ultimate weapon on their ranks to persuade him to come 😢
In reality what does it matter as long as we get well paid for him
Quote from: Burt on September 08, 2019, 10:24:14 AM
The Brentford model is an interesting one.
Their academy was costing £2.5m to run and the competition from other London clubs more often than not meant that the promising ones would get snapped up elsewhere rather than turn professional and graduate to their first team.
So they closed their academy 3 years ago and switched the focus to picking up 17 to 20 year-olds who have been released by Premier League academies to try and bring them along via a B-team.
Has it worked?
Last season, four B-teamers played for the first team, more than the number of homegrown players who had made their debuts in any one season in over a decade.
It's certainly food for thought...
Certainly agree it's working for them.
Equally, on those numbers (£2.5m per year) you could argue our academy, which has been more successful than theirs was ever likely to be, is probably working for us. £25m for Sessegnon, say £5m for Roberts (assuming most of the performance-related payments will never be triggered), £4m for Adeniran apparently, perhaps another £5m for Elliott and Hyndman at tribunal, a few million for the others we've sold like Stockdale, Woodrow, Trotta and LVC, plus I'd value the couple of seasons we had out of Dembele, Sessegnon, LVC et al at 10m at least, and now Steven Sessegnon and Rodak look like £5-10m players...oh and Bettinelli... I reckon it equates to something like £10m per season worth of benefit, so well profitable
Quote from: Statto on September 08, 2019, 12:33:08 PM
Quote from: Burt on September 08, 2019, 10:24:14 AM
The Brentford model is an interesting one.
Their academy was costing £2.5m to run and the competition from other London clubs more often than not meant that the promising ones would get snapped up elsewhere rather than turn professional and graduate to their first team.
So they closed their academy 3 years ago and switched the focus to picking up 17 to 20 year-olds who have been released by Premier League academies to try and bring them along via a B-team.
Has it worked?
Last season, four B-teamers played for the first team, more than the number of homegrown players who had made their debuts in any one season in over a decade.
It's certainly food for thought...
Certainly agree it's working for them.
Equally, on those numbers (£2.5m per year) you could argue our academy, which has been more successful than theirs was ever likely to be, is probably working for us. £25m for Sessegnon, say £5m for Roberts (assuming most of the performance-related payments will never be triggered), £4m for Adeniran apparently, perhaps another £5m for Elliott and Hyndman at tribunal, a few million for the others we've sold like Stockdale, Woodrow, Trotta and LVC, plus I'd value the couple of seasons we had out of Dembele, Sessegnon, LVC et al at 10m at least, and now Steven Sessegnon and Rodak look like £5-10m players...oh and Bettinelli... I reckon it equates to something like £10m per season worth of benefit, so well profitable
Is your argument that the academy is a cash generator rather than a training ground for future starters? To me, that would mean that ownership has accepted second class status and the same would be true for every team outside the top six. One can't really know why a man would plunk down millions to buy a team and then accept his allotted place. I find it hard to believe that a self made man like Khan wants to be a second rate football owner. I'd say that its in his DNA to be top dog. That, I'm sure is true of most owners.
Most clubs are at the mercy of the Big Six. Hard to hold on to a player when Champions league is available. Clubs like Leicester & Palace have demanded top price which does help but Man U still get what they want
Quote from: YankeeJim on September 08, 2019, 05:14:22 PM
Is your argument that the academy is a cash generator rather than a training ground for future starters? To me, that would mean that ownership has accepted second class status and the same would be true for every team outside the top six. One can't really know why a man would plunk down millions to buy a team and then accept his allotted place. I find it hard to believe that a self made man like Khan wants to be a second rate football owner. I'd say that its in his DNA to be top dog. That, I'm sure is true of most owners.
Not really sure what you mean.
We absolutely are a "second rate" team - we aren't going to compete with the top 6 anytime soon - and I'm quite sure SK appreciates that.
I'm not suggesting SK has "accepted" us being "second rate" forever, or that he's looking to make a profit from FFC, but irrespective of his wealth and ambitions, we're constrained by FFP, and also he's said repeatedly he wants to do things in what he calls a "sustainable" way. So everything we do is driven by "cash generation" to a large extent because, provided the cash we generate is recycled back into the team, that's what will deliver future success in a sustainable way and without breaching FFP.
To give some other examples, the justification for the Riverside Stand was the future revenue streams it will deliver. TK has also talked about signing players with resale value etc, and where we've had the opportunity to profit from selling a player (eg Aluko or Malone) we've done that notwithstanding their importance to the team at the time. But all those funds go back into the team.
Patently, we look to acquire players as cheaply as possible, so even if you treat the academy as a "training ground for future starters", that's only attractive to the extent those "future starters" are cheaper to develop in the academy than they are to buy in the transfer market.
Most of the academy players (Elliott aside) will spend a season or two in our team before moving on, so I'm not sure that being a "training ground for future starters" and "cash generator" are mutually exclusive, but anyway, even to the extent the academy is a "cash generator", well it's no different to the Riverside Stand in that respect.
Quote from: Andy S on September 08, 2019, 12:12:57 PM
In reality what does it matter as long as we get well paid for him
We must be realistic that any player good enough to play for Fulhan at 19 years old probably could play for a much better team at 25 years old and probably will. Our problem with playing young players, is most of youth players have short contracts. The only young players with long contracts are Steven Sessegnon, Onamah, Rodak and Kamara.
Most of these young players would have been offerred longer contracts at so called low wages (but wages most doctors would consider very good), but most prefer to keep their options open and hang out for better offers that maybe coming. There is not much point playing Matt Riley or Fossey when they need to make a few mistakes to improve and can leave at the end of the year.
It seems pretty obvious Brentford's business model concentrates on best return for expenditure in their case and that their academy was not producing that. The switch to picking up rejects of a suitable age from other academies to benefit from their excess training ground capacity and facilities has produced positive financial and performance improvements. This may suggest that for some clubs there are just too many competing academies in the same area to benefit all of them.
My own view is that football academies may be too narrow and restrictive in areas where there are large numbers of professional football clubs. I also don't believe you are ever going to stop cherry picking of young talent unless it was made illegal to do so and in a free market that seems very unlikely to happen once a young person is of working age.
Whether the checks and balances of compensation are fit for purpose is a whole different subject. The authorities could place a specific percentage value on any individual's employment worth - throughout their sporting career – if they have spent the necessary qualifying period in any single academy - rather like a royalty that is collected and paid to that academy. Of course even that would need some clever control mechanisms in place to defeat the wide boys.
Maybe clubs that have their Academy players poached by bigger clubs should automatically get a buy on clause on future sale of the player.This may also inhibit the buying club from poaching in the first place.
Quote from: YankeeJim on September 08, 2019, 05:14:22 PM
Quote from: Statto on September 08, 2019, 12:33:08 PM
Quote from: Burt on September 08, 2019, 10:24:14 AM
The Brentford model is an interesting one.
Their academy was costing £2.5m to run and the competition from other London clubs more often than not meant that the promising ones would get snapped up elsewhere rather than turn professional and graduate to their first team.
So they closed their academy 3 years ago and switched the focus to picking up 17 to 20 year-olds who have been released by Premier League academies to try and bring them along via a B-team.
Has it worked?
Last season, four B-teamers played for the first team, more than the number of homegrown players who had made their debuts in any one season in over a decade.
It's certainly food for thought...
Certainly agree it's working for them.
Equally, on those numbers (£2.5m per year) you could argue our academy, which has been more successful than theirs was ever likely to be, is probably working for us. £25m for Sessegnon, say £5m for Roberts (assuming most of the performance-related payments will never be triggered), £4m for Adeniran apparently, perhaps another £5m for Elliott and Hyndman at tribunal, a few million for the others we've sold like Stockdale, Woodrow, Trotta and LVC, plus I'd value the couple of seasons we had out of Dembele, Sessegnon, LVC et al at 10m at least, and now Steven Sessegnon and Rodak look like £5-10m players...oh and Bettinelli... I reckon it equates to something like £10m per season worth of benefit, so well profitable
Is your argument that the academy is a cash generator rather than a training ground for future starters? To me, that would mean that ownership has accepted second class status and the same would be true for every team outside the top six. One can't really know why a man would plunk down millions to buy a team and then accept his allotted place. I find it hard to believe that a self made man like Khan wants to be a second rate football owner. I'd say that its in his DNA to be top dog. That, I'm sure is true of most owners.
Name 5 Manchester City academy players in their first team?
An interesting perspective on the difficulties successful academies are experiencing in keeping promising youngsters, in this case Exeter City:
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/14728/11805574/inside-exeter-city8217s-academy-the-small-club-developing-big-talent
Includes a reference to the transfer of Jay Stansfield to Fulham:
"As Exeter's reputation has grown they have become a target. Sean Goss left for United in 2015. More recently, Jay Stansfield was sold to Fulham in the summer, aged just 16, on the basis that it was more than they would have received in the arbitration. "It is very difficult for us. Something must be done because it is not fair. The danger is that academies close. "
I would agree with these sentiments completely!
Quote from: Andy S on September 08, 2019, 12:12:57 PM
In reality what does it matter as long as we get well paid for him
Pretty much my view in a nutshell. Young players who are perceived to have very high potential wil almost always get cherry picked by the top 6-8 clubs. I don't care if it's spuds or wherever (but preferably not Chelsea, as long as we get properly paid.
Quote from: copthornemike on September 09, 2019, 02:06:36 PM
An interesting perspective on the difficulties successful academies are experiencing in keeping promising youngsters, in this case Exeter City:
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/14728/11805574/inside-exeter-city8217s-academy-the-small-club-developing-big-talent
Includes a reference to the transfer of Jay Stansfield to Fulham:
"As Exeter's reputation has grown they have become a target. Sean Goss left for United in 2015. More recently, Jay Stansfield was sold to Fulham in the summer, aged just 16, on the basis that it was more than they would have received in the arbitration. "It is very difficult for us. Something must be done because it is not fair. The danger is that academies close. "
I would agree with these sentiments completely!
Huddersfield closed their academy a couple of years ago as well for similar reasons to Brentford but that is the way of the world. The week that Elliot went to Liverpool, we got the lad from Exeter and in that case we were the 'big bad club'. I agree with Statto though that we have seen more value from our academy than most either through player sales or players making to the 1st team, thus saving on transfer fees.
I saw a video recently in which a professional English football academy insider showed statistics which prove that the average youngster attending has a 0.025% chance of making an appearance for a Premier League club in their entire playing careers. Now there were lots of side issues to these statistics explained in the video (e.g. decided not to pursue football career; chose another sport; had little chance on joining etc) but the overriding factor was that the standard required for a successful PL career is becoming increasingly higher and there are just too many stumbling blocks for all but the most talented of the bunch. The suggestion is that there are just too many academies.
