. Chelsea FC: best run club in the country. Top of the league on two-thirds of United's budget. LOVE Ffp
How can they say that when only 1 academy player has gone on to become a proper starting XI player and long time servant to the club in what.....20 years? Bertrand came close but then we flogged him. Want a list of promising names who were touted as the next big thing from our youth team and ended up playing championship football or flogged to other PL clubs in their late teens/early 20's, in the last 20 odd years, because just off the top of my head..... Jon Harley Mark Nicholls Ryan Bertrand Jimmy Smith Scott Sinclair Not to mention the multitude of youngsters who have been loaned out and will probably never make out first team, like: Josh McEachran Gael Kakuta Thorgan Hazard (they keep saying it, but where the **** is he?) Lewis Baker Patrick Bamford Nathaniel Chalobah Christian Cuevas I could go on....... Either our youth academy is a pile of ****....or the first team management need shooting. These kids owned the youth ranks, winning the FA Youth cup a **** load of teams in recent years aswell..... So in closing......No.....I would say our youth academy is far from the best....at anything..... Yes I am jaded by it. One of, if not the only failing and disappointment of Romans tenure for me, is that I thought after 10 years of Romanization, we would have an awesome squad of youth players....hasn't really worked out has it?
I get your point, but what I am saying is....how do we know its brilliant if we dont use it? Its all well and good winning FA Youth cups etc, but if they cannot make the step up to the big leagues....then what damned use are they? Granted, it could be that they are not given a chance, I am not 100% saying they suck, but there is a reason we are not playing our youngsters and its either because they aren't good enough or because the first team managers and coaches are not giving them a chance
I think no matter who they play for, there a lot of good young players who are(or have been) attached to our academy somehow. To me the academy is pumping out good quality, its hard for a manager to put in youngsters when we have the squad we have-although we need to start doing it! i have faith a player will come through and demand his 1st team place.
We certainly have an Academy with arguably the best squad, but as Bodanki says, if they don't graduate to the first team, in my opinion we don't have the best Academy Program, we probably have the worst. Ours has become purely and simply a financial tool used for FFP reasons, and not used as intended i.e. to bring on players. Our record is pathetic, though there are finally some signs this might be changing.
What makes a good academy? To me it has produce players who break into the first team, but look at the competition it's not an easy job. IMO some of these young lads are not given a chance, our buying in the Summer comes into this category. Is Markovic or Lallana really that good that we spend that kind of money on them when we could have kept Suso and used Ibe? I don't think there's much between them when comparing those players and when you add on the money we've forked out it really wasn't worth it. Nothing against the 2 players they are doing ok but that's just it OK. We also sold Martin Kelly and loaned Wisdom, surely they are a better option than Johnson and either could also be used as a center back instead of Lovren. If we had used our academy better we could have used the money saved to bring in better quality other than spreading the money out as we did.
Good job we have done at least one then. http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/row-zed/premier-league-academies-man-united-4775732
To be fair to LVG the only way he'll know if those lads are good enough is by playing them. He is going a bit OTT though.
Have you deducted the 26 years that United won only relegation to division 2 and a couple of Cups with their youth products? Or is the tradition more important than the end product?
Drogs nailed it Southampton are using theirs chelsea are not, Chelsea buy young and loan out, no one from the academy gets a sniff
