I've posted the article in full as you have to register with the Telegraph to access it. How can clubs like QPR develop talent when their best youngsters can be signed for just £3,000? SAM WALLACE CHIEF FOOTBALL WRITER 8 APRIL 2017 • 12:37PM There is a footballer at Queens Park Rangers who has attracted the attention of Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur and now further afield to the two big Manchester clubs, and by the end of the season the chances are that he will bid farewell to Loftus Road for pastures new. Despite the considerable efforts by various clubs to secure his signature, you will not have read about him in the transfer news for one reason above all: he is nine years old. Telegraph Sport is aware of his identity but given that we are not in the business of publishing the names of year four schoolkids in the football coverage that will remain undisclosed for the time being. This is a boy whose name is well-known in football development circles for his outstanding promise can be signed from QPR’s academy this summer for a £3,000 compensation fee. Where his future takes him, only time will tell, but it also begs the question where it leaves QPR, and clubs like them, as they try to develop their own talent in the hyper-competitive new landscape of development football. QPR have not always got it right in the last ten years but they now have a proper structure built by Les Ferdinand, their director of football, and former manager Chris Ramsey, now the academy director. Under the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) the club’s academy is rated category two chiefly because it is split over two sites in the west London suburbs and it is starting to produce players again. Darnell Furlong, son of former QPR striker Paul, has come through the ranks while Ryan Manning and Niko Hamalainen have been scouted in their late teens. The club has a bountiful urban catchment area across the west and northwest of London which yielded Raheem Sterling, who left for Liverpool in 2012 without making a senior QPR appearance. Yet there has not been an academy player established in the first team since Richard Langley and Marcus Bean, more than 10 years ago. QPR had a great tradition of developing players in the late 1970s and 1980s with many of the team that reached the 1982 FA Cup final having come through its youth programme. That era has had a shadow cast over it by serious allegations of sexual abuse against the youth development officer, the late Chris Gieler - a legacy the club has to deal with. In the modern age, however, QPR are trying to compete again for the best young local players. The likelihood is that not all will stay forever but it would rather not lose them at just nine years old. “For QPR, our academy has to be our future,” Ferdinand said when we spoke this week. “It makes it very, very difficult if you’re losing them at nine years old.” Ferdinand himself went to school in Shepherds Bush round the corner from Loftus Road but was missed by the system, coming through non-league at Southall and Hayes before developing into one of the greatest Premier League strikers of the 1990s. He played in goal until he was 15, which he confesses must have thrown a few scouts off the scent, but the chances of a teenager of his potential being overlooked in 2017 are nil. “Our player is being pursued by not just one club but a few clubs,” he says. “Let’s get it right, the top clubs stockpile players. There are 85 per cent who don’t make it through the system. At QPR he has got more chance of playing in our first team.” Then there is the financial side. Under Premier League rules no inducements can be paid to the families of children moving clubs but no-one is under any illusions that this is what gets deals done. Some clubs have paid up to £1,200 a month in what is euphemistically known as “welfare expenses” and given that the maximum EPPP compensation for an 11-year-old is £9,000, this kind of talent mine-sweeping makes financial sense for the wealthiest clubs. Ferdinand has a proposal that might offer some protection to clubs like QPR. Every player signed from another academy is assessed at an agreed age when he has reached adulthood, and a value assigned to him – whether he is to be sold or not. Then a percentage of that value is paid to his club of origin. It may at least stop the trawling for talent if the buying club knows that a £3,000 compensation fee could end up eventually as a £3 million bill. In the meantime Ferdinand has to go back to motivating his academy staff and around 30 scouts to go on finding and developing the best talent for QPR’s first team. “I want them to get out there and find the best players in our area. That is really difficult if someone is just going to come along and nick them. All the hard work you put in. Then years down the line the supporters want to know: how did we let him go?” The big clubs have always signed the best talent, but there was a fair deal for the selling party. Ferdinand earned QPR £6 million when he moved to Newcastle United in 1995, which, aside from the Sterling sell-on fees, remains the highest amount paid for any player who began his career at the club. It would be nice to think that a nine-year-old local lad could come through the QPR ranks and stir the blood of the Loftus Road faithful before perhaps spreading his wings and moving on. In other words, enjoying a similar career path to the one trod by Ferdinand, although the system is loaded against it happening again. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football...-youngsters-can-signed/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_fb
Let's hope Les' proposal gets some attention. The net result of a system like this is that none of the smaller clubs will bother with top talent.
Sadly, the big clubs call all the shots. Rules were changed a few years back under threat of a reduction in monies paid by the Premier League to the EFL clubs, this basically enabled the big clubs to walk in and help themselves to any promising young player and the club holding his Academy registration would get a derisory sum in compensation. A number of lower league clubs have virtually given up as all their effort can be to no avail and they get no recompense anywhere near what they have put in to develop the talent. Just another example of the Premier League and the top clubs in particular getting whatever they want. I posted last year about a 13 year old lad I drove to the Arsenal training ground with his mum as he was going to play in a tournament in Tenerife. She said he'd been at Fulham from six years old and signed for their Academy at nine. Within months Arsenal were in for him and, without asking her, she implied they'd had an offer they couldn't refuse. We, as a club, don't stand a chance, the whole system is set up for the convenience of the usual suspects...
Thanks for posting Nines - it is well worth a read. It has incited a bit of a ranty response but please don't take this as a criticism of having this kind of post (which we need more of). At no point is there any mention of us having spent years training this boy into a 4 foot 8 munchkin footballing magician. Therefore, the implication is that we were first to arrive at the school sports day and everyone else got there a few minutes later. We basically earned 3 grand for filing paperwork well. The kid has to be pretty special to attract so much attention and Les is pissed off because we can't get ample compensation for not being top of the tree and that he might not succumb to wasting his teenage years playing computer games or decide he wants to be a doctor or an astronaut or train driver. So we can't keep the very best? Now remind me what our academy status is? I assume that having billionaires parading round the board room for the last 7 years should have meant that we could have had some sort of moon base esque sports complex in the grounds of Buckingham Palace but no, after neglecting this facet of the club for years, we are now in an extended battle with the Warren Farm branch of the Ramblers Association before trying to build a more moderate complex. I'm getting tired of hearing the about 10 years since youth team progression. Football isn't going to grind to a halt because the top teams have enlisted every 5 year old that can walk. I dare say we can poach the second string talent off lesser teams. I dare say that there are more consistent offerings from developing talent rather that just trying to inherit the best but again the top clubs with the best academies will pip us at times. There's plenty of good players who slip th. We need to walk the hard path (pushing any ramblers aside) and build a reputation for producing excellence. That will come from buying progressively younger players (the Ryan Manning's who are a couple of years away from first team followed by those who are three then four years away etc). So 9 year olds aren't profitable. We've made millions out of Sterling leaving as a 14 year old so it's not exactly a disasterous injustice of a system. There are opportunities but not of bringing through the next wunderkind.
I think it's fair to assume that QPR have put a lot of time, effort and coaching into the development of this 9 year old up to this point in his development. The current system is incredibly weighted in favour of the big clubs who simply hoover up nearly all of the top 9/10 year olds and then either loan them out, keep them in their squads or get rid of them once they have grown up. Nearly all don't make it, even those that have managed to keep a contract until they're around 21. Something needs to be done before football completely eats itself.
But it won't happen, as I mentioned the last rule change prevented 'lesser' teams getting decent fees for players that were poached, the Premier League fatcats have a virtual 'closed shop' on all young talent and can help themselves without any penalty...
Interesting article and as a club we have to develop Warren Farm or somewhere else to attract the talented youngsters in their age bracket otherwise the "top" clubs will simply hoover up all and sundry. The piece shows that the club is moving in the right direction and as LF pointed out with a club like ours there is a pathway to 1st team squad and playing in the senior side rather than just playing against lads in the same age bracket and stunting progression. The amount of talent that the top 4 sides are allowed to stockpile is outrageous simply because they don't want other clubs to have them, surely it's better for football as a whole if lower league sides take on the youngsters, develop their skill set and life skills, give them experience of playing senior games to improve them and then if they are good enough they can move on to bigger and better things, instead of them being stuck in the Chelsea or Man City academy thinking they've made it but having absolutely bugger all chance of getting a sniff of 1st team football, wasting 5 or 6 years of a short career before moving on to a championship or lower side when released by the "big" club when they realise that the player is not going to be good enough or they've just spent £xxx millions on the latest overseas name to sell shirts...... I hope the parents of this lad, the mother has actually posted on LFW, show some restraint and allow the lad to simply enjoy playing the game as all 9 year old should do and not be obsessed about his career, that can come when the lad reaches 15 or 16 and if he's still considered good enough then decide how to progress, hopefully with the R's......
