I used to live in Watford and your comments dont tell the whole story. Watford were almost put into administration by the previous owner who had grandiose plans but was a bankrupt who never could deliver. Watford had applied to upgrade their academy at a cost of millions. The new owners could not justify this and withdrew the application so the academy has continued at the level it was already at. Watford now field as many youngsters from their academy as they ever have done and more than most other Championship sides. Also now they are owned by the owners of Udinese they have been "loaned" players from them instead of buying them - but as both clubs are owned by the same owners it makes no real difference.
Better cheap loans than what Cardiff, Leicester amd Portsmouth have done and spend millions going into debt and future trouble - and in Cardiff's case the owners care so little for the fans they changed their colours from the traditional blue to "lucky" red. Imagine if we got bought by a Chinese consortium who insisted we play in RED !!!!
Gianfranco Zola is an exponenet of football as it should be played and I would like to see him get promoted - odds are of course that one day he will return to Chelsea
Interesting to hear this and thanks for the clarification on the current status on the policy at Watford. It did seem a shame to me that the club couldn't proceed with their application as I did know the infra-structure had been in place for a number of years. Anyone with knowledge of academy football knows about the Harefield scheme the club set up and for a while we at Spurs were closely following the success of this to assess how we could maybe do something similar. As it turned out we are now in a position where we do it 'in-house' at our new training complex, although the substantial guaranteed annual grant from UEFA through gaining Elite status does help, something which I am sure the Watford people knew about when they made their decision.
brilliant!