I'm not sure if I understand the purpose of the Premier League's reserve teams: Why are they mostly used for players returning from injury and young players? Take a 26yo that isn't quite good enough to start for the first team - wouldn't he benefit from getting regular games for the reserve side? Would it be an insult to the player to ask him to do that? I would think that they would rather play than practice, but maybe my ego is smaller than most. Why do reserve teams only play two to four times per month? For instance, Arsenal's reserves only had two games in November, 1 in Dec., and 1 in Feb. They played/will play four times in January and April. I would think once a week would be ideal. Any ideas?
It depends purely on the club. Some use reserve games to try and get players on the fringe of the team match fit and maintain a degree of sharpness. Some perfer to only play young players in reserve games. That's why you had Reading and Watford contesting the premier league reserve title last season. Reading's reserves beat Arsenal's youth team 6-0, in a fixture which arguably did little for either side. Typically it's the bigger clubs who play their youth players in the reserve league, as most clubs seeing loaning a fringe player to a lower division club as a better way of aiding the player's development. One of the big criticisms of the reserve league is that there aren't enough games. Reserve football used to be regionalised until not so long ago, but the premier league decided to set up their own competition. It's split north & south, with each division of 10 playing 18 games each, with the winners of each playing off in a final. Some players would regard it as an insult to be asked to play in a reserve game (and it used to be a traditional way of punishing a poor team performance to make the whole team play in the reserves in the week afterwards) but some will do it without complaint.
They are looking to bring in a similar system to that which they have in Spain, where the reserve team is basically employed as a seperate team, which can compete in the second division, thus making reserve team games actually have a real meaning, the players can actually fight for a title, but if they happen to win it they cannot gain promotion, and this is meant to help produce more quality English player as they will be playing at a much more competitive level.
A few foreign managers would like that system, but I can't see it being workable. It would have too much of an impact on the rest of the professional game. It's not as if the football league would happily vote to have 20 reserve sides put in the league and 20 clubs thrown out of league football. In Germany, reserve teams of some Bundesliga clubs play in the 3rd tier. Of the 16 worst supported teams at that level (37 clubs), 12 are reserve teams. It would be 13 of 17, but for some reason Wolfsburg Reserves appeared to get one crowd of 18000 for one match this season, 17,500 higher than their usual gate. It's not as if clubs who'd bring no away fans would exactly add anything to the league.
Ye that's true actually, it only really works in other countries because their second and third tiers are so much poorer than ours, they don't get the fans or the good players, and ticket prices aren't so high either.