The most recent edition of The Next Big Thing podcast from The Athletic, which looks at some of football’s ‘brightest young talents’ focused on 19-year-old Aston Villa player Jacob Ramsey and The Athletic’s Villa reporter Gregg Evans spent some time talking about how the Birmingham club have been making an effort to improve the quality of their academy during the show, including stealing staff members from West Bromwich Albion.
Ramsey is an Aston Villa academy product so perhaps the fact that the 19-year-old was the main focus of this podcast provides a positive indication of the quality of Villa’s youth academy at present.
During this recent edition of The Next Big Thing podcast, Evans shared that the club has been investing a lot of money into the academy and he issued a positive claim on the standard of the facilities in the Villans’ youth academy.
The journalist said: “They’ve got a completely new complex for the academy at Bodymoor Heath, the training ground – state of the art. If you ask any youngster in the country, they couldn’t have any better facilities than they have at Villa’s training ground.
“There’s been a lot of investment in the actual academy. They recognised that West Bromwich Albion had the best academy in the Midlands; there was a strategic and deliberate plan to take the best staff members from West Brom and integrate them into Aston Villa.
“They have done that with Mark Harrison, the academy director; Steve Hopcroft – his role is player identification at a younger age level – and Villa have made a real push [at] signing the best 15, 16, 17-year-olds in the country and some on the continent as well.”
Are you excited by what Evans had to say about Villa's academy?
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TIF Thoughts on what Evans had to say about Villa’s academy…
It may be fair to say that Evans’ comments on Villa and their academy are positive for the Birmingham club and its supporters, with the journalist indicating that the standards of Villa’s academy are as good as any other club in England.
It might also be exciting for Villa fans to hear that their signing of academy manager Harrison and scout Hopcroft, both of whom previously worked for West Brom, was seemingly part of a concerted effort to overtake the Baggies as the club with the best academy in the Midlands.
As a result, with Ramsey reportedly set for a ‘key first-team role’ with the Villans this term, perhaps he won’t be the only highly-rated prospect to make his way through Villa’s academy into the first-team in the near future.