Should we sign more players from the lower leagues?

As some have pointed out, there have been some good purchases made by PL from the Championship and below but these are the exception. Buying a lot of Championship players would I think lower the quality of the squad so I still think it better to have mix of "home-bred" and imports from the Continent, Africa, Asia and South America. Who were West Ham linked with last week but decided not to pursue the matter? Leeds will do well to hold on to Wood if they miss out on promotion. And looking at Brighton, they seem a bit like Reading in our promotion year.. fantastic team ethic but a PL level they may well struggle.

 

Yeah I am not saying go out and buy 100% from the lower leagues. Just more of a mix then we do now.

 

Beddy

I actually think that there is a bigger picture to this. Most of the managers who are in charge of EPL clubs are European and even the odd English ones like Paul Clement have had extensive experience abroad. It is a strange situation insofar that some of the European players are coming from clubs no better than Championship level and even someone like Puel was poached from Nice who are probably at a same level themselves. I think that the top flight of Spanish, Portuguese , Italian , German and maybe even Dutch football is comparable with the English PL but there is certainly a diminution on quality with what exists in France which is dominated by three top flight teams with the balance probably being Championship level. I've been to one French league game and saw Auxerre play Wolfsburg in the Intoto Cup and thought the standard of football was woeful.

It is a frustrating situation because European footballers are generally of a better quality and whilst there are always cases of Payet who threw his rattle out of the pram, it is British / Irish players who seem to do stupid things like the bloke at Villa who missed training a few week's ago. I can see the argument for not having British players as well as the argument for selecting them. Obviously they are over-priced but when I watch the highlights on Channel 5 of a Saturday night, the quality does not necessarily seem sub-standard.

I would also have to argue that the whole grading system for academies which came in about three years ago will mean that the best local talent is going to be snapped up by the academies of Premier League clubs and this will effectively mean their is a smaller pool of players to search in the lower leagues. In fact, a good proportion of the players are actually loanees from Premiership clubs.

 

Think your bang on beefy...a large core of our promotion team are now premier league fixtures. Clyne, Jay all successes and that's just our examples. Cresswell was great yesterday as a quick example.

Price wise, I thinks it's comparable to Europe.
If we're regularly paying around £10m for players then I don't think a promising championship player is especially overpriced. Particularly when you factor in that a championship player is more likely to settle quickly.

 

Never mind the Championship, I was quite surprised by the standard of some of the football in League 1. I reckon there will always be plenty of talented players who just never get the breaks.

Someone mentioned Jason Puncheon, and he would be a good case in point. A mate of mine used to watch him play for Barnet, thought he had a great attitude, but never expected to see him in the PL. Sometimes a player just needs a coach to take a chance on him, and see if he is capable of stepping up.

 

I don't have a problem with the players we sign, it's the numbers that are the issue.

I do think there are plenty of undiscovered gems in the lower leagues though.

 

Same thing with Harry Arter; looked fairly good in the Football League, but would never have guessed that he'd be a key contributor in the Premier League. Probably wouldn't have gotten his chance but for Bournemouth's rapid-fire double promotion.

We should definitely be sourcing more young players from the lower divisions, and I wouldn't be opposed to some more established ones, although a contributing factor may be that prices have gone mad in the Championship...getting good players isn't particularly cheap these days, even for other clubs in the second tier.

 

There's a young lad banging them in for Blackburn at the moment....

 

Suprised it took so long for someone to mention that!

 

But it proves a point, I think. If our thinking was to build up Sam's fitness, match experience, confidence and so on by loaning him to a Championship club who weren't that likely to challenge for promotion, and then fetch him back, then the same should be true of other young Championship players who are doing well, surely?

 

'Banging them in' might be a bit of an overstatement. He was in a prolonged drought until yesterday...hadn't scored in the league in 7 games, only had two in his previous 12 league appearances. Not opposed to him getting some playing time next year, but he's still some distance from being a finished product.

 

Potentially, yes.

I personally have never seen anything from Sam to convince me he'll make it as a PL striker.

Still pretty young though with time to prove me wrong.

 

I used to talk about this a lot after we signed Clyne and J-Rod after getting promoted. If you buy the best 3-4 players from the Championship every season, they will all make the step up. It just seems pretty obvious to me.

Not that expensive either if you consider the inevitable sell-on fee etc.

 

Yep, we made massive margins on Clyne!!! and I doubt we will make huge money on Jay either...

 

In fact, id go a step further and build a small wall around the club. When we do buy from the Championship, they'd never be able to leave

 

Thing is Beefy, even the most sparsely kitted out PL scouting group is going to know every Championship and LL player. At least with Saints extensive scouting network and tied in Black Box system, we have an advantage on pretty much every football club in identifying talent specific to our needs. Our only problem is that as soon as we register some interest we alert other clubs to that talent. However, by then we usually have some control of any contact, and if everyone behaves reasonably honourably we secure the player. If they don't, the player ends up at Liverpool or Spurs.

 

We have yet to sign a player who wouldn't be in the database of every other Premier League club. Heck, I'd wager that we haven't signed a player who wasn't (spuriously) linked by national papers to at least one other Premier League club before we registered interest.

 

Yep, not convinced we do anything massively different in terms of scouting if I'm honest.

 

Stones is not worth that much

 

Generally the better players will be with teams chasing promotion, and will cost a fair amount for the club to sell. There may be talent in the lower leagues but players from abroad offer cheaper buying cost and cheaper wages. This may be offset by lower league players settling in quicker, there must be several worth the risk