its a Barm said:
My personal opinion is that we are doing a great job with the eds team squad
What is your criteria for doing a great job compared to a poor job?
I can't think of a single metric by which our youth policy is doing "great" outside of success at youth levels. But it doesn't matter if you win every single trophy in the world at U21 down the U9s, the point is to provide players who challenge for the first team squad.
We haven't done that. Well we have, but we decided not to play them so they either went elsewhere or got put out on loan. Some like Rekik to the point where it's obvious to all and sundry that they have no desire to come back and feel their time is better spent at a club that will give them an opportunity to play. Yet another player who will walk into the nationals and say "young players shouldn't go to City". Next year we have a decision to make on Lopes and I have no doubt that we'll put him out on loan again to further delay the inevitable, hoping that somebody else will make the tough call to put him into the squad. He certainly isn't getting in front of Nasri or Silva therefore according to most on here he isn't good enough and we should let him go again. Doesn't matter that he's one of the best young prospects in world football, just that we already have better in our ranks so it's a step back.
The last Academy player to break into our squad was Dedryck Boyata. He's now 24. And he's only here because of homegrown rules. Oh and City legend Alex Nimely who was apparently in our squad last season.
On numerous occasions this year we have played teams who have more City Academy graduates in their squad as we do.
Barker is about the fifth best player in that squad. He might be lucky and get on the bench because he's a Manc and it's good for the image. He isn't ready for a first team place in terms of he isn't a top PL talent and if we're not making allowances for being a homegrown player then he'll never in a million years be as good as a Reus or the like of.
There's so many people with their head in the sand about this. They presume that because it's City then "well they know what they're doing don't they?, "oh we'll play them when they're ready" and other such cliches with absolutely nothing but blind faith to back that up. Then they point to Pozo and say "well he played Pozo didn't he?".
No, Pozo has started once against Leicester and was subbed to put on a winger and the only reason that happened was because it was him or a midfielder up front. Of course he was then dropped and they put a midfielder up front. So essentially they started our young and tricky attacking midfielder against Leicester in winter away from home, played him out of position then subbed him after an hour. I bet James Wilson and Tyler Blackett are well jealous. He has only ever being used properly in his City career once and that was when we were about 5 up against Sheff Wed at home in the League Cup and he got 20 minutes.
We haven't broken an Academy player through in the 7 years since the takeover but for some reason it's all "well I trust them" with no reason to do so. Apparently some people believe that the Academy only started when we built that new building and nothing before that counts or it is all going to be different because we've moved offices. Not sure what they thought Carrington and Platt Lane was for.
I don't know a single person who pays attention to the Academy who isn't even a bit worried about this now and many are along my lines of thinking, and we're City fans. People retweet bullshit "yay I got on the bench" messages from the kids on Twitter and are all like SEE? DO YOU SEE HOW HAPPY HE IS? like they would possibly sit on Twitter saying "yeah fuck this club". Being an unused sub when we're 3 goals up and Scott Sinclair warms up might be a dream come true for you but these lads had their pick of all the clubs in the world and they're not City fans. If I was a player and I had a choice between City and most clubs now I'd probably not end up at City because I don't see the progression system that the Uniteds, Barcas and Ajaxs have into their first team squad. We've done the thing that we're best known for post-takeover and slapped around a bunch of money and said that this is a big intention of ours yet we haven't actually backed this up with anything but money. Spending £200m on a new building isn't exactly impressive when your owner is a trillionaire monarch and we haven't produced a player for 7 years. What we need is to actually produce some talent. This whole idea of "well we'll just win this trophy then things will be fine" is cockgobble, the title race will never be easy, there will never be an easy time to blood new talent into a league game, we will always need to win every game.
People like to point at Soriano and Begiristan and declare we're the new Barca or that we're following their model. We're nothing of the sort, we're the new Chelsea. We talk about youth for 10 years and produce Michael Mancienne then buy in a better defender.
