It’s often claimed that, “we can’t go on selling our best players and expect to be competitive”. I think this is the wrong way of looking at it. The black box system has unearthed some brilliant players, such as Mané, VVD, Wanyama, etc. Our Academy has produced quality graduates like Lallana and AOC and we have brought previously unrated managers such as MP1 and Koeman to the EPL and had great success- all under this board. Can you name one of these who we were touting around, trying to sell? No, neither can I. We are literally victims of our own success because we are not a big enough club to retain them. Its not that we constantly sell our best people. It’s that in a world of short contracts, they want to leave for more money. If you think firing Les and Ralph will change that, I disagree.
Let's slow down on the 'black box', I think. It's a scouting database. Probably a good scouting database, but something that every club has. Much of the work ultimately comes down to the staff, however, and our recruitment has gotten significantly less impactful over the past couple years. Our Academy has not produced much in recent seasons, to the point where only two graduates have logged any real time this season. Our recruitment and the Academy were our strengths. I'm not sure we can rate them as strengths still.
Les should go because of 3 poor transfer windows in a row and 2 poor managerial appointments in a row. We are not bottom of the league because we are victims of our own success. We are bottom of the league because of bad management.
I'll give you Mane, but i'm pretty sure everyone knew how good Wanyama and Virgil were lets not make out the black box uncovered them, we were just lucky enough that at that particular time we were an attractive club for them to join.
Isn't newcastle up for around 300m? Or they had an offer around that mark? If so 210 for 80% isn't particularly cheap.
Is this the Academies fault though or have we just had managers recently who are too scared to try the players out? If we weren't struggling so bad I would like to see Sims and Hesketh given a chance. Who knows we may have some gems just not being given an opportunity. Unless we give them a chance we will never know. Over the years we have had a few players coming good at once not loads.
If that was so certain, why didn’t Spurs and Liverpool just sign them for the low prices they were available to us? Virgil was a risk as doing well in Scotland is no guarantee. These were great buys and note that I said black box ‘system’ as it’s the folk operating the computers and studying the footage who make it so successful.
Lots of players look good in the "lesser" leagues and come in that £10-15m price bracket, most of them don't turn out good enough for the top teams. The bigger teams with their larger transfer kitties can afford to wait and see which ones actually are a success and just pay more for them. Buying a Mane for £35m is less of a risk than buying 3 Mane type players from smaller leagues for £35m combined. Picking which players will be a success out of the ones playing in the lesser leagues is something we are/were good at, but are strike rate was still not exactly perfect. For every Wanyama/VVD/Mane there is a Ramirez/Osvaldo/Juanmi/Forren
Or for every Mane/Wanyama/Clyne bought from the same league, there's a Lovren/Schneiderlin/Shaw/Chambers. Not saying the success rate isn't worse, but its not 2-3x worse.
Exactly...the big sides buy the 'certs' and even then they don't all work out. We buy at a lower level and take the risks....then the bigger clubs step in and buy our PL proven players....and guess what, they don't always work out. Our system is shown to work because we find enough good players to earn us a nice income. The area we have fallen down in recently is getting players through from the Academy....because that is where the real profit lies. This good financial plan....which makes everyone say we are a well run club....has hit a rut because we have lost sight of the football side.
Let's say 100% of the club was £235-£245 million. Considering Newcastle are going for £300 million I'd say that we aren't a cheap buy.
Both. Trusting the Academy is no longer a prerequisite for employment as our manager, it seems, but from posts made by people who know things around here, the Academy has real problems in leadership, as well.
The Black Box is just a fancy way of saying scouting department. Every club in the league will have one, but they don't/didn't promote it like we did.
I think that there is a bit more too it than just a phrase. It’s a room where players can be analysed for performance by video and statistics. I think that we may have been ahead of the game at one point but of course everyone else copies and catches up. Then finding the bargains becomes more difficult.
Many almost certainly got there first, frankly. I'm happy that we put the effort and money into bolstering our scouting and analytics, but the touting of the black box had less to do with its utility and more to do with our PR...because we had this mysterious Black Box that spat out a constant stream of top-quality transfer targets, we needn't worry about any departures, because we always had half a dozen players lined up for the position, just as good but more affordable. It was a way to put a nice gloss of competitive edge on what was a business decision, and one that has been less successful since the less mysterious but well-regarded Paul Mitchell departed as our head of recruitment.
On the subject of the Academy, I’m sure someone said a while ago that we were going to go through a “dry spell” with the Academy because there was a period when we were recruiting kids while we were in administration or League One and that had an impact on which kids were prepared to join us. Is that part of the reason we aren’t seeing so many youngsters come through or are/should we now be past that? Is it just the usual reason - it’s harder to introduce young players at the top level.
I think Spurs did sign Wanyama for the low price available to us, and they got the proven premier league player. With VVD he saw us as a genuine way to promote himself and move on, I agree we did really well to sign him in the first place but to say the black box plucked him from the unknown is stretching it some.
I'm sure that's true, but the end of the cachement era should really offset that: as a Cat 1 Academy, we can bring in kids from anywhere, and for a spell we were...our Academy featured an awfully large number of players who jumped here from big London clubs because of the pathway we offered. That seems to have dried up a bit, though, and some of those players have subsequently left. We're a less attractive proposition for emerging talents than we were a few years ago.
