itt an ongoing discussion about player development

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/217490/American-dream-for-Gunners Arsenal are joining Chelsea, Utd etc. in building a proper training development set-up in America but so far, none of these set-ups has succeeded (Utd have got a whole... 0 players out of their link with the Yankees).

So so many Premiership/English clubs are failing to bring through quality players. Compare this to Germany, where a team can sell an Ozil only to replace him with a Makin for free. The four most celebrated English coaches of the past decade ('Arry, Woy, Schteeve, thebig_sam) have bought through... Stewart Downing in the past ten years?

Almost all clubs are broke or learning that they can't spend wildly on transfers like they used to and yet seem to not be looking at how to acquire players any other way.

What is the problem(s)? Is it sack race, meaning that no-one has time to care about how their 9 year olds will turn out/needing immediate results and fan satisfaction bumps from buying new players? Are the English not technically proficient to be the best? Do teams just not know what they are doing?

Gradi's Crewe are p much widely acknowledged as the 'youth development' team of the football leagues, right? if they were in a financial position to keep their best, they would be a premiership club but they really, really aren't. Do people see youth development = Crewe = languishing in League 2? The same way that currently on a bigger scale Evra has just said player development = why Arsenal won't win the league this year. This is disregarding that Bayern and Barca have used youth development to not only make their team but their countries the elite, as English football is traditionally v. insular.

Reading Why England Lose, they argue that too many English players may be playing in the Premiership. With it being 'the best league in the world', only our elite should make it in against the best from other countries and those that are good enough to make it there are overplayed.

If we say a team (11 players) join the 20 Premiership academies a year, that is 220 English players. Over a decade, that is over two thousand players going into some of the most well-funded clubs in the country, incl. the likes of Utd, City, the London teams, the Merseyside teams & Villa who supposedly have terrific-to-state of the art training facilities. And yet from the 2000, we can only produce 10 or so who are potentially WORLD CLASS? Something very wrong has to be going on.

So what is everyones thoughts on the subject? Will things improve any time soon? What has to happen?

young english players have 'made it' once they make first team, cf micah richards. Development ends p much immediately after the first big contract.

why is that though?

why do english players seem to stop caring once they get rich, when players from other countries continue to strive for excellence when they hit big bucks?

cos yer a tabloid nation mayne

as opposed to... anywhere else in europe? spain has papers dedicated to lol barca and lol real and lol football

they've also got left backs with law degrees

youve got a gcse in latin.

Srsly, you are Bad People, overall. But good street skills, in fairness

Reading Why England Lose, they argue that too many English players may be playing in the Premiership. With it being 'the best league in the world', only our elite should make it in against the best from other countries and those that are good enough to make it there are overplayed.

don't get this really. the same goes for germany, italy and spain but they don't suck?

tony blair, the schools, the parents in reverse order

everyone is bad people. not stopped the italians, has it?

the education thing is fascinating. smarter players surely means better players?

rooney was a better player before ferguson tried to get him thinking

How much of an impact does the media have?

i'm gonna say less than the actual industry itself, tbh. Behaving like a fully formed adult in your twenties is a lot to ask if you were shit hot and rich in your teens.

long held the view that footballer's wages ought to be held in trust, if there were any possible way to enforce it.

I'd be really interested to see how an extended run of England picking only Championship players would work, say for a season, to see if the leg-up boosted them or if it's too late by then. On the other hand, what Carragher said about Bellamy has a lot of sense to it (moving to Cardiff doesn't show hunger, rather the opposite, because the hungriest players are the ones who've worked their arses off to get in the Premiership in the first place)

MLS ppl on B|gS0ccer are already freaking out about "what this will do to the MLS academy system" -- the answer is, of course, "nothing".

Hell MLS clubs are already signing Arsenal academy rejects at a pretty good clip: Zakuani, Ryan Smith, some defender this week, etc.

Considering we have already bought USA's u17 captain Gil subject to work permits, y'all should have seen us pillaging the lands coming.

so many Premiership/English clubs are failing to bring through quality players. Compare this to Germany, where a team can sell an Ozil only to replace him with a Makin for free.

not sure chris makin counts as progress tbh

picking the right players from the premier league would work better than picking championship players.

Dawson and huddlestone were legit first team contenders but were passed over. When england starts rewarding form the national team will fare better.

They are media-trained before they turn 10.

http://www.thenational.ae/sport/football/la-maisa-where-barcas-stars-are-produced?pageCount=0

La Masia has never, for example, produced a top striker. Not in 30 years.

When did you stop thinking of Bojan as potentially a top striker [and one who has already won league titles and the champions league]?

eh pretty soon after i saw him play a couple full games.

Scouted from across Spain, the 60 young players who live at La Masia play surprisingly little football - just over one and a half hours per day.

Instead, there is a heightened emphasis on school work, with players expected to attend extra classes with tutors at La Masia once they return to the centre after a day at school.

8m per year to run La Masia. That is 153k a week. Which is what, Rooney's wages? It is 4 times Benni McCarthy's wages at West Ham, so let's say roughly 4 squad players wages.

If Spurs took Woodgate and King* off their books (incl. wages, bonuses etc.) - they'd be able to afford La Masia each year.

*Two inactive players 95% of the season.

and what to show for it, eh

I would love to see how much German teams are spending since they ramped up the system.

No-one seemingly gives a toss about youth systems in England either, so it would take out the pressures of expectation if a midtable club or whoever just stopped spending £8m a year on wages or transfer fees and built and ran a proper yut academy.

hurrah no more pressures of expectation! finally now we can all be crewe alexandra supporters.

Yup totally what I meant. Do Crewe even make 8m a year? Or I could be talking about making Iniestas instead of Stewart Downings?

i see u already mentioned them in the op, soz.

it's very easy to be idealistic from a position of strength basically. people extol southampton's system as a big self-sustaining life saver without accepting that the comparatively large costs involved in keeping it all running were also partly to blame. qpr currently have an 18k ground and a centre of excellence - at what point will it be feasible to invest the £25m needed just to upgrade to a full academy in an already overcrowded catchment area? stoke are maxing out on wages just to keep their heads afloat in the prem - are they supposed to take the hit of relegation and the wilderness now to reap in 10 years what they might sow now? it's not easy.

essentially the key issue though will always come down to the virulent and endemic british mistrust of club admin above the manager's head. and - common sense be damned - i doubt this will ever change.

It pleases me to see Middlesbrough struggle this year.

What I don't get is how exactly La Mesia is churning out such high quality product. Crewe always get held up, but their total over two decades was David Platt plus a lot of journeymen. Which is good, like, but shows it's not such an obvious move to pick that over four Benni McCarthys. 90s Man Utd and Ajax are the only remotely close examples, and those were unsustainable at such astonishing levels.

they have all of catalonia and probably half the rest of spain -- iniesta is from albacete, pedro from the canaries iirc, and they presumably have the best coaches/system

It pleases me to see Middlesbrough struggle this year.

― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, 16 February 2011 18:22 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

expensively gambled failure bad
expensively nurtured failure good

aren't middlesbrough p good on this and other 'ethical' fronts? downing, cattermole, johnson is a fairly good record for a small city club

stoke have one of the lowest % wage bills in the league actually

utd and ajax still produce top quality - last season if i made an xi of players anywhere in the world on top sustainable form i would have had fletcher and sneijder. ok maybe fletcher would have ONLY made the bench.

In the 30 years since La Masia's inauguration, more than 500 youngsters have left their homes and families to stay at the academy. About half of them were from Catalonia, and the rest came from other regions of the Kingdom of Spain and beyond, including 15 from Cameroon, 7 from Brazil, 5 from Senegal and 3 from Argentina. Of those 500, about 10 percent made it into the first team

if they kept that midfield together, boro would be premiership midtable. its the keeping it together part.

and yeah, i'm not talking lower league clubs. i'm talking clubs were 8m is easy enough when just redirected into something potentially more sustainable and sensible.

of the 90% who didn't make the first team though you'd get reina, arteta, cesc, merida who is killing it at athleti, etc. etc. etc.

ajax now make a lot of money buying in ~18-22 talents from elsewhere for a few million and developing them in a friendly environment -- they've made cash on a few such transfers (suarez, huntelaar) though there is always cvitanich, suleimani...

they have stekelenburg, van der wiel, vertonghen, eriksen, prob others from their academy who would sell for a lot

How a Soccer Star Is Made

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html

abt ajax

i heard the exact opposite re stoke. got any figures to hand?

I'd only Arsenal, Villa, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Utd&City and Spurs are spending 5+m a year on development costs. I would have said West Ham but supposedly the porn baron gutted the system as an unneccessary expense? If they buy Bridge and Keane in the summer and paid their signing on fee and his wages, that is the equivilent developing the likes of Mark Noble, Jack Collison, Freddie Sears, Junior Stanislas, James Tomkins, Jordan Spence and Zavon Hines - basically half their current xi+subs, for 3 or 4 years potentially. These aren't terrible players either, some of them (Collison and Stanislas imo) have bright futures ahead.

if they kept that midfield together, boro would be premiership midtable. its the keeping it together part.

and yeah, i'm not talking lower league clubs. i'm talking clubs were 8m is easy enough when just redirected into something potentially more sustainable and sensible.

― if there is a King Moaty, apparently he is huge into slapstick. (a hoy hoy), Wednesday, 16 February 2011 18:35 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

yes but "keeping it together" without impacting on youth systems is a luxury for every club that isn't top 5.

and did west ham not bring in keane and bridge for fat money precisely because the bright future guys were set to take them down?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_jLlqDrcSYeQ/TQdBRiDMgaI/AAAAAAAACsQ/0--y2O3V8Ks/s400/14%2BNewcastle%2BWages%2BLeague.jpg

i'd guess how it works for most big academies is s/thing like hopefully 1x 4m player p/a, 2x £1m players p/a, a few quid from the dregs, and every few years you get a first teamer.....like say darron gibson, shawcross/bardsley, eckersley/brandy/______, danny welbeck (maybe)

If West Ham invested as well as Lyon then i'd take your point but seriously I do not see Keane and Bridge doing anything that Sears and Spence don't already. Which I guess is my point - transfers are a ridiculous gamble while you can control a system that could potentially cost less. That and there is nothing to say just because you are currently a shit club that you cannot produce the next greats - who were Ajax before Michels etc.

I've seen charts for Stoke that go both ways.

Didn't Strachan gut Boro's youth system in favour of a hidden SPL value policy? Speaking of which, I saw an article today about Celtic with exactly that 18-22 buy-and-sell-on Ajax narrative above. Izaguirre being the jewel now iirc. It's basically the future for every club outside the CL elite though, no?

that was only stoke's first season in the prem though right?

yeah course transfers are a gamble (whether we consider keane & bridge to be poor ones is beside the point) but that's the point - you might win where before you had a certified, controlled failure. who knows where west ham might now be if kitson and hartson hadnt come in for what was then laughable money in 95/96?

Imagine not spending £12m on Alfonso Alves and instead looking for smarter deals (i.e. a pienaar or a beckford or a howard here or there) to make a larger squad of potentially talented if yet unheralded players. And then as players slowly start to show promise, they can come in, not with the weight of expectation but to push the guys in the first xi. If they make it, great. If they don't, then at least they may have lit a candle under the anus's of the first xi.

i.e. stupidity and a lack of planning is why boro aren't in the same position as everton.

seriously I do not see Keane and Bridge doing anything that Sears and Spence don't already

this is kinda deranged -- rk is one of the most prolific goalscorers in pl in recent seasons. 30 y/o and still useful enough if not amazing vs freddie sears who isn't evem proven at championship level

i certainly know which one i'd have

I dunno, this is all shooting the shit and we cannot tell what goes on in the day-to-day running on a football club. I just don't understand the Premiership view of "we'll let the foreigners make the best players, we'll end up buying them whereever they come from"

clue; it's not the wanker with the appalling attitude on 85k a week.

Keane is playing like he's retired already, if he is playing at all. Hell, they didn't even involve him at the weekend, did they? Or was he just so awful I didn't notice?

with sam on this, but the successful examples are few and far between. What pl clubs of late have deserved reps for youth production- villa, everton, boro, city pre-saudi. None of them were performing brilliantly.

UNITED?

Any examples are few and far between - which is the biggest problem. Not enough clubs take it seriously at all, let alone to be looking at La Masia for examples of fine tuning.

of late? Their youth players are higher profile, but how many turn out for pl clubs each week?

the top clubs pay a lot for youth development, as much as barca if not more probably, but are less successful cuz

- 90 minute rule
- lack of continuity in coaching, eg arsenal only recently rationalized their formation at all youth/senior levels to 4-3-3
- lack of really easy fixtures to blood kids in the first team
- relegation scraps mean only wilshere/sturridge/welbeck level prospects will be given a chance on loan even at a crappy pl team
- youth level still (via england national teams etc) predominantly kicknrush, which top teams don't play - their players need power/pace/passion but also skill/intelligence

mad hindsight going on here. who's to say whether an ambitious signing turns out rebrov or modric? or should spurs have just kept biding their time hoping neale fenn would turn out alright?

90 min rule?

Also I take those clubs to be successful examples. The likes of Rodwell, Coleman, Anlongahor, Johnson, Cattermole, Sturridge, Richards, Onoeha - will make up big chunks of international squads for the next ten years, a sign that something is working.

the crappiness of pre-08 citeh/boro/westham is more abt crap management in other areas

their success in youth areas ought to be abstracted to another balance sheet, like if they sold every academy product, each would probably make a profit against the costs of development

clubs can only recruit kids from radius < a 90m drive

ambitious signings to complement youth are different to paying almost-but-not-quite money on the likes of, say, konchesky

matches have to be 90 mins long - not enough practice for the kids

ah ok re 90m

rtc- would neale fenn have ended up a better prospect if half the money spent on rebrov was put into better coaching standards or equipment or facilities? and then use the other half to instead buy that times equiv. of pienaar AND kranjcar?

no, cos he was shit.

how many of these clubs have continuity at exec level such that the ppl making decisions can reasonably expect to benefit from siphoning money to the kidz? if not, they might as well chance it with an alves/rebrov/samaras signing in the hope it solves their immediate problem

ya i think u r deluding yrself if u think hiring johann cruyff to spend 50 hours a week with craig eastmond is going to turn him into a sneijder, or even a nigel de jong

ya i think u r deluding yrself if u think hiring johann cruyff to spend 50 hours a week with craig eastmond is going to turn him into a sneijder, or even a nigel de jong

Yeah but it'd still improve him.

how many of these clubs have continuity at exec level such that the ppl making decisions can reasonably expect to benefit from siphoning money to the kidz?

This is the key issue, difficult to see how many Premiership owners are in it for the long haul. The modern clubs that people most associate with developing top-level talent are Barcelona and the German clubs, and most of those have ownership structures in place that don't exist in the Premiership. It gives more continuity.

Also I take those clubs to be successful examples. The likes of Rodwell, Coleman, Anlongahor, Johnson, Cattermole, Sturridge, Richards, Onoeha - will make up big chunks of international squads for the next ten years, a sign that something is working.

It's not working that well, most of these players aren't that good. Rodwell and maybe Johnson are the only ones I can see becoming a top player by international standards.

yeah that's what i was saying earlier, brit footer culture being the way it is an exec could point to the balance sheet and a rosy cheeked u16 international til the cows come home but the fans will still tear u down for not releasing the fundz and letting arry/kev keegan/whoever "get on with their jobs"

maybe the fm2012 can incorporate a system where they send someone round to your house to daub obscenities o ur house and torch your car for playing at being a petit wenger too long

I saw an article today about Celtic with exactly that 18-22 buy-and-sell-on Ajax narrative above. Izaguirre being the jewel now iirc.

Do you have a link to this article?

n e wayz will continue this discussion later, am about to watch utd vs nukey reserves on mutv

winners play liverpool in the next round at anfield. for once i'm stickin up for man utd tonight.

you guys mean seth johnson, andy johnson, roger johnson, michael johnson or what?

It was in The Times, ailsa - I don't have a subscription, it was a copy lying around while I had a coffee.

Ok I take it all back. Clubs should have never bothered with youth development at any stage ever. I think tonight proves my point. What can English home grown kids get you? NOTHING. Especially not a man of the match performance against a world cup winning midfield.

lol shut up you silly tart

^

:D

also xpost - richards and onouha p much would make my seasons best squad so far.

onouha u didnt

nader minooooooo