linkenholtroyal Snowflake Royal linkenholtroyal It is highly ironic that we seem to only have an academy these days to feed our local league 1 clubs I also wouldnt be surprised if the team who will not be named get promoted with our rejects next year. Ther maybe something in playing the academy players and giving them a chance.
WTAF.
What about Rino, Olise, McIntyre and Richards.
Plus Holsgrove seems on the cusp and maybe Southwood too.
I was just saying, Dickie, Henry, Fosu and evening Kelly would be quite useful right now. These are players we could have brought on and be on less wages than the players we brought in. You can add Stacey to that list and Barrett and Howe we could almost make a full first team of youth players we released and should have persevered with.
They would also probably beet our current team on a quarter of the wages.
I know the academy does bring players to the first team but this lot were lost without a fee and Are now better than what we have.
Takes all sorts of course, but I think this absolutely the wrong way to go.
We let James Henry go 10 years ago. In that time we've been Championship winners, we've played in the Premier League,. we've been to the FA Cup semi-final. How long were we supposed to hang on to him? He's a decent pro, but he is certainly not better than all of the midfielders we've been playing in the meantime. And he wouldn't even be at the level he got to, without all the gametime he had, that he would not have got, if he'd stayed with us.
Dickie hasn't played in the Championship at all.
Fosu has only managed to get 2 starts this year in the Championship - a full 3 years after leaving us.
Jack Stacey needed 4 seasons in League 2 to get where he is now.
You're talking about hanging onto players that weren't good enough at the time for the Championship - and either playing them instead of Championship-level players, thereby getting us relegated - or destroying their careers by not playing them, but not allowing them go somewhere else to build a career.
Keeping that many players on the books, in case they do well, but with zero regard to the players themselves, is the kind of horrific shit that Chelsea do. How many of their ridiculous stockpile of young players would actually have decent careers by now, if they'd been let go by Chelsea, instead of being financially hand-cuffed to the club? How many years of Michael Hector's career has he wasted by signing for them?
Nah, oxf*rd that.
It's not just the morality of it - we're never going to have the prestige of a big academy. We get and keep aspiring players on the basis that we'll train them well, and we'll treat them right, and if they work hard, and stay healthy, they can be professional footballers. Treating young players like cash cows instead, is not going to win us any friends, and may not get us much cash either.
Yes, we'll occasionally lose out on good players, but the vast majority of players we release, they build respectable careers for themselves at a lower level, or work through years of that lower level just to get to the level we need - or they drop out completely.
Very few of our ex-Academy lads show us up by being way better than the players we bought instead.