In the second part of his detailed look at the English youth system, Samuel King proposes some solutions to the problems identified in his brilliant initial article, which can be found here.
Fantasy Solution #1
As unlikely as substantial change to the system is, the only way it could happen is if in five to ten years’ time we are still in this position of City and Chelsea blocking opportunities and in reviewing the progress of EPPP they come to accept the argument that expecting title-chasing teams to develop youth players in the modern game is not feasible (considering City’s recent academy investment this conclusion is highly unlikely). In the future this position should be even more persuasive though as there will be a group of England internationals who will all have come through a select group of FL and smaller PL academies who, rightly or wrongly, will be acting as feeder academies for the bigger sides – something which will be juxtaposed against the big clubs’ failure to develop players through their youth setups.
In the junior England youth teams, prestigious tournament victories will become ever more likely as the system up to the age of eighteen is yearly refined and improved. The contrast of City and Chelsea’s players repeatedly winning the biggest youth tournaments internationally and domestically then failing to make it at their clubs should set it into even harsher relief that they cannot develop eighteen year olds who are on the level of twenty five year olds who’ve played three hundred club games, nor can they get that experience through loans. It should also be noticeable that they are not the only European title chasing clubs struggling unsatisfactorily with this problem and that a resolution might be beneficial. All this should be noticeable; that doesn’t mean they will notice it, or see any need to change, and it might also require insight on the part of the FFP rule-makers (if they’re still around in five years), which is not likely to extend to this niche area.
Only if they do decide change is required will the PL consider moving from its current stance of centralisation to directing the coaches and players to the clubs who provide first team pathways, be they smaller Premier League clubs or FL ones. Under the same argument it would be to their benefit (although completely unheard of, and totally implausible) if Chelsea and City were to close their academies and invest the funds (and indirectly staff and expertise) – that, without providing first team opportunities, they are inefficiently committing to youth development – down to the lower PL and FL clubs who are in effect already beginning to develop players for them (they could also donate their academy facilities to a nearby FL club, this solution might suit City who are very intent on making a difference to the lives of those in East Manchester). It would be quite a neat twist if FFP were not only to offer such funding of lower league academies as exemptions, but rather incentives. So for example the new money investors that FFP is now relaxing its regulations for, could be allowed to go £100 million over their FFP limit, as long as they committed £10 million to the funding of four of the best-rated local lower league academies, £5 million to local grassroots football, and a further £5 million to subsidising free coaching badges schemes.
While all this may seem to be in the spirit of self-sacrifice, both Chelsea and City’s interests would be served far more from investing their money in FL academies than they currently do, as it would drive down the inflated price of English players which they now increase by hoarding the talent in their academies and denying them proper chances. Of course greed, idealism, and self-interest (which doesn’t really protect their self-interest) decrees otherwise and they’d much rather have all the talent under their control, as opposed to being owned by the smaller clubs who might then sell to their rivals.
In the modern PL era that sense of the need for control over players is likely to be enhanced by the growing strength of the mid-table clubs. For the youngsters to be capable of easing into Champions League football they would first have to move from the FL to intermediate PL clubs who, with the new TV deal and top calibre youngsters that they could retain, might edge ever closer to challenging their hegemony (something made increasingly tangible by the ability of WBA and Everton to reject bids for players that two years ago they would have had no choice but to accept – not incidentally for players who were two of the earliest produce of the reformed academy system. Everton with Stones, Galloway and Holgate are proving particularly effective at mining the lower league academies potential and they may now be in a position where they don’t have to sell). That fear, combined with the idea that the players, whose development they funded, might move to their rivals, is partly why this scenario of the big clubs funding FL academies will never be more than fantasy – when you’re on top, paranoia tends to be your guardian angel.
The only other way round this issue would be the introduction of the Italian contract system where clubs can own half shares of a player’s contract, but this would have to be drafted so that it only applied to players developed as a result of development partnerships. These would be between PL clubs who’d supply the funds to FL academies to develop players for both of them. In return for their investment the PL clubs would elect to take half shares in the contracts of those youngsters it considered elite talents. The FL side could then sell their half of the contract on, but only with the approval of their partner, while for anyone to sign the player from their next club they would have to come to an agreement with both rights owners.
This would satisfy City and Chelsea’s desire – or indeed any other PL club who set up a development partnership – to retain an element of control over the player’s future as well as pleasing the FL clubs who would have a steady supply of quality players, and full contract rights over youngsters their partner didn’t deem elite talents (who would be quite numerous and more able than the FL academies could otherwise develop).
Unfortunately it’s a proposal that would be rejected as harshly by the public and press as that of B teams. It is after all foreign in influence (like much of the best practice of our modern academy system), unconventional, and against the much romanticised (and in many cases – due to money – sadly no longer existing) traditions of the British game. The accusation would be made that the FL development partnership clubs would be no more than glorified B teams (and maybe overly successful ones as result, with an unfair advantage from their partner’s funding). This ignores the fact that as the FL’s most talented players are rushed away to the PL at the first sign of promise, those FL clubs with good academies are already beginning to operate as feeder teams for the PL.
Reform is needed, but people like the old ways and even if those ways no longer exist, the important thing is people can still believe that they do.
Fantasy #2 – The Tottenham Renaissance
City and Chelsea have been the focus in this essay for they are the biggest problems with EPPP and the modern system. It is mildly possible however that their issues will be resolved, one way or another, over the next ten years by the biggest positive of EPPP (other than the improvement of the FL academies). This is the third of the big three EPPP academies, Tottenham Hotspur, whose successful en masse promotion of their youth players is probably the only hope City and Chelsea fans have of ever seeing their clubs follow suit (and I estimate that chance to be about 0.1%, at best).
To change the dynamic of how English clubs view the promotion of young players Spurs are going to have to do more than just promote some good talents such as Bentaleb, Rose, Mason, and one genuine star in Kane; that still has the feeling of an occasional freak talent among an above average group. To have a significant effect they’re going to have to have a team of stars, not one but seven or eight, whose promotion they are going to have to skilfully manage over the next seven years. If they are to change anything it’s vital that not only are they successful but that the idea of youth players in major English teams – presently extremely unfashionable – becomes attractive to sponsors.
The good news is that as the result of a brilliantly run academy under John McDermott Tottenham possess the potential stars – the even better news is that Tottenham’s new stadium financing means they’re going to have to rely on those players, and what’s more Tottenham’s board seem to have been persuaded of the quality of the youth players; the need to play them; and to have a manager who supports them, whether that be Pochettino or someone else. All the signs are there that Levy is fully aware of the potential he has to have a largely home-grown, technically skilled team, playing exciting football in a newly built 60,000 seater stadium.
This vision seemingly owes much to Franco Baldini’s failure to improve the club’s position with the Gareth Bale money, and Tim Sherwood’s eventual validation of his long-held contention that there was unrealised value in the club’s youth setup, a value that in the players which have come through is nowhere near the bounty waiting to be discovered in their elite youth players currently aged 15-18.
The following list of players may only have significance to Tottenham fans, but it’s a mightily impressive potential Tottenham midfield selection for 2022 – a time when Harry Kane will be twenty nine. They are: Nya Kirby – 22 years old; Oliver Skipp – 21 years old; Tashan Oakley-Boothe – 22 years old; Marcus Edwards – 24 years old; Joshua Onomah – 25 years old; + MK Dons graduate Dele Alli – 26 years old. That of course, is only the midfielders (the area Tottenham specialise in). Even if only half the members of that group fulfil their potential – and there are a number of other fine midfielders in that age range who may also make it – Tottenham will still be in a very impressive position. Including their best attackers and defenders, that is a concentration of talent which is approximately two or three times anything Southampton has brought though their academy in a corresponding age range and the players have a technical profile which is superior to many of those Southampton players at the same age.
The reason Tottenham may cause such as stir is that youth development and promotion when it’s done well, as Barcelona, Ajax and Man Utd have proved, far surpasses the quick team-assembly of transfers that Tottenham have for so long specialised in. Ironically while that’s been ongoing (and failing) beneath the first team a group of extremely skilled, intelligent players have been developing; friends, all schooled in the same style of Dutch influenced total football for as long as they can remember.
Significantly, unlike Chelsea and City’s players, they will be coming into a team that is in the perfect position for them to develop: the barrier of entry is not too high, and if needs be can be prepared for by loans, but it’s the level they require to improve; they have a manager who enjoys youth development (not one who sees it as an irksome, contradictory job requirement; or just a pleasant ideal he can’t afford); and as Kane has proven they’re not likely to be rapidly transferred, so they can continue to grow as a group.
Most importantly there is no immediate need to win trophies; for Tottenham the quality of their youth players promises a better future where their youngsters will enable them to regularly challenge for silverware and so there is no loss in the settling-in period. Chelsea and City’s financial – almost political – need for the constant affirmation of their own superiority through trophies, means there is no imperative for them to move from a system of winning with acquired players, to one of winning with home-grown players, when the cost of that is a team-building period in which the chances of winning are diminished. Why would they choose the second option when home-grown players and acquired players to them are just different sets of assets? Yet to Tottenham, elite youth players promise a gain unattainable through any other recourse; Spurs are exciting because they are the only English club that possesses all the factors required for youth to succeed on a grand-scale in the modern game – something far harder now than it was for “Fergie’s Fledglings” in the 90s.
If this materialises City and Chelsea’s reaction will be interesting to observe. Most likely they’ll try to buy Tottenham’s players and continue to block pathways for their own youngsters (hopefully Levy is still around to tell them what to do with themselves). In critiquing why their own players continually fail they’ll conclude it’s because, while their players are technically skilled, they lack the strength of character required to achieve that Tottenham’s possess, and there’s nothing they – the clubs – could have done about it. The argument will be made that if you look at where Tottenham’s players have got to, compared to City and Chelsea’s players, that the Tottenham players were just always better, and what City and Chelsea have got to do is to try to get the players up to that standard. In other words they would probably behave exactly as Chelsea presently are, and how City are likely to in the future (there is more doubt about this, and they still have the chance to prove this critique wrong).
Alternately they could start thinking rationally, and realise that they either begin promoting their best talents; find a workable way to do so; or at least make their academies profitable both to themselves in terms of sales, and to players in terms of development, or else it’s in everyone’s interests that they close their academies – although there is one other possibility….
Fantasy #3
One of them employs Carlo Ancelotti.
A Solution as ludicrous as the situation Chelsea and City find themselves in: If you care, let them go
The following proposal is a purely fantastical one as to how City and Chelsea (particularly) could improve their provision of pathways. Out of the many possible alternatives I have gone over this is the most radical I could think up and I believe it’s worth presenting in its full impractical splendour. It is far from a fully worked up answer but it touches on quite a few interesting points and with the intention of emphasising those it’s presented in its most extreme form – although there are several moderating changes that could be added to make it more realistic (there are signs City are already adding these as this proposal is an exaggerated version of Barcelona’s modern philosophy).
It comes from an analysis of three disparate areas of the English game. Firstly an appraisal that City and Chelsea’s academies, in truth, are independent centres of excellence that just happen to be funded by particular football clubs. In their disconnect from any opportunities that befit the calibre of player they develop (and sign), they have far more in common with Jean-Marc Guillou’s African academies – whose produce arrives in Europe without contractual affiliations to where they were developed – than they do to the Southampton or Ajax idea of an academy where players go straight from a club’s youth to first team.
They are also a step removed from Brendan Rodgers and Alex Inglethorpe’s Liverpool system where the likes of Jordan Ibe are prepared through loan spells in which they don’t turn into world stars but are readied for first team action. City and Chelsea’s academies are institutions that really go up to U-19 level and then the players have to find their way own into the game, bizarrely while still contracted to those institutions, so they’re never really free of them nor embraced by them (just well paid).
Secondly, the understanding that in the modern absolute football plutocracy – in which many Premier League mid-table teams, funded by the new TV deal, will follow Chelsea and City in becoming completely impenetrable to young players – that the way forward for English youngsters to develop, as showcased by the likes of John Stones, Dele Alli, Brendan Galloway and Joe Gomez, is in the Football League, not on loan, but by having firm roots established in the club at which they are to develop (otherwise known as a contract).
Thirdly the belief – which I think is proven by the evidence of the past five years – that loans in moderation may provide sufficient experience for players to be able to compete in mid-table sides, but that they will never be able to offer the experience required for players to compete at the super-clubs. There is a stage in between which is being missed as the intermediary level clubs usually only take risks on young players if they have them under contract and not on a temporary basis as they clearly judge this not to be for their benefit, but the loaning clubs. If mid-tier PL clubs do loan other clubs youngsters it is only when they have seen them first competing in the PL for their home club – opportunities Chelsea and Man City are usually only prepared to offer after they have excelled for a mid-tier club.
The proposal therefore is that not only should Chelsea and City scout, tempt, and develop the next John Terry, they should also then release him at the end of his second scholar year (or earlier if he’s ready for it) to one of several Football League clubs with whom they have formed a relationship, and if they progress well there, then at another mid-table Premier League club, attempt to buy them back for £30 million. Not so much a team full of John Terry’s as one of Matic’s. (As a by-point this release from contract would only relate to the club’s most talented players, those they felt not yet ready for the step up would stay with their U21s before being loaned out.)
The first question (one of many) is why should they when they can just close the academy down and buy someone from elsewhere? A strong argument considering they use the youth teams to try to avoid this form of extreme spending and save money. After all, isn’t it in an attempt to circumvent excessive expenditure that they (City especially) spend so much on signing foreign imports who would never come if told they were going to be arbitrarily released at eighteen? (In fact – whatever the merits of nine years of Chelsea or City schooling – almost all domestic youth players would refuse knowing that if they were to excel, their lucrative youth contracts – parsimonious compared to the money they could make as established players – might extend to a year and no more, if that. This refusal to sign however is not because they wouldn’t have the money – they would, the clubs would see to that, be it by hook or by crook – but because they wouldn’t have the dream, just the naked reality of being released without making it at Chelsea.)
There are several strands to this, the one I really wish to deal with is the implication that Chelsea and City’s academies, as they currently operate, are set to save them money.
The greatest folly of the current system is – if you ignore FFP for a moment – that the big clubs believe they’re potentially saving money by expensively signing youngsters beneath the age of eighteen who they then consign to certain failure when they then go out and sign a fully developed player in their place (effectively signing two players when they only need one). Not only that, after the age of seventeen they go to great lengths to tie these young players to their clubs with long and costly contracts although the players have vanishingly small chances of ever appearing for them. (It’s worth mentioning that in conservative estimates Chelsea and City’s joint expenditure on youth related projects is at least £400 million over the past ten years, and the amount they’ve recouped in sales and loan fees doesn’t come near equalling what they’ve spent on youth players wages (although City are closing that gap)).
Under this proposal the clubs would save money by no longer paying wages over the age of eighteen (which aren’t FFP deductable) and at senior level the clubs would still continue making their marquee signings. Just now a proportion of them would be players who were schooled at their own academy and had a strong connection to the club in identity and understanding of play and had been readied to play their part as senior players. This way the clubs don’t have to make two individual signings, they just have to sign the same player twice whilst cutting out the needless expenditure between the ages of 18-23, while for those players they decide after developing in the senior game that they may not be quite good enough for them, they have reaped five years of savings.
If it’s argued that they risk losing the players they develop to other clubs, well how’s that any different to the current system where they’re released without starring for their clubs? As for once the players are on the general transfer market, they now have the bonus of one of their transfer targets actually having an affinity with the club, which tips the balance in their favour. Matic for example really wanted to prove he could make it at Chelsea.
In effect the proposal is that the clubs continue what they’re doing with their transfer strategies and their excellent development work between the ages of 5-18 (their signing of foreign players not included in that analysis) and just cut out the waste in the middle. It’s one of the ironies in this situation that in trying to grasp onto the players in a permanently juvenile form for their long-term promise they stop that promise being realised. In this context the option is of releasing players in their peak form at eighteen so they can play first team football in a stable environment for a club who’s fully invested in them, or when they’re disillusioned and disappointed at twenty three. Ask Gael Kakuta which he would have preferred in hindsight.
The real point to all this is that obviously it won’t work for a club to release all their most talented youngster’s arbitrarily at eighteen (not least for the difficulty in signing them in the first place), but there are cases of very talented players, perhaps like Colkett or Palmer, for whom Mourinho seemingly has no great affection, that their only chance of playing for Chelsea is if they are to be sold now and develop elsewhere. Maybe somewhere like Charlton Athletic?
As mentioned earlier this seems to be the path down which City and several other continental powers are heading. It remains to be seen how the players they sell fare in the professional game, whether – with their increasing quantities of quality players coming up the age groups – they can get their academy to eventually turn a profit, and if any of their players can “do a Matic” and successfully return.
It certainly seems to be a much wiser path than that Chelsea has been on for the past five years and which has reaped nothing for no-one. City at least have already managed to make a profit on this years academy financing with the sales of Marco Lopes and Olivier Ntcham which will more than cover their costs, and those two players now appear set for good careers at strong clubs in France and Italy – giving them a chance of one day returning to the Etihad. This is more than Chelsea has ever managed by holding onto its young players for too long (this is their non hedge fund players) so that they couldn’t get good transfer fees for them once the player’s development had been significantly harmed. In this City may have been fortunate, as beginning their evolution five years after Chelsea they’ve been able to learn from their mistakes.
A Short and Sour Conclusion
With all that taken into consideration, it’s worth saying that for the sake of the players, the English game and even the European game – which needs England to find a sustainable source of quality players or else its leagues are going to be turned into Premier League subsidiaries – it is to be desired that the next five years of Chelsea and City’s promotion of talent are not as destructive as the last five have been – for all the senior trophies they’ve won.
Our thanks, once again, go to Samuel King for this exhaustive, thesis-esque analysis of the English youth system’s current state. You can follow him on Twitter @KingSRV and, if his words haven’t demoralised you away from youth football action altogether, you can follow us @youthhawk for all the latest from the U21, U19 and U18 leagues. Our comprehensive Wiki can be found here.
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