I honestly don’t know where Shrewsbury or Exeter are, and don’t have a map by me. The point is that not only premiership clubs have good youth development. Peterborough might have it as well. I grew up in A city of 6 000 people and had very good youth coaches. Better than anything ManU have produced recently.
Aloisious, how much does an average person make in Croatia? ~ $2,500 a year? So, are you saying that if Peter Kenyon gave some 15-year promising kid a 3 year, $200K contract, then his parents would keep him at home?
The point of the FA regionalizing the Academy structures is so that geography is not a restriction. No one can predict which clubs are going to end up in the Premiership or CC Championship. There will be times when certaon geographical areas are without a team. The FA will allow exceptions for travel in these cases. The fact that those players came through Man Utd's youth system at relatively the same time is an aberation. You may never see that again. LeTissier was a fantastic player whose career could have had a higher profile had he not been so attached to Southampton and the southern part of the country. You have to understand that he was fiercely loyal to Southampton. Wayne Bridge is a quality left back and a regular first choice national team player when fit. For the longest time, Southampton was a Premiership team on a second division budget. They often barely avoided relegation, and their old stadium (The Dell) only had seats on one half of the stadium. And their Chairman is a moron.
That's not the point at all. The point is that regionailization is an incentive for the clubs to develop the best players in their areas without uprooting a 12 year old from his family to play soccer. Even a perennial bottom of the table club like Southampton can produce quality first team professional players. Some of the best youth systems are from clubs not in the Premiership. Crewe Alexandra and West Ham United are two that immediately come to mind.
Anyone else read the other day that Sir Alex Ferguson said something to the effect that the FA youth academy model (Man U included) needed to be overhauled because they were not producing very many high quality players? He said Man U was finding far better teenage prospects abroad.
He's complained about that before. His preferred set-up doesn't help the Oldhams of the world though.
Well shouldn't the Oldhams of the world be helping themselves by finding ways to develop talent on their own so that when big clubs come calling they have something to sell. English players are the most expensive in the world top to bottom and premiership clubs are forced to spend millions acquiring the best players from the lower divisions. Not thousands, millions. Shouldn't that be incentive enough for teams like Oldham to get their act together? Doesn't the fact that they haven't speak directly to the point I was making that too many kids are forced to endure substandard coaching because of the FA rules? Its not as if when premier league clubs develop players they are the only ones who benefit. Many players come out of these academies being good players yet not quite good enough to play in the premier league and they end up moving to teams in the lower divisions (or teams lower down in the EPL) for free. There is no excuse for the presnt system.
You don't understand how the Academy structure is organized. There are no "regional monopolies". A U12 player living within an hour's drive of London could be recruited by the Academies of Tottenham, West Ham, Arsenal, Chelsea, Charlton, and Fulham amomg others. A U12 player in the Liverpool area would be recruited by the Academies of Liverpool and Everton, amomg others. A U12 player from Manchester could be recruited by Man Utd, Man City, or Bolton. And a U12 player from Birmingham could expect to hear from Birmingham City, Aston Villa, or West Brom. Etc, etc, etc.
I don't think anyone is in the dark about how it works. Can he be recruited by Liverpool and Man U etc? Can he be recruited by Arsenal Chelsea etc? No on both counts? Then there are regional monopolies in place and some of them are very destructive. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=monopoly "Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service" If you deny entry to some participants and reserve entry only for other participants you are essentially establishing monopolies. It doesn't really matter how teams have access to these players what matters is that ALL teams do not have access.
Are you just trying to be part of a wind up? Not only don't you understand how the Academy system works, you haven't read the various posts explaining it. Until the kids are 16, they can not travel more than an hour's drive away from home. So yes, generally a 12 year old within an hour's drive of London can choose between Chelsea and Arsenal if offered a spot at both academies. If a player lives between Manchester and Liverpool, then he could choose between the two if offered a spot at each academy. I posted this - didn't you read it?
Rummull and sdf… Why are you advocating complete free market conditions when it comes to 12 year-old kids? What is the advantage of kids being bought and sold, uprooted and destabilized at such young age? In human terms there is no benefit. And there is probably no benefit in football terms either.
Sigh. No I know how the system works. The only problem here is your unwillingness to face up to some of the negative effects of the system as it is set up. But thats okay.
So a 12 year old living in Exeter can't benefit from the better coaching he can get in London? Brilliant. And who said anything about being bought and sold? It is about giving parents and kids the choice to get the best. Right now many parents of promising kids don't have that choice (unless you want to believe that the only promising kids in england live with and hour of clubs in the top two division) and that hurts no one but england and the FA is to be blamed for this. And by the way can we cut the crap and stop pretending this doesn't happen now> Keiran Richardosn is from London I believe and Man U asked his parents to move closer to the northwest so that he could train at Man U. People need to get over this "uprooting 12 year olds" nonesense and stop applying american sensibilities to other cultures. At that age you are pursuing a career path and most of these kids would do it if it means giving them a leg up.
I understand the point you're trying to make but Liverpool and Manchester are less than one hour apart.
Rommul The FA is assigning value to local development. It builds stronger ties between a club and a town. It prevents national near monopolies, your regional monopoly term fails the very definition you provide because the current system gives authority over a certain task in a certain area to all businesses in that area, not one. If it was possible ManU would try to get every single good young English player to come to their acadamy, they along with the other top 5 clups would gain exclusive control over the early development of all players that look to have national team potential. That would mean that there are only five ways that players are trained and the fact is that these top five clubs already have enough money so that they can get the best players in the world. These top clubs don't need their youth players to become profesionals and all but the very very best will be failures as far as they are concerned. Currently a team like Charlton, Blackburn, or Fulham need their youth players to be developed enough to start for them, they have a greater incentive than Chelsea or ManU to develop non-superstar talent and always will, the difference between making a couple of $100,000 transfers for talents who are youth washouts in your system or getting a starter to help you stay up is enormous. Concentration of talent is an imperfect argument. If it is better for developing, 12-16 year old, players to play with the best talent why don't teams practice them with their first team? If a developing player is totally out of their league then they will not gain much from playing with concentrated talent. If a 12 year old for QPR is too good for the U-13 team then he can always be moved up and play with better players. How many 12 year olds are better than QPR's and their ilk's full team, within 60 miles of just about everywhere in England is at least one CCC team, thus your picking of Exeter as an extreme example, and in most locations one EPL team is near. If every youth player had perfect knowledge of what team had the very best system in place for developing them then your system would work. But they don't so many will go where it looks the best just like in the US and we all know how that has worked out. The current system incourages a diversity of ideas under which players of all levels, at age 12, will develop. If you effictively limit the choices of top young players to 5 ideas then you will only get 5 types of developed players. There is unequivocally no one best way to develop soccer players. Every system has its flaws and if you limit the number of competitors for top talent then these flaws will become apparent and there will be much less pressure to fix them if you have few opponents who can compete. With movement allowable after the age of 16 there will still be talent condensation at that point but it will be because of competition from hundreds of systems trying to develop the best pro and not 5 systems getting the most gifted at age 12.
Richardson was originally in West Ham's youth system, on the eastern side of London. ManUtd signed him from there when he was 14, where his parents moved the family to Manchester for "educational reasons". I have no problem with a family moving closer to a team's academy so their kid can be within an hour's drive of a certain academy. I absolutely have a problem with a club signing a 12 year old and moving him across the country so he can train. You don't do that to a kid who may not have reached puberty yet. There is not one youth development expert that would advocate such a thing. Clubs would do it to get first crack at what would appear to be a quality player, which is the very reason it is not allowed. At U12, there is no way to predict which players will become professionals. There is no way to predict if the U12 kid will even be interested in the game in 3 years. He could burn out. He could not grow. He could discover girls. This is why the emphasis is on training. The idea is to develop them into professionals. Of all those that stay in the program, .05% become professionals. Not exactly solid betting odds. Does an Academy deny coaching to many kids? Yes. Because the Academy exists to train the most talented local kids in an age group. It is not open to all who wish to go. The Academies have the best coaching. Every professional acdemy has high quality coaching. So every academy kid receives a very similar standard of coaching. I have observed this is the south, in London, Merseyside, and the Midlands. Your posts on this subject indicate that you are not intimately familiar with how the system works, what it does, and what is happening at them today. Substandard coaching? Hardly.
How big is Exeter exactly? Davor Suker was trained in an 85 000 city until he was 20. Darijo Srna was trained in a 15 000 city until he was 16. Dragan Blatnjak was trained in a 6 000 city until he was 17. Look, teaching kids how to trap, pass, shoot and move is not nuclear physics. The nuclear physician at Oxford is much better than the nuclear physician in Asuncion. The youth coach at Man United is not much better than the youth coach at NK Osijek. Even if there is a slight difference in coaching quality it’s much more important for kids to be enjoying the training and the game. Why would it be nonsense? And what have American sensibilities got to do with this? It simply isn’t good to move thousands of kids across the country or to a different country when only 5% of them will make a career of it.