I'll separate out four kinds of loan. 1) 'Big' Prem club to 'little' Prem club. I'm very doubtful about these, especially after what we've seen from Gilmour so far. It seems to me that most of the benefit goes to the big club whose player gets Prem experience when they are not really ready for it. The smaller club takes the hit, the big club takes the benefit. 2) Prem club to Champs club. This can work well - look at Skipp, who was probably just as important as Emi in getting us over the line last season. But even if it works, it leaves behind a gap which needs filling. Because Skipp was so good last year, none of our permanent players got the chance to build up their experience in the role that Skipp claimed as his own. Could Sorensen be up to it? We have no idea, and we may not be able to take the risk of giving him a run of ten games or so in order to find out. 3) Loan with option to buy. These seem much better, but are harder to arrange for the obvious reason that they don't favour the party which has more power - i.e. the bigger club. (Imagine if we had had the right to buy Skipp at the end of last season.) 4) Clubs of our size to clubs below us in the pyramid. These may sometimes work for the club (e.g. Cantwell going abroad) but often don't seem to help the player much. What I do feel is that clubs should not be allowed to have a 'stable' of youngsters they can loan out and see which of them might turn out to be pure gold. And although the worst culprits are big teams like Chelsea and Liverpool, even Norwich aren't innocent in this regard. Under Webber we seem to have bought quite a few young players with an eye to making a profit on them rather than seeing them as possible players in our future squad.
I know our view of point 1 has been tarnished a little by Gilmour but Williams has been good if a little rough around the edges. But outside of us look at Gallagher, good season for West Brom last year and this year he has really kicked on and is driving Crystal Palace up the league
I agree about Williams especially, but we seem to be under pressure to play Gilmour who still is not PL level. Yes he gets praise for Scotland, but most of their games aren't PL level.
Re Gallagher, a key aspect is trying to make sure that the loaned player will fit in with the system the team plays. I can't help but wonder if the loan of Gilmour was more about the kudos of getting a 'name', and not enough consideration was given to how he would fit in with our group of players and our playing style. If I imagine him at Watford, for example, I believe he would be doing much better, not because the Watford players individually are better than ours but because his shortcomings would matter less in a more physical team.
Yet he seems to manage better with Scotland (with Hanley & McLean), albeit normally playing against Championship level teams. Personally I think he well overrated, that's not to say he won't be a decent player in the future.
This is now three years old but nothing much, if anything, has changed -- which maybe suggests that, for all its shortcomings, the system does work to the advantage of a sufficiently large number of clubs at every level. https://taleoftwohalves.uk/featured/loan-system-work
I think there's two arguments here, whether loans work, and whether the current academy setup & loan market works for English football. All tranfers, permanent or temporary, carry risk. Our loans for Kabak, Normann and Williams appear decent, as did Skipp, Jordan Rhodes, Fraser Forster, Ryan Bertrand, Darren Huckerby, Peter Crouch, Daniel Pacheco, Leroy Lita. Some of those were development loans, some were filling squad gaps with other teams excess players. On the other hand... Gilmour, Marcus Edwards, Patrick Bamford, Harry Kane, Patrick Roberts...didn't work so well. There's many components to a successful loan. The loanee needs to have the right mentality, and go to a club that suits their personality and playing style, with the football at a level that pushes them to develop, but isn't way above their head. And often you need a club in a position where they can afford to give a youngster a chance. Norwich couldn't really afford to give Harry Kane a 10 game run in the team because the damage of him flopping would have been too great. It's harder to get right than a permanent transfer. Are loans working for British football? It's hard to say. To use Gilmour as an example. He spent 8 years at Rangers, but was then poaches around his 16th birthday to join Chelsea for £0.5m. Whist Chelsea's academy may have accelerated his development, so might 2-3 seasons of playing in the SPL for Rangers. He was training with their first team as a 15 year old. Now aged 20, perhaps a Chelsea or a mid-table Premier League club are dropping £10-15m to sign him from Rangers. Rangers would have done much better out of developing Gilmour if there was less incentive for him to move to a top 6 club as early as possible. If more players are able to develop at smaller clubs, and move up the leagues using permanent transfers rather than starting at the top and being loaned down, you'd see more money going to smaller football clubs, which would help the game long term. There's definitely an argument for having promising talents develop in world class facilities surrounded by top, top players, but I think there should be a limit. Chelsea will have full academy teams playing/training for their U23s and U18s, and they also had 37 players out on loan last season. Players like Lucas Piazon who signed for Chelsea in 2012, left in 2021 after 1 senior appearance and loans to 7 different clubs. I think it's that 18-23 age group that needs some reworked rules. This seems to be the career stage where players fall into the "endless loan" cycle, and that seems deterimental to their development but clubs are able to hoard loads of players in this category because 1 success can pay for 10 failures. Maybe you let clubs have a maximum of 50 senior pros on their books. That's a 25-man senior side and a 25-man development team (U23s). Players out on loan count towards those limits. If you're a Manchester United, with a 33-man first team, 4 out on loan and 17 U23s..you have decisions to make. They already need to cut four players (across the Prem that would be around 80 promising youngsters released into the football league), but then if they want a player for the first team...do they promote from within and give someone a chance, or do they buy in from overseas and have to sell a youngster? Hopefully, it would reduce hoarding of youngsters by top teams, allowing lower league clubs the chance to sign 18 year olds on permanent deals, so they can sell for profit when they develop. It might also encourage clubs to look within and develop a player, rather than taking the short term fix of buying a new senior pro.
