This on the face of it seems to be idiocy of the highest order ,everything the club has worked for the last couple of years to be thrown away!
http://www.watfordfc.com/news/article/120814-academy-statement-311652.aspx? After working hard to try and get into the top bracket it seems the new owners have decided to drop us down to the 3th tier... Maybe they thought it wasn't worth our youngsters being hammered most weeks but surely not good for their development...
well actually, it's a good thing, our talented youngsters won't be taken away from us, even if we aren't playing in a decent league
It appears to be a nail in the coffin of 'community Watford' in my opinion. Time will tell - a season or two to see if we continue to bring in new scholars from the local area or look elsewhere for our young talent.
This is very bad news and evidence that the new owners see Watford more as a finishing school and shop window for their players from elsewhere, and not a source of young players in its own right. At this level, our Academy players will not play in the new u21 league and will be struggling to get competitive experience next season. It makes our Academy much less attractive to talented youngsters , who will now favour clubs with Academy one or two status. It is a blow to those youngsters and their families who have committed to Watford, but now get the signal that their chances at the club are diminished compared to the opportunities to be offered to young players from Udinese and Granada. That is where the Pozzo' s will make money, so that is where they intend to focus their investment. Well , there were worries about how this "project" would unfold, and now we see that some of those worries were not unfounded.
Beginning of the end for Harefield. Another thing that made our club a bit special chucked away. I have bizarrely never felt this 'meh' about the club before at the start of a new season.
This does seem a raher strange decision and one that ponts to simply not wanting to invest the money into the academy. They must have some reasoning behind this, because you would have thought on the face of it, this would be detrimental to the club. Pozzo's way of doing things is to buy young, develop and sell on for a profit, so surely Harefield would have been a perfect place for these youngsters to do this.... unless Harefield themselves has said they do not want an influx of young foreign students? I can see us cancelling our link with them and creating our own Academy where it will be flooded with young, foreign 'talent' Maybe they have decided they just won't be able to compete with all the other clubs, and being in the U21 league, this will just showcase our talent to the other clubs! Does seem a bizarre, and a very disappointing, development!
How many players have we fed to Ude and Granada? How many have they fed to us? Just wait and see what happens, take the emotion out and who have been our best products in recent years? Danny Graham I would say is one Marvin Sordell another neither started their footballing with us. In fact how many successes have come out of the harefield academy, just interested genuine question.
Well it looks bad on the face of things, but you have to wait and see what happens. It may just be that they don't see the u21 league as the best way for us. Why I don't know..... but obviously as newest crop aren't anywhere near ready for that level. The more notable reserve/academy players are getting older and are either going to feature for us, or would do better being loaned out to League 1/2 teams. u21 league may supposedly be of a higher standard, but it won't necessarily be like that.... and League 1/2 football is going to be far better. I'd expect players such as Thompson, Jenkins, Bennett, Massey and Assombalonga go out on loan. The younger lads would probably be eaten alive in a u21 league anyway.
True - they couldn't compete against Barton Rovers last night, losing 0-12. I would like to hear the rationale behind the decision though - the OS really says nothing - but, as with everything else to do with the club these days, I won't be holding my breath.
The devil will lie in the detail. I'm not going to react to this until I know more about what this actually means in terms of changes at Harefield. The main downside of being category three is that the English Premiership's Poaching Plan ensures that we can lose a young player for £12,500 per year, as opposed to losing one for £40,000 per year if we are in category one, or £25,000 per year in category two. Even £40k a year is a pittance when we are talking about losing potential Ashley Youngs, Marvin Sordells, Aidy Mariappas etc. The downside of being in those categories is needing a squad of around 18-21 18-21 year olds to compete in the new league, and if you're category one, having to spend £2.5m a year on youth development (despite the fact that we are already training a decent number of players to a better standard than EPPP requires, on half that money). On another note, EPPP puts a monetary value on the employment value of children who are legally too young to work (under 13s). Once that legal anomaly has been picked up on and dealt with, and once an adjustment is made to take into account school years, I suspect that players won't be allowed to switch clubs until they turn 14. Once they're 16 they have the capacity to commit to a pre-contract which to all intents and purposes is binding. So really, all we need to do is work out how to convince 14 and 15 year olds that we are a club worth sticking with.
To be fair, the difference between the amount we can lose our players for compared to how much extra the club would have to pump into the academy to meet cat 1 status, maybe they just didn't think it was worth it. If they continue as they are with the Harefield Academy, hopefully it's success will convince the youngsters to stick with Watford anyway... and the fact if they train hard and prove themselves, they will get to work under Zola, plus they may get the opportunity to play in Italy or Spain for one of our 'brothers'! Maybe they are gambling on the fact we have a very good and unique set up which will attract the players!
Aberdeen--the Harefield link is just coming to fruition--the first cohort of youngsters is now moving into our own Academy and getting professional contracts. The value of this approach was supposed to show up in a year or two's time--but not now, since if there are to be any youngsters in the first team they will be from Udinese or Granada.. The Stephenson plan which aimed to have 60% plus of the first team made up from our own Academy products has been abandoned, and the decision not to invest in the Academy confirms this. If the next development is the breaking of the link with Harefield and the reduction in youth coaching resources then the role of Watford in the "Pozzo family" is clear--not a "feeder club" (you need a proper Academy to be that) but a finishing school and showcase for Pozzo players being groomed for sale.
After giving it some more thought, I actually don't think we will get rid of Harefield, I just don't think they were willing to increase the funding to £2.5m, when bigger clubs can still poach our players, just for a few extra grand each time. How many of our youngsters have been taken since we have had our link with Harefield? Maybe they believe the academy's success speaks for itself, and still believe they can attract the younsgters to the academy, who will still see it as a route into our first team... plus our acadermy won't have the exposure to the big clubs as they would if they were playing against them in Cat 1 games! Maybe they also feel sending the youngsters out on loan for first team football will be more beneficial to their development than just playing against other 17/18/19 year olds! If they were considering abandoning our academy, surely they would have just disbanded it completely, and withdrawn our partnership with Harefield.... Only time will tell, but I don't see this as a huge issue yet - but only time will tell. They wouldn't have invested so much money into our club already, to just throw our academy away, when it was the academy that was a main reason to attract them in the first place
Well it was never likely we were going to get cat 1 status anyway. No way we were going to, or needed to, invest £2.5m a year but the Premier League are stubborn at best so cat 2 was most likely. Not sure why we haven't gone got this. Are we going to reduce our investment further which would surely lead to Harefield looking for alternatives? Or is the commitments involved with cat 2 too restrictive in Pozzo's eyes. I do hope this doesn't mean they've given up on local talent as that would be a serious error as much for the community nature of club as for the players and success on the pitch.
