JoeMercer'sWay said:people need to understand:
07/08 we were under Thaksin, struggled to mid-table finish and the young lads we brought in were Thai, that year we got rid of Marc Laird, whose now at Orient and Nathan D'Laryea, who's quit after doing nothing.
So our first team was at a certain level, and our academy well it was producing players for the championship/league one in all honesty.
08/09, first year of the takeover, through comes Weiss at the end of the season, Ched Evans and Dan Sturridge play their part but don't score many. Out team was still at the same sort of level at the end of the season, and our academy had signed Trotta, Helan and some guys we don't have anymore, and we sold Matt Mills(now Leicester) and Grimes who's in League 1, the rest have done little.
09/10 the first team jumped up to a European standard, whilst the academy is at the same level it was before because the setup hasn't yet really shifted and the players coming through have been brought through at that level, so you're now looking at trying to get the 11-14 year olds in the academy and trying to turn them into quality players, we'd be looking at 5-7 years from that point to see the rewards, but we jumped again in 10/11 and again this season as the first team, so really you can only look, bar the odd gem already in there, at players who are kids now just starting to make their way up who we can turn into top stars, and 2bh the academy setup I don't think is good enough still, so it could be even longer.
The question is not how many players get into a club's first team, it's how good they are. Would Veseli trouble anybody? no. Has Arsenal's policy, bar Jack Wilshere, worked? no. Have they brought through anybody else that they haven't signed from elsewhere? no. Have United? Welbeck, Macheda's on loan.
Their current crop, the Keane's went to my old school, are they good enough? doubt it. Morrison has gone, wanted first team football and he's better than Veseli comparitively, Pogba, will he stay? They bought him in. Who have they bought through in recent years who was actually top class? nobody, and they made the judgement calls to get rid of Pique and Rossi.
Arsenal, British? Wilshere. that's 1, Keiran Gibbs is always injured so hard to judge, and Ashley Cole was a decade ago. The rest are all foreign, brought in on a conveyor belt that was started in motion way back in the mid 90's. They poached from other clubs, and then it took them several years to start to see the results, and out of all of them, all of that policy there was only one that became world class, Fabregas, and they've sacrificed winning things to play these guys who haven't been good enough.
Chelsea produced one in a generation in Chelsea and then went and raided West Ham, their other notable product, Robert Huth. They've had longer than us and who've they produced? Josh McEachran?
Liverpool, the generation of the 90s, in the 2000's? Stephen Warnock, they have a couple of fullbacks that are decent now, but not world beaters.
I think the biggest question you have to ask is why in the 90's the big clubs could bring through a bunch of talented English players, plenty that went on to be top quality players, but since 2000 none of them have been able to produce anything of real note, and not even the smaller academies of Crewe, West Ham, Boro(Downing & Johnson, they could be an exception), but why very few of them can keep bringing through a player or 2 in each batch, or every other batch that's good enough? What changed? what went wrong?
You have to look at the guys we have on loan, the guys we've brought in in the last 2 years and give them time to grow and try and catch up with the first team, the ones that have been in the academy all along have much less hope, but one or two might be good enough. Otherwise we just have to get the setup right in the academy and look at 5 and 10 year plans of where we want to be, and we have to work out where many, many other clubs have gone wrong in their setup and not copy their mistakes.
You can't expect our current academy players to be good enough for first team selection now, because the academy is nowhere near that level. Whatever progress the first team makes will take the academy many times longer to achieve, we aren't Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs or United who've been top clubs with a settled academy setup trying to be at that level for decades, but even still we're arguably producing better or equal products at this stage anyway, but compared to Barca we aren't quite there yet, and Real, well anything decent that comes through there has to leave and play regular football before being bought back, it's not to dissimilar here, players leave the club they got brought through, go down the leagues and then come back much better players with those or another lower league club who gets promoted a few times.
Freddy wasn't good enough, he's no loss.
Neville Kneville said:JoeMercer'sWay said:people need to understand:
07/08 we were under Thaksin, struggled to mid-table finish and the young lads we brought in were Thai, that year we got rid of Marc Laird, whose now at Orient and Nathan D'Laryea, who's quit after doing nothing.
So our first team was at a certain level, and our academy well it was producing players for the championship/league one in all honesty.
08/09, first year of the takeover, through comes Weiss at the end of the season, Ched Evans and Dan Sturridge play their part but don't score many. Out team was still at the same sort of level at the end of the season, and our academy had signed Trotta, Helan and some guys we don't have anymore, and we sold Matt Mills(now Leicester) and Grimes who's in League 1, the rest have done little.
09/10 the first team jumped up to a European standard, whilst the academy is at the same level it was before because the setup hasn't yet really shifted and the players coming through have been brought through at that level, so you're now looking at trying to get the 11-14 year olds in the academy and trying to turn them into quality players, we'd be looking at 5-7 years from that point to see the rewards, but we jumped again in 10/11 and again this season as the first team, so really you can only look, bar the odd gem already in there, at players who are kids now just starting to make their way up who we can turn into top stars, and 2bh the academy setup I don't think is good enough still, so it could be even longer.
The question is not how many players get into a club's first team, it's how good they are. Would Veseli trouble anybody? no. Has Arsenal's policy, bar Jack Wilshere, worked? no. Have they brought through anybody else that they haven't signed from elsewhere? no. Have United? Welbeck, Macheda's on loan.
Their current crop, the Keane's went to my old school, are they good enough? doubt it. Morrison has gone, wanted first team football and he's better than Veseli comparitively, Pogba, will he stay? They bought him in. Who have they bought through in recent years who was actually top class? nobody, and they made the judgement calls to get rid of Pique and Rossi.
Arsenal, British? Wilshere. that's 1, Keiran Gibbs is always injured so hard to judge, and Ashley Cole was a decade ago. The rest are all foreign, brought in on a conveyor belt that was started in motion way back in the mid 90's. They poached from other clubs, and then it took them several years to start to see the results, and out of all of them, all of that policy there was only one that became world class, Fabregas, and they've sacrificed winning things to play these guys who haven't been good enough.
Chelsea produced one in a generation in Chelsea and then went and raided West Ham, their other notable product, Robert Huth. They've had longer than us and who've they produced? Josh McEachran?
Liverpool, the generation of the 90s, in the 2000's? Stephen Warnock, they have a couple of fullbacks that are decent now, but not world beaters.
I think the biggest question you have to ask is why in the 90's the big clubs could bring through a bunch of talented English players, plenty that went on to be top quality players, but since 2000 none of them have been able to produce anything of real note, and not even the smaller academies of Crewe, West Ham, Boro(Downing & Johnson, they could be an exception), but why very few of them can keep bringing through a player or 2 in each batch, or every other batch that's good enough? What changed? what went wrong?
You have to look at the guys we have on loan, the guys we've brought in in the last 2 years and give them time to grow and try and catch up with the first team, the ones that have been in the academy all along have much less hope, but one or two might be good enough. Otherwise we just have to get the setup right in the academy and look at 5 and 10 year plans of where we want to be, and we have to work out where many, many other clubs have gone wrong in their setup and not copy their mistakes.
You can't expect our current academy players to be good enough for first team selection now, because the academy is nowhere near that level. Whatever progress the first team makes will take the academy many times longer to achieve, we aren't Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs or United who've been top clubs with a settled academy setup trying to be at that level for decades, but even still we're arguably producing better or equal products at this stage anyway, but compared to Barca we aren't quite there yet, and Real, well anything decent that comes through there has to leave and play regular football before being bought back, it's not to dissimilar here, players leave the club they got brought through, go down the leagues and then come back much better players with those or another lower league club who gets promoted a few times.
Freddy wasn't good enough, he's no loss.
I couldn't agree more.
The academy system has so far failed to produce players on a decent scale. Not just ours, but everybody's. There are still people on here moaning about Hughes ruining ours, as if it was actually any use to us whatsoever beforehand apart from to produce players for mediocre teams (which we once were).
Khaldoon was straight into the academy as soon as he arrived. There was never a cat in hell's chance it wouldn't be changed, it wasn't fit for purpose.
The new one will show people how it's done & hopefully if we get guys from Barca involved in the club, they will bring their methods & perhaps one or two staff to show the way.
In the meantime, we will have to do a fair bit of poaching to keep us ticking over.
MCFC_NGEN_ACAD said:Until the new #MCFC integrated training facility is built & quality coach/mgmt/support staff around yth develop will prob still be an issue