Rodney said:
I am always surprised at the intensity of this debate.
The manager and coaching staff are experienced professionals who must surely recognise when a young lad is ready to be involved.
If they are not being given a run I trust the Clubs judgement, they know the players and they know the issues. If they are ready and good enough I expect them to be involved, if they are not then so be it.
People have mentioned how many Mancini give debuts to in contrast to Pelligrini, it didn't produce many 1st teamers did it?
The manager is a man who shouldn't be the sole decision maker and should be set quotas from above.
In the modern football world, managers have a distinct pressure to favour the known and reliable first teamer over the unpredictable youth no matter how good that youth player may be. In the "win at all costs" era of football, clubs who haven't built a specific philosophy in bringing through young players are having trouble developing one due to this pressure. At Ajax, Barca, United, etc you are forced to bring players through otherwise you'll lose your job. At places like Spurs and Liverpool they can legitimately use them as squad members out of the gates.
Every player in our squad is world class and would walk into 16 teams in the Premier League. Our backup right back who we barely use has been in THREE Premier League Team of the Years and played 300 Premier League and 70 Champions League games who was first choice at the Champions League club Arsenal. At 16 clubs he's their star player, at ours he's replaceable. We're talking about binning off Samir Nasri because he's wank - at most Champions League clubs let alone Premier League clubs he's their best player. There are about 3-5 teams in the entirety of world football who are in our league in terms of talent on the pitch, and 3 who are solidly above us. The rest of the world has our reserve players as their star players.
The idea that any young player in the world outside of the Messi type is going to walk into this team is ridiculous at best and delusional at worst. The loan system does nothing apart from polishing which we could do better at City and get them playing with world class players every day and learning the systems of play that they use rather than getting the shit kicked out of them in the French League as the only creative player on a team of plodders or facing off against the fearsome strikers in the Scottish or Dutch leagues.
So the current scenario is that we have a manager who is pressured to win every point so has a reason to not use the players, no tradition of bringing them through that has been stressed so not enough pressure from above, and no pressure from the players themselves as they don't have the development time needed to play for us and by the time that they do they've spent 5 years on loan and want to leave for guaranteed football.
The system we have is completely broken. Only a fool thinks our youth system is in any way functional. We have brought through no first team squad players since the takeover SEVEN years ago and the fact that we've recently built a new building has distracted people as a "reset point". The excuses that people give don't reflect the reality of the modern City positioning - people have said all season that "games are too important" to be using young players in but we will never again have unimportant games where potential title winning points aren't on the line. Even this absolutely nothing game against Southampton has people saying that we shouldn't give our promising youngsters imported from the best Academies in the world a chance because we might lose.
City managers need courage in the philosophy that Sheikh Mansour wants us to have in terms of bringing through homegrown players or they need to be made to work to quotas of played minutes because SOMETHING needs to change in this respect. The "they'll come through if they're good enough" argument is juvenile and doesn't consider the reality of the talent levels available in the City squad.
