Transfer Rumours transfer thread fact and fiction

To echo PNP here, I think it’s much harder to give chances to young players when the club has been in full on crisis mode for about a year now. When Poch joined it was very much a brave new dawn and we could give chances on the up. Rightly or wrongly it’s much harder for players like Markanday to get choices when we’re raging against the dying of the light.

That said, and especially considering we only have one right sided forward at the club, I’d have liked to have seen him given more game time. Given the promise he’s shown in the youth competitions I can’t think he’d have been worse than some of the others.

 

I think there is.

The issue of an unproductive academy and poor recruitment strategy are both linked by the same underlying issue and it is one that many of us have feared for the past 2-3 years. There seems to be no unifying vision or drive forward at the club, from the top down. We have lurched from one short term solution to the next for ages now, hoping to magic away entrenched issues with one lucky move. Conte is the latest flourish of the magic wand.
He has only ever delivered short term success throughout his career and time will tell if he can buck that trend here but personally I don't see him staying beyond his 18 month contract. We just won't back him enough to justify him turning down some of the biggest jobs in football.

Currently I am not shocked at the lack of success from the academy. After all, we have had 4 permanent managers with 3 radically different approaches to the game in less than 3 seasons. A degree of sympathy is perhaps due the youth coaching staff. They are training our youngsters, but for what? Towards what style of football? Which system? Which formation?

However, this isn't a full mitigation as Chelsea's turnover of managers and styles has been almost as bad as us yet their academy is producing some bangers at the moment.

So my personal feeling is that what we're seeing from the academy is symptomatic of the club's general malaise of widespread uncertainty and a million miles away from the 'DNA' Levy waffled on about last season.

 

We were pretty much in a crisis when Poch joined though, we're not actually too dissimilar in situations in fact, he joined after two manages got sacked in the same season whereas two managers got sacked within about six months of one another recently here. He took the brave call though to integrate youth players over the likes of Soldado, Adebayor, Paulino etc.

This time around though, whether it's Jose, Nuno or even Conte, we've just constantly handed chances to Ndombele, Dele, Lo Celso, Bergwijn etc and it's produced exactly what we the fans expected - nothing. The fact we don't even have a senior backup to Kane as well makes Markanday's exclusion this season even more baffling, both he and Scarlett could've been given minutes each in the games of Kane's absence and that's not forgetting that prior to this season, Markanday's primarily played on the wing too where chances could've easily been given.

 

Nail on the head.

I struggle to think of something more disheartening to a promising youngster than having to watch my childhood club being taken to the cleaners by a bunch of clowns stealing a living while I don't get a look in.

 

Chelsea have chucked an enormous amount of money at their academy, though.
They've also broken various rules and been caught repeatedly, yet barely punished for it.
Their youth players don't suffer from managerial changes either, as they're usually out on loan.
They had 39 players out at other clubs last season.

 

We were but we also gave Poch a 5 year contract with the intent of having a rebuild. Since then we had the fling with Jose in a last-ditch attempt to rescue something from that core squad, a failed Nuno, and now we’ve got Conte but who knows if he’ll be here last 18 months. A new manager with a long term contract to fix a broken club will play young players. Short term solutions are less likely to.

 

not sure i agree with this.

Chelsea are permanently in crisis mode and managers are sacked for looking in the wrong direction.

There are plenty of opportunities to give young players a chance (or at least get them a good loan move) especially when you are relying on the likes of doherty and davies etc

 

lets not take chelsea, take someone like the spammers or even liverpool. Hell even united have managed to include some of their youngsters in even though they are spaffing money left right and centre on expensive signings.

Likewise le arse have had a big batch of academy players come through.

 

Who have West Ham had? Rice and Johnson?
That's comparable with Kane and Skipp. Probably worse.

Rice was rated as rather ordinary too, believe it or not.
His attitude and professionalism were what made them keep him, not his ability.
That's why your lot let him go. He wasn't good enough at the time.

Liverpool? Alexander-Arnold and that's about it. Ripping off Bournemouth, other than that.
Am I missing some players here?

Utd have a few and they're very good, but it's not amazing for a club of their size.
Rashford, Greenwood and McTominay are all top players. That's about it, though.

 

I agree they should give them chances. Generally I think specialists do better in positions than Square pegs in round holes. I’d rather see Markanday played on the right than GLC, or an academy left back played instead of Doherty. There are some exceptions, like Sonny for example who is probably a better hypothetical option as a 9 than most academy players. But I’d generally rather see a coach stick to his system and pick the best players for each position than mess around with the fundamentals of what they teach on the training ground every day.

But coaches tend to go with experience when the chips are down. I don’t think that’s always right but they usually do.

 

I don’t necessarily think the scale of a contract dictates whether or not they can provide chances to youth. I think as Bob’s also pointed out, there are other clubs handing out chances despite having issues of their own.

For one reason or another and one manager to the next, this club is massively failing its promising youth players. Madueke and Edwards are probably worth a combined £50m-£60m in this market whilst KWP is probably worth double what Saints paid us already. Can’t help but feel Markanday’s gonna be another and I wouldn’t be surprised if down the like someone like White follows suit.

We’re losing really good talents who could’ve either made first team impacts over a sustained period or impacts like Mason/ Townsend/ Bentaleb who were then sold for good profits. It’s really, really poor from us.

 

Agree with this. Regardless of the first team situation it shouldn’t impact the academy players going out on loan etc.

You would also hope that the academy manager would be letting the first team manager who the stars are and who could possibly be looked at.

As bad as Lo Celso and Ndombele have been, there must have been a legit reason why Poch, Jose, Nuno and now Conte didn’t give more of a chance to the likes of Markanday, White etc

 

I think it absolutely does affect it. The length of contract given to a new manager reflects the kind of manager you’ve employed and the job you expect them to do. Poch was a long-term appointment so he had scope to build slowly and try things out. If he tried youth players and they didn’t work he wasn’t going to lose his job immediately, because he was doing that as part of a regeneration of the squad that everyone wanted. Rightly or wrongly a coach like Conte who is on an initial 18 month contract and wants to win fast is going to have a completely different attitude.

Like I said, my view is that on a ‘depth chart’, I’d place less experienced specialists above senior players massively out of poison most of the time though.

 

The tone was absolutely necessary given your entire argument was not only wrong, but also put so much importance into a monetary figure as if that had any bearing on anything

To underline why you're pointing the finger in entirely the wrong direction, here's a WindyCOYS post from 2019 which I posted here at the time, and it still bears repeating
https://windycoys.com/2019/10/guest-blog-youth-special/

The point of a club's academy is to develop a player until they turn 18, which is exactly what our academy is doing because if it wasn't nobody would be hyping up players nor would they think we made a mistake by letting the player go

The issue is the period where a player is 18-21 which is a crucial time in their development, yet the vast majority of time the players are still playing academy football and nothing else when to develop they need to be playing senior football at some level, and when it comes to our academy in the last ten years there's been four courses of action
1.) Be promoted to the first team (Bentaleb)
2.) Be slowly dripfed into the first team (Winks, Skipp, Livermore)
3.) Be loaned out for regular football (Kane, Skipp, Townsend, Caulker, Parrott, Etete, Bowden, Ogilvie, Pritchard, Carter Vickers)
4.) Another season in the U23s (Edwards, Shashoua, Georgiou, Oakley Booth etc etc etc)

Now I'm not saying that as soon as every player turns 18 they should be loaned out, as not only would that make U23 matches really weird but also the obvious fact that some players develop quicker than others so Player A may look like a real prospect at 18 while Player B might only start to put things together when they're 20, but by the time a player is 18 the first team coaches should have an idea of which players can be an asset in a season or two and which needs more time in the oven - and this is where the failure has been, as instead they all spent two or three years in limbo where they trained with the first team yet still only played U23 games

And it was clear this was a major issue in 2018-19 when the agents of Edwards, Shashoua, Sterling and Georgiou all demanded loans for their clients, which it's worth noting that the summer of 2018 is also when Noni Madueke and Reo Griffiths both left

So no, the academy is not a failure, the failure entirely falls upon the first team for keeping so many players in limbo for two seasons that were crucial to their development, just as the blame lies with the first team for giving the likes of Walker-Peters and Onomah so little in the way of opportunities even when they were making matchday squads

 

I’m yet to see a prospect leave Spurs and really tear it up at a decent level elsewhere. Going abroad to a inferior league or down a level in England and then do ok doesn’t really prove the club got it wrong.

As much as I slate the club, I don’t think any of the above mentioned would do any better or even the same than the bad players Spurs have signed.

 

I was joining in on the bandwagon for the spammers and thought about it after i posted . Think people maybe carried away as they have a lot of young good players they bought not necessarily academy trained.

In any case comparing declan rice (good eyes by the west ham recruiters i say) to Kane is farcical. Theres a 4 year age gap there. Might as well bring in ledders whilst you are there.

Liverpool - bringing through curtis jones who looks decent, nicked a few of our youngers and sold them for a good sum alongside their own (ibe, solanke, brewster) or played them briefly til injury (harvey elliot). does Joe Gomez count even though they bought him really young off charlton? I won't counter neco williams yet as they were ropey last year at the back.

So United have 3 very good players who are arguably first teamers, Henderson who i think will be a decent keeper. This baring in mind they have been spending left right and centre (whether they have spent well or not, they are still giving their youth a chance). Tuanzebe looks like he'll be decent.

Arsenal have a few - Nketiah, Martinelli, Saka, Smith Rowe thats before all the youth they may have been but were sold/loaned deemed not good enough yet in willock, maitland niles, reiss nelson, iwobi

 

What are you expecting from teenagers/ those in their early 20s though? No one really tears it up at that age. The ones that do often go for mega money, such as someone like Haaland, and it's worth mentioning it was the lower leagues that initially set him up for the Dortmund move as he played in Norway and Austria before doing it Germany. Players like Haaland though are more the exception more so than expectation.

Madueke is doing very well in Holland at 19 and has been linked with Dortmund and Leicester. Edwards has also been linked with a return to England as well as Sporting Lisbon who won the league last year. KWP is also doing well for Saints, likely worth double what they paid us already. We've lost some really good young players and we're about to lose another.

 

Arsenal do have some good youth players and they've arguably misused a lot of them.
They keep playing **** senior players or paying big money for crap, rather than playing them.
I was mystified when they paid loads for Pepe and signed Willian with the options they've got.
****ing Iwobi, though? Really? Can't believe they ripped Everton off that badly for him.

Harvey Elliott was bought from Fulham two years ago.
I don't think buying Chelsea youngsters should count either, as that's not an option for us.
Curtis Jones was one that I missed, though. He's local, so probably a Toffee.
Taiwo Awoniyi looked good for Nigeria the other day, but I don't think he spent any time at Liverpool.
He was on their books for six years, yet he was out on loan the whole time at 7 different clubs.

Dean Henderson was signed from Carlisle, but he was 14 so I'll give you that one.
Haven't seen enough of Tuanzebe to judge.

 

And bought back a player they'd previously sold.

And had players they've let go come good - at PL level.

If you're looking for negatives you can find them anywhere. You could argue with the amount of money Chelski have thrown at youth and their ludicrous loan system they should have actually done better with it than they have. Let's not forget for every success with their 39 players on loan they're going to have multiple failures. And the funny thing is I keep hearing those all-knowing pundits when describing one of these Chelski players on loan saying things like 'he can make it in the first team next season'... but how many do? Let's also not forget Piazon, the Brazillian who has ended up as Chelski's longest serving player - he played for them three times in 10 years. Clearly these players agents are not advising them very well if they're saying they'll get a chance in the first team. Also remember the transfer embargo a couple of seasons back, all the pundits going on about how great it was Chelski giving all these young players a chance... and what did they do the first chance they got? Bought half a new team for hundreds of millions.