Don't there have been any since that year which also featured Luke Shaw, Harrison Reed and Callum Chambers. Think Sam Mcqueen was that year too and he may have had a career at that level.
We had a badly underperforming youth set up for a long while. There is no doubt about that. You can’t bring through bad players. That said, I am also with Schad on this. We have not made promoting youth a focus of our model the last few years. This year we started with the best will to do it and then the youth got shelved when the bad run hit. No way was that bad run anything to do with SAA. He looked superb in his early cameos- not just in the friendlies. One starting performance when the ball never went out to the right has totally stalled his season. I think you do need to have a statement youth player coming through to set the tone.
True. But there was also a considerable lack of investment in the club at any level during the Gao years, so it's not a big surprise the academy suffered. Our current owners have been in charge less than two years, but have made repeated promises to focus on the academy. So we need to give them a while at least before we start judging. Remember we hired the director of the country's most successful academy 6 months ago.
And that's fair. it's also entirely fair for a young player to look at that and conclude that this isn't a good place for them to be.
Yep. SAA is the one player I think we'd all have liked to see more of. But again, he is ridiculously young. He'll get more chances this season, but honestly, if he or any other 17 year old starts kicking up a fuss, probably just best to let them leave.
Also, what clubs, apart from the rich ones, have been constantly turning out academy players over the last decade? Brighton had Ben White. Who else? West Ham had Rice. Who else? Not gonna go through every club, and I'm sure there are one or two that buck the trend, but we are hardly alone in struggling to produce local talent.
That is fair. But how many players are there in the Brighton first team squad that they have signed from academies having never played any notable senior football? I don’t know the answer but I expect there aren’t many.
In terms of playing academy players we haven’t been good at it recently and that is because of where the first team has been in the last 5(?) years. With the Covid season being a bit of an exception from memory every year we have been in a relegation fight which we wouldn’t want to risk youngsters in, or this season where we seemingly have to win every game to keep up with the other promotion chasers. To be a club that gives lots of opportunities to young players you have to be a mid table club in whatever division you are in really. I’m much more in favour of loaning players out to whatever level they are deemed good enough to be playing regularly in the hope that eventually after one of these loans they are good enough to compete for a starting spot here on a regular basis
He asked about players they had signed without significant professional experience, which necessarily precludes 'their own'.
And I’d say signing players at 15 almost makes them your own from an academy sense. Not quite the same as plucking a player from another academy. But that is maybe being picky. Not really sure what the cut off truly is age wise. Brighton are too recently established at the top level to really have a record of doing what I describe and asked about. Another reason it’s a gamble for Doyle. No track record really. If he truly thought he should have been playing this year then another championship club should have been the move. But that clearly isn’t the reason
Fair enough. It was just that your 'two minutes' comment yesterday, included only academy players, and not others brought in. In which case, Ferguson shouldn't count.
I agree with you. But Brighton signed Ferguson at 16. We signed Amo-Ameyaw and Meghoma at 16. Amo might even have been 15.
Sure, we're talking about two different things. And I think that they need to be evaluated separately. We have made good on our attempt to be a finishing school for 18-20 year olds from high-performance Academies. Players and their families take notice of that, and consequently we can expect more Lavias and THBs etc in the future. We have not demonstrated much interest in bringing through our own Academy players. Entirely possible many of them feel that the club lacks commitment to them because it doesn't have the same sort of financial investment it makes in the aforementioned category. Players and their families take notice of that, and consequently at the first sign that we aren't holding to whatever promises we've made, they're going to look elsewhere.
Agree on both points. And yes, there was definitely a frustrating lack of quality coming through during the Gao years. I'd just say that seeing as we have relatively very new ownership, we have to at least give them time before criticising the lack of youth coming through. They've been making good moves so far; hiring Wilcox, bringing in SAA/Meghoma, and giving Ballard/Dibling decent pro contracts.
On the subject of Blackburn, I enjoyed this transfer announcement https://x.com/Rovers/status/1750265976048824343?s=20
