Of course I want tommy Doyle to make it.....a player who has a huge connection to the club.
I would think/ hope I made it clear what I meant. Ie more of a connection with local players, which I think most city fans have. Tommy Doyle is for all intensive purposes our version of gerrard or lampard.
Good, and why I deliberately picked him, but these were your words....
I've kinda given up caring about the youth team. for the last ten years or so none of them have made it or really been given a chance.
So why "stop caring" ? and why not treat the academy for what it is, its a university for footballers, where they get the best football education (and also a good real education in case they don't make it), and a business where we bring in talent and bring it on, or create talent from local, like Phil Foden / Tommy Doyle / Harwood-Bellis.
The point was made that City don't (seem to) care about the EDS (academy), of course they do, but the first thing people need to realise is that we have world class players in our squad (more than enough to fill a first team squad, possibly 2), and therefore its very difficult to force a way into our first team from the academy, the club, and Pep regularly say this too.
We also play youngsters 2 or 3 years up from their own age group where considered good enough, so its little wonder they get beaten in games against kids at the right age group.
So when Phil gets time like last night, he has to take it (he did imho). Our academy is not just about bringing players to the first team, its now an important revenue stream, and I'd argue one that is very good at it like Sancho (also rumours that we might have got £22m for Diaz for instance). Its part of the business of the club, unlike when we were shit, when we developed players for a couple of seasons of "emerging into the first team", and then hoping they were good enough to keep us up, and loyal enough to want to stay, but not too good to have ambitions to be better than City.
At the end of the day, being the best EDS / U18's / Youth Cup team is not the point, the point is creating footballers, and we do that, we also utilise a system where we send good players out to "further eduction" across europe, and that is better than sending them on loan to league one, or even the championship, because in europe many teams play in a similar way to how our first team do. Here in England, in the main they don't play our way, so those who remain here who are loaned are probably already deemed not likely to be good enough, and the ones we don't loan are the ones that we want to keep close, so that they are training with our first team squad regularly and learning from the best manager/players in the world, Garcia and Harwood-Bellis for example (I can't remember who else is training with the first team squad right now, but there are others).