If you’re able to find a concrete figure I’d love to see it. Your mileage is going to vary across academy types and with different clubs within Category One. Chelsea and City have the most expensive academies in the country by far that run at an estimated cost of £8m a year. I’m certain that ours is *significantly* less than that and we also receive grants for it from the Premier League and the FA. In the days of “The Orchard Homes Academy” cost was estimated at about £1m a year. If ours is, say £4m (still feels too high of an estimate to me, just given our comparative player and staff numbers, plus Chelsea and City will have “youth” on much larger contracts than we do) then just having Tella emerge is a break even because you’re now in possession of an asset worth more than the cost of running the facility. If we had signed Tella from the Championship last year, his contract and fee would likely have been much higher. The clubs who made the choice to bin their academy were a handful of lower league clubs and Brentford. Normally I’d say that anything Brentford does should be something we all consider. However it only made sense because the cost of them upgrading into a Cat 1 academy was massive at that time and they had just been promoted to the Championship. If they weren’t Cat 1, then they could have lost any developed players for six figure sums without even a fight due to EPPP. The income isn’t just our direct sales and the opportunity cost of not having to sign a young forward/winger. Every player who has come through to be a professional is worth money to the club for the remainder of their career. If, for example, Callum Slattery gets signed to another team for a fee, Southampton gets a percentage. Even without a sell on agreed. We get cash just from having funded his early development in solidarity payments.
Great analysis, and even if the cost of the Academy is as high as £4 million per annum, that's still less than JWP's salary on his new contract.
I want to be clear too, I’m not saying that there’s loads of secret gems we’ve got, or that Horseman is the man (or horse?) I don’t know the truth of that. This is partly because education is a tricky, shifting and ephemeral business, like anything where your product is a literal human being! The comparative age, experience level and developmental stage of different players at different clubs and the way they pick their teams makes it hard to match up teams in a league fairly and we don’t know enough about the individual players to know who is likely to pan out and in what ways. I’m hoping I can start going to the games again now I’m back and I’ll be able to watch them regularly like I used to. If we’re playing another team and they have a mix of players who are older and more physically capable on average, or more experienced, then it’s much harder to narrow that ability gap at this level, than in the first team, where the blend is different. Mainly though it’s that there has clearly not been a vision for that part of the club for some years. Pretty much until Ralph got his feet under the table and Crocker returned as DoF. We’ve had struggling first teams where it’s hard to bring in kids, coaches who have reportedly ignored the youth sides and a lack of longer term planning that has made it hard for players to see and have a pathway. I’m hopeful that is changing now. Matt Crocker has such a history in that area that there’s no way he’s going to deliberately allow it to fail and he has the right knowledge, experience and training. Remember, change doesn’t happen overnight. In education outcomes often won’t be measurable for years after changes are made.
B Team normal service restored, losing 3 -2 at half time. Caleb has picked up a yellow card. 3 - 2 FT
https://www.southamptonfc.com/b-team/matches/2021-22/premier-league-2/saints-vs-stoke-2021-10-01 1 - 1 HT Olaigbe Update 1 - 1 Full time.
To the previous discussion, if you're a Cat A team an Academy is almost always going to be a net financial benefit. It may not be such consistently, but the peaks are more than sufficient to cover the troughs. Take someone like JWP. His value isn't only what he could be sold for: his value is also in the bit where we did not have to pay for him in the first place. He has likely produced some excess value above and beyond what we're paying him, and additionally did not cost a fee. Even before having sold him, he has likely been worth tens of millions, and that only increases if/when he eventually departs.
Good. You have no business being in a competition designed to give league one and league 2 clubs a chance to play at Wembley anyway. How would you feel if Southampton were knocked out of the Johnstone's paint trophy in 2009 or whenever by a PL academy instead of winning it?
That Ballard chap is looking really useful... Difficult to tell from highlights but defending looked poor. If in doubt, boot it into row Z. Still - no shame to losing to an Adkins side!
Sounds like your view is similar to mine maybe. The only time I ever want Portsmouth to lose is in the EFL cup so we get knocked out of this demeaning joke of a competition as soon as possible
