waspish said:
We know that even BaconChops knows that! It like someone has already pointed out he's setting the Agenda for the media and his fans
Yeah! Fucking annoying though, everyone takes his word as gospel... Everyone has an opinion on City, and hardly anyone knows what's actually happening.
I hear the "We never play academy players" etc argument all the time. While being untrue is annoying because, I believe we've revolutionized our first team to build a name on an international level. What that does is enables us to compete for the signatures of young lads who will want to grow through our academy to the first team. When we were mid table and fluctuating in and out of lower leagues, we were being used as a stepping stone a lot of the time, not necessarily through malice in the players, but once a bigger team noticed we had a good youngster, they would be cherry picked and there's hardly anything we can do about it. Over the years we've been seeing us compete with the likes of Real and Barca for young players now, and with the new training facilities we're going to be the dogs bollocks at bringing players through the academy. What everyone neglects in their argument, is that doing this takes far more time than building a title winnings first team squad. We need the infrastructure to do so, an infrastructure the scum et al have had for years!
Even with all that in mind, we've still produced the most premier league players than any other academy (Can't find the reference but pretty sure I've read it somewhere).
3-4 years ago we started a mission to change our first team, and we've done it, I suspect the same time frame for our academy to really fulfill the potential it has!