The academies of clubs in the PL and outside have been in existence for some years now with the aim of improving not only the clubs but the standard of the national team. Well we have all seen the result of this both in last year's WC and this year's Under 21 tournament, and that is the continued regression of English footballers in terms of ability and attitude. Is there one English footballer today, or who has played at the top level for the past 10 years that has the level of ability and footballing intelligence with those of a previous generation. Is there anyone with the talent of John Barnes, Peter Beardsley, Paul Gascoigne, Glenn Hoddle, Bryan Robson, Steve Williams, Alan Ball, Rodney Marsh, Colin Bell, Alan Shearer and of course Matt Le Tissier. All these players had talent, skill, determination. Some also liked to party. My answer to the question I asked is definitely not. So what exactly are the academies doing as most of the players produced are at best Championship standard? If we look at the French academy, they are churning out technically skilled players but watching their international teams these same players have very little flair or imagination - they appear to be clones. Is this happening in our academies, too?
Big teams in the premier league demand instant success and so using players from academies is seen as a risk. Other than saints and arsenal, although arsenal tend to buy their youngsters, are brave enough to use academy players. Academy players just aren't getting the game time. U-21 football is just a graveyard for young players, it is several steps down from competitive football.
To give a slightly less brief answer to your question, but still keeping it very short... here goes. I have stood on my soap box far too many times on this topic. There is no quick fix and when Greg Dyke said that we are aiming at the 2018 World Cup, I pissed myself laughing. We need to give it a lot longer and drive the problem from a lot deeper. We are a nation of fighters, conquerors and drinkers. We don't develop players in the right way and those that are trying to do that are still in a massive minority and swimming against the tide. The whole ethos of the game needs to change, but that is going to take generations and generations, if indeed it ever can change here. Our end product (the Premier League) is about blood and thunder and as you drop down the leagues the story gets worse, so when those lower % of people who are trying to develop players technically above all else, try to play them in a professional game, they struggle due to the physicality of our professional game. Focus needs to be on skill, skill, skill. Technique, technique, technique. Unfortunately the majority in our game still focus on win, win, win and expectation, expectation, expectation. This question cannot be answered in a couple of posts, or the problem be solved in a few years. I fear that the desire at the top for money has pushed us too far to be able to realign our game to develop a successful, sustainable generation.
Competitive football ... what do people mean by that? I have never seen an uncompetitive game of football and that includes the 15 minute torturous fat dads' games I played in 2 weeks ago at a "fun day" I really do fear that our end product at the top of our footballing World, I.e. Professional football, has created too big a gap to plug between it's current guise and the change needed at the very first levels of football. The end product is pulling in a different direction to that of development needs and I think never the twain shall meet. I see it every week coaching the boys and listening to parents and other teams coaches. Only this week a parent from another team's player telephoned me to ask if I had a spare place in my team. He explained that although he had been playing for this other team for 5 years, his manager had signed 4 new boys from a higher league and had sent a text to this father saying his son won't be picked and he should find another team. I thought about this a lot as it really bothered me. Why does an adult who coaches a boys team feel the need to tell a 14 year old boy that he isn't needed anymore in his local park team? It comes down to that biologically/genetically ingrained desire to win, no matter what. Why could the coach when approached by the 3 or 4 boys from a better team say, "sorry I already have enough players"... believe this or not, that is what I do and have done each season. The existing boys get first option on places, regardless of ability. There is so much more to write on this, but it is difficult to explain. I can just say again that I genuinely fear that we have two lanes of football now and the National team will never reach the heights again and the national leagues will continue to go from strength to strength as a product but driving the success gap between the two, further and further apart.
Absolutely spot on FLT. I couldn't have put it better myself, so I'm not going to try. Young kids should be taught to work hard and improve themselves, not to win at all costs.
Agreed with FLT, but there's another hypothetical question here which is would all those players, with their love of parties etc, be quite as successful in the modern age with the requirement for extreme athleticism etc. Certainly if they all had the mentality to work toward that physical standard (with someone like Shearer, no doubt), but Gazza....hmmm.... I think the answer is probably yes, they'd all still be exceptional, but there is also another element to modern day play that's more pronounced now than even in the latter stages of those players careers (that's my point, I think!)
I have always said that an exceptional player from the past would be exceptional now because they would go through the same training sessions etc. The ones who would lose out would be the cloggers...they'd never be on the pitch long enough.
Until the FA stop the "players that have been with a club 3 or more years count as English". Clubs will carry on buying up the best talent from abroad instead of giving a **** about homegrown talent.
Point is when we had world class players, as I have highlighted, we did not have academies! They learnt their craft playing in the street. Nor did they spend their time in tattoo parlours.
This is the other thing, I think English players were hyped up as "world class" in past eras as there wasn't such easy access to watching games from all round the world as there is now. Wouldn't be at all surprised if the % of world class players in this England team is similar/the same as from the past
I can't agree I'm afraid. We had "Youth set ups" just as we do today, but not called academies. As for these players not spending time in a tattoo parlour, that is because they found the pub before they found the tattoo parlour. Not all those players were World Class either. I am not quite sure what it is your trying say? Are you saying that we don't need academies? I don't think any of those players were picked up as 17 year olds playing in the street? For certain, the Saints linked ones came through saints youth set-up.
IOM is correct about the paucity of naturally skilled genius kids about. I would add to all the views above that kids aren't as naturally inclined to get outside and play with a ball anywhere near as much as they used to. There are many distractions these days. Add to that, the modern GB needs space for its population. No Ball Games becomes a real shocker when the importance of how green a relatively ordinary piece of grass has a higher priority than the health, fitness and good play habits of children. Another point about kids going outside of their own free will and playing football is that they do it when they want to. That's extremely significant. If the green area is only a couple of hundred yards away and youngsters are like-minded, you'll get little groups playing games with jumpers for goalposts. This is where the little geniuses are to be eventually found. Less likely are they in academies, where they get to train in a very organised fashion two or three times a week. They want to be out on the green for half and hour, an hour, perhaps all day, every day, honing their particular skills or laughing themselves daft from the sheer pleasure of playing and being with friends. Or perhaps kicking a tennis ball against a wall, and trapping it or volleying it to perfection. Not rushing home from school, jumping in the shower, having the kit organised and then jumping in the car for the half hour journey to the Club, so that they can have an hour before they have to come home. They could have been honing their skills for two or three hours at home or on the local green. What I'm saying is that the very strength of academies, of hoovering up football minded kids at an early age and giving them an opportunity for organised play with excellent facilities, is also their weakness. Depending upon the methods and techniques involved, one churns out excellent players at best. The utter geniuses will almost certainly be held back to a certain extent by the structure of an academy. Thankfully, Southampton's Academy is less rigid than others. It's a beacon in the fog because they teach with more of a mind to play rather than instruct. And their recruitment is more to find the differences in players rather than to take a set type of player from an early age. Players of all ages at Saints talk about the Club family. One could very easily call it a group of little friends playing in the local park with jumpers for goalposts, honing their skills.
Agreed ^. I think our academy will produce a world class player within the next decade. I'm confident of it.
I feel very strongly about this too. There are two sides to this point of the debate: 1. Those that say you need players to play with better players (under a club guidance) and be coached to be improved 2. Coaching a player too young, can flatten out any natural flair There is merit in both views, but I always think it is unhealthy for a lad to be taken away from playing with his mates at too young an age. For example, if you are in the main Academy squad as a 11 year old (for example) at a pro club, then you can't play for your normal Sunday team. This is so, so wrong in my opinion. In as little as one season's time, that child could be out of the academy and then looking for a team to play for. I think that no club should be able to sign a player before he is 14. Just my opinion. Coach them at training centres, etc but leave them out there a little longer.
They were playing the streets when there weren't so many cars around. Each cul-de-sac would have a knockabout going whereas now cars are up and down every single road all the time. Also every house has a car or cars. The minute a kid even thinks of taking a football and knocking about on the street every curtain starts twitching and severe warning issued by the car owners. Parents therefore stop the kids playing on the road because they don't want a confrontation, bill for scratch repairs etc. One neighbour took one of my Son's balls and put it in his wheelie bin until I walked up and asked for it back, however I can understand his point r.e. he doesn't want careless kids (all kids are pretty careless) scratching his car. They were knocking about on the parks when the goal posts were still left up (without the nets of course) and before all the parks had 'NO BALL GAMES' signs on them. Said it before. The massive park 400 yards from me used to have 3 football pitches and a full size cricket pitch. The cricket pitch is lovely and flat but unused. Where the football pitches used to be there are no posts and no line markings and are no longer used as football pitches. Football teams used to be pretty cheap to play for and manage. £1 a week and games were fairly local. These days there are less teams because noone wants the hassle + CRB + lazy parents and therefore there is a scrabble to get your kids into a team. Then you are faced with the leagues being much less local and if you haven't got a car then you're struggling. My Son's school football team has had 2 games all season!!! Both against the same team quarter of a mile down the road. If money is to be spent as grass roots it needs to be spent providing ease of access to the sport with low prices to match. No good building uber quality pitches and then still charging more / games being non local. It should be spent making it possible for kids to have those knock abouts. Knowing this country the bill for risk assessments / insurance and then taking down all the 'No ball games' signs would use up all the budget.
Well said Imps, I agree entirely. What it all boils down to according to your excellent analysis is that although Academies might not be the best possible way of bringing kids into football they are the best we have, although the number of kids they have to choose from is much lower than it should be.
TSS - The 'Jumpers for goalposts' scenario is often not possible now because the 'NO BALL GAMES' is not to keep the grass green, it is in reponse to NIMBY homeowners whos gardens back up to the park or dog owners / park users putting in complaints about balls nearly hitting them or the language that they hear from the 'jumpers for goalposts' partakers. In this country this is a common problem with all sorts of things. Councils do not grit pavements anymore because if they miss a bit and someone falls over on that bit they can be sued. They have pulled up all the flag stones replacing miles and miles of pavements with tarmac so they don't get sued. They put rubber surface on all the play parks so they don't get sued if a kid falls over. The rubber lasts a few days before vandals dig it up and then the padlock the gates until it is re-rubbered. The play park near me is virtually always padlocked up. The same with the 'NO BALL GAMES'. The councils don't want the responsibility of monitoring / insuring / paying so they just get rid of the problem and insist that sport is played in sports places, which costs money and is at the end of / very very close to everybody's home. It all started on our park because kids were knocking about with golf clubs on there. So when I was a kid on these same parks the playpark was simply grass same as the rest of the park. Was always open. All the football pitches had the goalposts up all year round. Just the nets taken down. If you tripped over a flagstone my Mum would tell me to pick my feet up and if she tripped she would say 'Oops silly me'. If we or our parents/grandparents slipped on ice we said Ouch but didn't blame anyone else.
