This. The world has now changed at WFC and we will be forced to play some of our youth players who would not have been good enough for the prem or a team looking to bounce back to the prem with no margin of error. We also don't have the funds to keep signing first team ready players. Hopefully a couple of year from now, 3 or 4 of our regular 11 will have come up from the youth teams like Hodson, Sordell, Robinson, GNW etc when we were mid champ / League one.
Sure, may have. But unless we fall down a hypothetical hole and say their release by Watford stunted their future development, hardly any of them have gone on to establish themselves at a decent level so far. I actually think the better approach is hoovering up the Morrises of this world and seeing what we can do with them. Trying to create our own from scratch seems like needle in a haystack type odds these days.
Done very well for himself but probably just at the wrong time with us. Shame Tommie Hoban was injury prone. All clubs let players leave and they go on to have a decent career but many more don't I think the numbers show. In the 80s I believe Tim Sherwood and Dean Holdsworth left us young?
and Ewan Roberts, Malcolm Allen, and Jimmy Gilligan although we did get the correct (at the time) transfer fees for all of them.
I’m firmly of the opinion that we stunt the growth of our young players before we release them due to the apparent limitations of the academy. But I do agree with you, you either go all in on youth with the Category A level or you don’t bother.
Really, I was going off his wikipedia saying that he was born in England, seemingly sourced to this article from the website of Finland's national broadcaster, though in Swedish for some reason (https://svenska.yle.fi/a/7-10025990). Either way, strength of one familial tie over another or not, to make the decision on that basis when comparing each country's likely tournament ability, not to mention individual sponsorship opportunities and visibility, seems particularly rare in this day and age when a player like Yunus Musah can choose the USA despite growing up jointly between Italy and the UK, qualifying for Ghana through descent, and his sole connection to the country being to be coincidentally born there whilst his parents were on holiday.
I don't think we're ever going to have a top academy, certainly not in the near future under the current ownership, simply because of the cost. As you say, the academy hasn't really been a major concern, not in the way we've run it before anyway, with transfer dealing the world Pozzo knew. Now the money has all but gone, many many other clubs copying and bettering the process Udinese developed and the club maybe, just maybe, looking to develop over several seasons rather than running full pelt at the EPL should mean one or two of 'our own' get a chance (providing we're in the Championship). In my opinion, had he stayed and played at a higher level with us, even sporadically to begin with, alongside better players than he now has with St Johnstone, he'd have developed as a player more so than he has. We'll never know but that's my feeling. That's been tried by the current ownership. Players from Man. Utd (Whelan), Arsenal (Hinds), Tottenham (Patterson & at least one other) and Leeds (Dalby, who we paid a lot for) are among those who came in late in their development along with others from supposed lesser clubs and played alongside some of those coming through our own system. None of them made an impact. We've also been scooping up players from top level sides through all age levels for years just like everyone else, with no real success. Aaron Benn from Arsenal being one of the latest to come and go quite quickly. Of the current under 18's Ben Casey has already been at Fulham & Arsenal, Joel Sala (Chelsea), Jack Taylor (Spurs/West Ham), Amani Bowlin (Spurs/Arsenal) with plenty of others in the 18's coming from Brentford, Orient, Reading & others. Of the 21's, only Hamzat Balogan (Man Utd) and Luigi Gaspar (Arsenal - hello Luigi's dad!) are the only two I can see who have come from so called elite academies but as I've already mentioned, the club made a concerted effort to sign those released late on several seasons ago but had zero success. Incidentally, Dan Phillips came from Chelsea at about 14 or 15 for whatever that's worth. Personally I think we're on a decent path of recruitment at the moment. Plenty of youngsters from higher level academies coming in at various age levels, lots who have left from a similar level to ourselves and now we're mining local non-league sides too. Couple that with players who arrive here pre-teen and I'd say that's a good way of covering all bases rather than chucking everything in one direction. (note to self; Don't mention Harry Styles, it's late and nobody will appreciate it).
Yes all these (and Sherwood and Dean Holdsworth noted above) left us as they weren’t good enough to pin down a regular starting place in the team and chose/were forced to leave, drop down a peg or two to develop and come back up. They weren’t stolen by a top side for peanuts, at the age of 19-22, despite having played a number of times, they weren’t good enough to be first choice for us. We were happy to let them go for a market place fee. It’s not the same as the current hoovering up of any talent for peanuts by the elite clubs.we could have held onto these players if we’d wanted to or truly believed they were good enough to become long term first choice.
Yes I didn't imply that those players were stolen from us, and agree circumstances at the time meant they needed to move on to stand any chance to further their careers as we couldn't offer them enough game time, they all dropped down and eventually were good enough to overtake where we were in the case of Sherwood, Holesworth, and Roberts certainly!
Absolutely, I wasn't sure whether the suggestion had been made (not by you) that losing our best prospects has always "been a thing" with these guys being rolled out examples so just I was keen to make 100% clear that that wasn't the case.
Can someone please point out to the person above that this is clearly not a major issue when you've got someone like Harry Amass who was in our academy since the age of 9 earning an England youth call-up while still with us, and is now considered one of Utd's best academy prospects after being there less than a year.
Fair enough, I'm mistaken on that point. I did think I read he had joined Watford at the age of 11 after moving to the UK from Finland, so maybe he just spent a few years there. I just found this brief interview with him where he says that his preference would actually be to represent England as it's where he was born (though he doesn't say that it's also where he grew up, or that he's lived here his whole life, which suggests that maybe he could have lived in Finland for a while). But also, I found this article about him playing for Finland - so with his 2 caps he's not yet out of the running for representing England some day: "New FIFA rules mean players can still switch international allegiance if they have played no more than three competitive matches at senior level before turning 21. Even if Galvez, 18, plays against Northern Ireland on Friday and San Marino on Monday, he would still technically be able to represent England or Spain in future." " "I picked Finland as it’s just the best place for me to be right now. I’ve been called up to the first team and that might not happen if I chose another nation, I don’t know." https://www.manchestereveningnews.c...owing-excitement-finland-over-future-28124822
Fairplay, interesting - if a little treacherous, perhaps, but then that's nothing new for Tomas (weeeyyyyy).
On gaining independence, Finland was a part of Russia, but before that it was a part of Sweden for a long time, and even today Swedish is an official language of the country. It is only spoken as a native language by only a small amount of the population (though seemingly a large proportion of the national football team judging by surnames!) but as a second language by many more as it is still a compulsory subject taught in schools (not without controversy) and is a requisite for government jobs
When I went to Finland in 2022 looking for bears and owls I went to Kuusamo close to the Russian border and was within 500m of the border at the bear place. Local Finns said flying into the airport there could be quite dangerous as the Russians would play around with satellite signals and tracking and "move the location of the airport" and some planes had had "issues" !!
yes, I was scouting for strikers. The great grey owl and ural owls I saw would probably be better at holding the ball up than our bog owl. Oulu, Finland is actually a great place to see owls, saw 8 species in about 5 hours, but i digress....
Fully agree, I think it's nice we have an academy lad in the squad/starting XI most weeks but I think people are falling into the trap of overestimating his ability based on this. Decent Championship fullback, nothing more for me at present.
Fair point PA, I just think the talk of him packing his bags for the Premier League in a year or twos time is a touch premature for me personally.
What recent years show is that we are good at scouting high quality youngsters and developing them. But then the system just allows them to leave for peanuts so makes it all a bit pointless. People say "offer them a path to the first team" but the best talents are going at ages 14-16 not 18-20 so this is completely unrealistic. There's nothing we can do about it, just have to hope there are a few late bloomers like Andrews that drop 7/10 performances in the academy teams every week but not the 9/10 that might get them noticed by the vultures.
If the system was not allied to.giving the PL parasites everything we would in all likelihood have a very decent side sprinkled with several and nit just one Academy product. The whole rotten system needs to be replaced where clubs have their nest kids nabbed for a pittance.
A new Premier League stitch up funding deal for the EFL is going to be announced imminently, so I think we can expect more system rigging in their favour rather than less.
Not wishing to cause an argument but who have we let go in the last 5-10 years that has gone on to have a career at the level we're at or above? Also we really had nothing to do with the development of Morris
It always has been to be fair. Might be slightly worse now but there are so many players who come in and don't make it but I agree I think we should look more at players released from Premier league clubs a lot more
The system is also against smaller PL clubs running Cat A academies. It's all geared towards the big 6 hoovering up talent and sod the rest.
Nitpicking but disagree on Malcom Allen. He left us when we were relegated and joined top flight Norwich.
Yes but he wasn't a regular for us and had been loaned out during our relegation season so I think we were happy to sell. Great goal away against Citeh in the cup though ! We could have kept him as a promising youngster but not sure we expected he'd have got much first team action given we'd just signed goal machine Stuart Rimmer ! Only scored 8 in 35 for Norwich which sounds ok until you consider 4 were in one cup game against non leaguers !
Bassett sent him on loan but when he came back I’d say he was our main man under Harrison. 22 appearances. I think we’d have liked to have kept him but this was just a case of a player having a chance to stay in the top division after having a comparatively good season in a dreadful team.
