In all the years of following Sunderland i cant think of many QUALITY players either scouted or academy bred.Anyone know how the scouts are or who is in charge of developing the up and comlng players.The turnover is very poor to say the least.
Martyn Waghorn... £3m Jordan Henderson...£16-19m Grant Leadbitter... £2.5m If my calculations are right that comes to between £21.5m and £24.5m. So Adam Johnson and Stephen Fletcher are indirect products of our academy. I'm happy enough.
Oh ok. Those two international players aren't good enough for you? Who would you have signed with that money?
The Academy is useful for training etc. but, when it was built instead of buying players we hit the wall and quite a lot of people said it was a waste of time and money. Yes the facilities are great, yes the players are more comfortable there with the many gyms saunas and treatment tables. However it hasn't lived up to it's rep by producing steadily good players for our first team. As for our scouting network do we even have one? as I'm sure scouting Johnson and Fletcher could have been done from an armchair with Sky on the box. We need to sort the scouting out and we need to sort the Academy out by attracting the good young players not just from the North East but, from around the World.
We are miles away from doing that comm, I'd be happy with two good homegrown players in the team at the minute mate.
barca has had theirs for 30 years we have had ours 9 plenty time to catch up. Boro done the same a few years back as well against Fulham i tend to recall 0-0 draw I believe.
9 years should be enough to provide us with at least 2 maybe 3 decent first team players though mate, at present we have Colback who isn't exactly setting the PL alight. Agreed it'll take time but, time is something we have very little of at SAFC. Don't Barca play a "B" team as well in the Spanish league not sure what level mind but their version of the Championship I think?
yeah they do but they cant get promoted unless the A team gets relegated (which isnt going to happen) barca and real also get 70% or so of the TV money its not split equally like over here. for me there is too many professional and even non professional leagues in the country, we just havnt got enough (good) players to go around all the clubs, its probably impossible to turn 99% of players into world class or even PL standard players and most of the youngans want to get snapped up by anyone but us (yes even the toon and boro, well when they were in the PL anyway), so i can see how its a hard slog for the coaches and why we havnt produced more quality (we have produced a few that went to the lower leagues but not many PL players).
Look at the turnover of managers - stability is the key to allowing dynasty's to be built. However, lets not lose sight of the fact Barcelona are a top, top club and is it fair to compare ourselves to them?
