BBC... Liverpool very likely to sign youngster Harvey Elliot

[Two Ton Ted]

Not sure it's on this thread, but, Darren Gough on Talk Sport suggested he may well stay with Liverpool for a while but then will be sold for up to 90 million,,,,, he is that good. 

I find these statements ridiculous. Injury, attitude, drugs, there are so many reasons why a young player will not fulfil their potential.

[FFC1987]

Not sure it's on this thread, but, Darren Gough on Talk Sport suggested he may well stay with Liverpool for a while but then will be sold for up to 90 million,,,,, he is that good. 

I find these statements ridiculous. Injury, attitude, drugs, there are so many reasons why a young player will not fulfil their potential.

What exactly is he basing that on? Has he seen him train for months? Coached him?

[Mince n Tatties]

Darren Gough the drunken sex pest from Talk nonsense😵

[General]

Can't help but wonder what the circumstances around this is and whether we shot ourselves in the foot or not with the way we approached him and giving him playing time so early on without having him tied down to a longer contract.

I know ambitious people can simply be impatient but even that can be managed if you know the player well enough, earn their trust and they have belief in the coaching staff to get them to their desired level.

I'm not sure I get the point in playing someone at 15 and what it ever achieves apart from headlines. Does not to little good to the club's bottom line.

There's also issues around the contractual situation of our young players. So often we do nothing with them or fail to tie them down. Why? What's their ambition level and why aren't we showing similar ambition in showing our support for them.

Our academy is meant to be one of the best in the country. Lose dembele to Celtic and he gets bought for 19 million. Lose Roberts early on and he goes all over the place as with hyndman.. where's the perspective we give the players.

If we keep getting rid of them it's only going to be natural that the only place they think they can be ambitious is away from the club.

Must sort this key component of running a successful club and academy out. Otherwise it simply defeats the point.

[toshes mate]

This topic, and another that recently appeared about FFC losing its younger talents, got me thinking about the football academy business, how it earns its living and how it makes money.  There is surprisingly little information about academies, their costs, their reputations, and their benefits or otherwise to football talents either within football and the football authorities or from parents and players who have used them.  There is, as a certain football boss might say, a remarkable absence of statistical data, or, indeed any data.  I did however find some research done by a father who was trying to find the most suitable football academy for his son, the costs and the potential success rates.  This man has conducted his own research and produced a table of success weighted outcomes for over eighty EFL clubs in 2017/18.  The research is quite detailed but only as far as the information available allows, and that, as the father warns in his abstract, is down to the amazing lack of data made publicly available.

The father's table shows the top club academies were the usual suspects (the Manchester PL clubs and the London PL clubs etc.), with Fulham down in 22nd place, below clubs such as Middlesbrough, Charlton, Reading and some others.  The table shows FFC to have about a third of the outcome success rate of the top club, and about half the potential of the main bulk of the top ten.  After that the range narrows into a competitive band where there seems to be much less difference between clubs.

It crossed my mind that if the football authorities got a little tougher on academies and a little more open and public about what these academies should and should not do, then dads and their kids wouldn't face such a difficulty in finding a suitable place to try to become a successful professional footballer without risking considerable financial outlay for low success outcomes.