Academy contracts

[Sting of the North]

Then why bother with it when we can just go back to the old way of doing it, using scouts.

Brentford have made a success of doing just that. And remember our last really successfull home grown talent was Sean Davis and he was pre Academy.

I seem to remember someone called Ryan Sessegnon that made over 100 first team appearances for us, being named Championship player of the season, being instrumental in our promotion to the PL and netting us a profit of 20-25 million or so. I would say that is at least moderately successful, but we may have different opinions on what constitutes a success. That is without discussing the Rodak's and , Woodrows, Christensens and Carvalho's and such.

I agree, I'd say that our academy has produced a very high number of good senior players in the last 10 years:
Kerim Frei
Neil Etheridge
Pat Roberts
Cauley Woodrow
Tankovic
LVC
Dan Burn
Moussa Dembele
Ryan Williams
Jesse Joronen
Emerson Hyndman
De La Torre
Tayo Edun
Ryan & Steven Sessegnon
Marek Rodak
Matt O Reilly
Harvey Elliott
Stansfield, Francois and Carvalho in the current set up.

There's also those playing that we had a hand in but didn't give a debut to (all of those above, we did).

You can go even further with this list and name a number of younger players we released/sold very cheaply currently playing in the championship in Elijah Adebayo & Djed Spence, with several more like Cam Burgess, Denis Adeniran Stevie Humphreys in League 1. I'm fairly sure last season we got recognised for having the best academy in the country based on the amount of players we produce now playing professional football in the top 4 leagues of this country.

I think the problem we as a club have had since 2014 is that our league position has been unstable due to forever being in a promotion or relegation battle, which is a harder environment to bed in academy players because you want more experienced players in that situation. As a result they see their path to the first team blocked and then get their head turned by a bigger club's academy (and salary offer) or a smaller club's first team offer further down the leagues. It says a lot about the current ability and potential of Carvalho, Francois and Pajazati that they're making a name for themselves and getting into the first team in a squad that is expected to be top 2 this year (as well as a manager that thankfully has faith in them).

Excellent post (and excellent list by Jim before that).