Often they are tossed aside, with little thought for what happens to them from that point onwards. There certainly needs to be a better system in place to help young players, once they are cast aside from a clubs academy set-up and this is one of the main failings of the system. Another of its failings is the preference of clubs to scour other countries for teenage talent, which serves no benefit to the youth in this country at all. If you are bringing up your own kids, then what is the point of looking elsewhere for expensive talent, who will then jump ahead of your own academy prospects.
It would be easy to argue that the academy system is not to blame and that talented youngsters would come through if they were good enough, but it seems as if a lot of talent is actually turned away due to the footballing mindset within this country. If we look at the way academies select kids, they often tend to prefer the athletic, tall, strong children, whilst the smaller boys-who could arguably be more skilful-are turned away from an early age. Academy football is also played with a very rigid style, which means that true talent never really gets a fair chance.
This priority of physical presence and athletic ability, has certainly not helped to develop technical footballers in this country and needs to change if we are to start developing more world class modern footballers. There is also a problem with the pressure that is put on young children at academies, instead the emphasis should be placed on putting the fun back in the game at the younger ages, with the focus on enjoyment over winning.
The changes that the Charter for Quality set out to make have not really provided the strength in depth, in terms of a bigger talent pool, that they were supposed to. However, it could be our expectations that we need to revamp rather than the academy system. Compared to the footballing superpower of Brazil, England has a much smaller talent pool to draw on, and perhaps we need to scale back our estimations as to why we aren’t successfully developing more world class players.
The academy system hasn’t been all doom and gloom, and there are many thriving academies which have produced top quality players over the last decade. The West Ham academy is just one of the success story’s, with several of England’s so called ‘golden generation’ passing through the ranks of the famed academy youth system. The environment in the set up, is hailed as an important factor in its development, and maybe this is the problem with many of the academies around the country.
You can throw all the money in the world at developing young players, but it takes more than that to produce Premier League quality players. Due to the amount of money that is around in the modern game, academies are now filled with foreign talent, which must be disheartening for the English kids, who are then told they are not good enough. The academy system was never set up to be filled with anyone outside of English youth, and it is a shame in terms of English talent that they are turned away as foreign talent is brought in.