I’ve been fretting about this academy business – it looks like the club will go for Category 2 status rather than the Cat’ 1 which will be de rigueur for Prem’ clubs, and anyone else with the facilities and who want to stump up the cash. So, in an attempt to make myself feel better I’ve been looking into what the consequences of what going for Cat’ 2 might be. First, the new categories look like this:- Cat’ 1. - Must have a budget of => £2.3M. - Full time staff => 18; set minimum times for player-coach contact - The “90 minute rule” doesn’t apply (IE, they can recruit – and poach from other academies – from anywhere in the land. All us other peasants are restricted to youths who live 90 minutes drive from the ground, and you’re not allowed to sneakily re-locate families for the purpose). - They have the right to give other clubs 48 hours notice to mooch up and watch their players (I don’t know if this is lower category clubs only, or includes other Cat 1 clubs). Cat’ 2. - Must have an indoor training facility and certain minimum standards which we doubtless currently satisfy. - Must have a budget of => £0.97M. - Less rigorous requirement for full time staff and player-coach contact time. - Allowed to recruit from the age of 4 (!) upwards. - 90 minute rule applies. Cat’ 3 (roughly equivalent to the current “school of excellence” level, which is the level below where we currently are). - Can’t recruit until 11 years old. - Budget => £0.32M Cat’ 4. - Recruit locals and cast offs of Cat 3+ clubs that are 16+. - Budget requirement => £0.1M. Then there are the compensation fees – that is the amount a buying club (ie, only Cat 1 clubs if more than 90 mins from your catchment area) has to pay to poach a youngster. No more will clubs either negotiate a transfer fee plus various add-ons or go to a tribunal to decide a fee. It goes:- Age 9 to 11 - £3K for each year at your academy. Age 11 to 16 - £40K for each year to another Cat’ 1 club; £25K for each year to a Cat’ 2 club; £12.5K and £3K for Cats 3 & 4. Assuming that’s three years at 3K, as a Cat’ 2 academy the most we’d get for a poached youth is £134K. That’s if we’d had him since 11 and some evil Cat’ 1 team had poached him at 16. If we were a Cat 1 club, we could still have our players poached, but the compensation would increase to a maximum of £209K. I suppose all this means that once your youngsters have hit 17, the usual transfer rules apply. This will surely encourage a Cat 1 feeding frenzy of any decent sub-17 year old?? So - nobody would have waited for Wickham to have hit 17 – some fascist Cat 1 club would have nicked him at 15-16 for less than 100K! 1. Advantages of going for Category 2 status? Ummmm … You save on your annual budget for sake of giving up a maximum of 75K for each poached youngster. I don’t know what we pay every year to run the academy now – we might be fairly close to the Cat 1 budget already, for all I know. How much will we save? If you go Cat 2 would we make an effort to spend less, or carry on with our current budget level? I’m bloody sure we spend more now than the proposed Cat 2 minimum of just under a million per annum. Does anyone know?? We might be close enough to some of Norwich, Cambridge and Colchester’s youngsters to nick some of theirs even if we’re too far away to poach anyone else’s! If we ever get promoted ever again we can always upgrade to Cat 1 (well…presumably). Even if we were Cat 1, other Cat 1 clubs can still poach our players, though at slightly more compensation. I can’t think of anymore. Is the extra money worth the ability to recruit and poach from anywhere you want and to ensure your players have the best facilities and the most time with the best coaches? With the insanity that might well ensue with Cat 1 clubs fighting for any promising youngster before they hit 17, I’d say it probably is.
Clearly been doing your research JJ. I agree, I hope we do go for a Cat 1 academy, and being the optimist I am I think we will. I think/hope Clegg and Jewell are just calling for caution before all the details come out and they have a meeting about it, so not wanting to definitely commit until this is the case. Well I hope thats the case anyway.
You've really done your homework on this one Jonah. If the difference is that you need to spend approx 1.4 million a year to gain 15K a year on your academy products price I can see why ME might think twice about upgrading. Assuming the decision is not one for life and that you can change the status of your academy if you so wish I can see us sticking with the grade two until we (if ever) get promoted. The financial outlay compared with the return is not worth it. If we were to spend that extra 1.4 million on a player we can keep, as well as the cash we might save on staffing the academy at the top level it might mean we stay grade two. We already post on average 10M in losses every year that need paying somehow. Evans' money is the only thing keeping us solvent at the moment and if he decides to use the money on the team rather than the academy I could see his reasoning. We have always had a good academy and brought some good players through but are there enough to justify the extra outlay in the hope you produce another every one or two years?. ME's thinking may be to spend on the team and upgrade after promotion. Sure it puts us at the mercy of grade one academies for a while but if we concentrate more on the first team and gain promotion through this method and then upgrade it wouldn't be all bad. In all honesty, staying grade two doesn't change much for us, you still have the 90 minute rule which is currently being used to pick up youth players and just because grade one's can come in for your player does not mean they will always end up with said player, a deal still has to be agreed with all parties. It may only be a temporary situation, it doesn't have to spell the end of our academy for good. If the cash goes into building a promotion winning side then I'm all for staying grade two.
Isn't it funny how a thread that says simply "Jewell Out" will get a load of replies but when somebody constructs a good article like this nobody can be bothered to engage in a decent conversation?
TBH San diego, I think on this subject it is so blatently obvious which way we should go its criminal that the club is even thinking about not doing it!
Do you honestly believe that Guru? From what I can see it makes no financial sense for us to upgrade. The yearly costs of running a top level academy versus the extra cash we receive if we sell a young player really doesn't match up. For a club who loses 10M a year it is something we could well do without burdening ourselves with. Tell me really, what are the pros and cons of running a grade one? It pretty much amounts to spending an extra 1.4M for the chance to poach other academies players and having a wider catchment area. Are we such an attractive prospect that players will suddenly choose us over say Doncaster, who may stay grade two, or move from the north just to play for the mighty Ipswich, I think not? If it was your money would you invest so heavily in something for so little return?
For a lot of clubs I think the future is going to be arse about face. It seems that, similar to the Glenn Hoddle set up in spain, that in future small clubs will sign the talent after some 'super power' has put in all the hard work to get them to that standard. Take the big 4 clubs and the amount of youngsters they sign as 13-16 year olds. About 1 in 20 or 30 actually make it with that club and the rest are released back into a lower level. Its not the way I would like things to go but I can see several clubs thinking that that is an easier option. Wasnt Scott Sinclair, as an example, signed by Chelsea as a 15 year old from Bristol (?) A very good player but highly unlikely make the grade ahead of the many internationals and has now filtered out to Swansea. The only difference will be that the future bristols will not get the compo in the first place. Sadly it could be a regular rather than an exception in future but I doubt the future Swanseas will complain if they can regularly get this kind of deal.
A stable club needs a stable foundations! ask yourself this San Diego, if we have the next Connor Wickham come through, he could be poached from us for peanuts, because we didn't invest! we could potentially lose millions for the sake of save 1.4m a year! and as a club who has dreams of playing in the premiership, we need to get our grass roots premiership standards before we can even contenplate being a premiership club.
Question? How many academy players would you have to sell EVERY year to match the difference in the costs of running a grade one versus a grade two? Remember to take into account staffing costs and the miniscule 15K a year difference a year you gain because you are selling a grade one player.
Guru, nothing different from how it is currently then ay? We are even now at the mercy of bigger clubs if they try and tap our players up. Paying to be a grade one academy won't change something that already exists, it just makes it more legal. I have to agree with Tractorbhoy in that the bigger clubs will have a lot of players who will never make the grade and filter back down the leagues. Take our very own Lee Martin or JET for instance.
