For every Jack Wilshere, Tom Cleverley or Wayne Rooney, there are tens of players that don’t make it through from the academies to the first teams of the top clubs. The FA are doing their bit to ensure the development of young players, the quota for home-grown players in English clubs ensure that at least eight players per squad are developed at the club. Yet, with the influx of foreign money, and subsequently foreign players, in to our top teams is there really enough of an incentive for young players at top clubs?
Whatever you do in life, you need to be able to believe that your goals are achievable if you work hard enough, but at some clubs that sentiment just doesn’t ring true. People might suggest that one or two players every five or so years might break through to the first team squad but that hardly counts as success.
I’m not talking about a possibility of making it in the sense of there being a possibility of winning the lottery,I’m talking about a realistic possibility; the sort of possibilities that have been proven by a continuous string of players taking the path from academy to first team all at the same club. In some clubs clearly this scenario can be a reality, take Arsenal for example, or even Man Utd. Yet this is not necessarily the case across the board. You might ask why it matters, well it matters because the same clubs that insist on spending over the odds on domestically based players as well as those from abroad are also the clubs that buy up a lot of young talent from academies across the country.
If these clubs are buying academy players without any real intent to develop and use them then they are wasting British football’s brightest talents. The other problem is that these top clubs employ some of the best youth coaches our country has to offer without necessarily making the best use of them.
People will say that academy players will make it if they are good enough, and if they aren’t then they won’t, but this isn’t even necessarily true. Many young players who are good enough but not nurtured in the right way fail to make it at their clubs.
Take someone like Andy Cole for example, he failed to make it at Arsenal when he was young and it was not until three clubs later when he moved to Newcastle that he really progressed. If the top clubs in this country want to ignore youth development and spend big every summer then that’s fine, but they can’t have it both ways. If they insist on buying young players they must use them.