02 Sep 2015 08:18:30
Ok guys quick question on what you think is going wrong at our academy. Was having a debate with some friends and as they were saying about our youth academy churning out players, and how the spending "isn't the United way" I quickly realised that hasn't been the case for years really. Quick list of home grown players over the last decade is a little depressing
Tom Cleverley, Jonny Evans, Darren Fletcher, Darron Gibson, Adnan Januzaj, Danny Wellbeck. And at a push you can include Paul Pogba and Gerard Pique
Hardly a wealth of talent that's been top class, and virtually no top strikers for a long time (was always disappointed Giuseppe Rossi didn't make the grade for us) Why do you think this is? Especially the lack of a potent striker for so long
Am I missing anyone? And if not are we just riding on the reputation of the 90's as teams like Southampton have us beaten hands down it seems. Thoughts?
02 Sep 2015 09:41:51
To be honest this is the same for all clubs in the PL. I think if a club Coukd get 1 player coming through and actually being a starter every 1/2 years they would be doing well.
You state Southampton but the amount they have had really is because they had to do it this way through the leagues.
Not so many coming through now and I think there is unrest between the manager and academy director as koeman is buying rather than trusting the academy.
02 Sep 2015 09:49:37
Mike.
People are always looking at our ability to develop young talent through rose tinted glasses. '92 was a fluke, in terms of our academy in the past 30-40 years. Yet we always have the phrase 'we don't buy talent we make it'. To an extent that is true, it's just that the talent we have developed since '92 has generally been of a mid table team standard. We have filled teams such as Everton, Sunderland, Wigan and hull over the years with our cast offs. On the whole they have been reasonably successful yet it has been very difficult to distinguish any top top talent from our academy.
As for not buying talent. Well over the last 25-30 years we have regularly broken fee records with our latest being the most expensive teenager. We paid record fees for Cole, Rio, Rooney we have paid extraordinary amongst for players. I remember us signing carrick and
02 Sep 2015 09:52:59
*sorry posted accidentally.
I remember when we signed carrick people complained we had over paid, I remember when we signed berbatov it was a fair price, I remember us paying a large fee for a player with dodgy knees. Not once but twice in short succession.
Yes our academy is better than most but no means is it the best especially as it isn't the best in the country.
Sorry about the ranting it just annoys me when people hear a phrase so often they start to believe it.
02 Sep 2015 11:02:37
Good post.
Right well the reason we have struggled to develop top class strikers and goalkeepers is mostly down the the importance of the position. Most top clubs with a few noticeable exceptions struggle to produce top class strikers and goalkeepers, and none manage it on a consistent basis.
The reason for lies in the importance of the positions, all young players need game time to progress, they need to make mistakes and learn from them. But top clubs need a much higher level of consistency to achieve their aims. Games are won and lost on the actions of a few players on the pitch. Those players are either the ones scoring the goals or keeping them out. Everyone else plays their part but as we are seeing at the moment with our team, we are creating chances but our strikers aren't scoring them, our defenders are doing their best defending to the extent that our goalkeeper has only had to make 12 saves in 6 games, unfortunately he has missed 3 of those saves and we lost a game because of it. Had our keeper made the saves and our strikers scored their chances we would have won that game playing exactly the way we did.
It is for those reasons that makes top clubs reluctant to give youth a chance in these key areas and as such means they don't get the experience to improve and reach their potential. Nearly all the best strikers and goalkeepers in the world started out at smaller clubs with lower expectations meaning they were able to field inexperienced young players in key positions.
As for our own youth team unfortunately our club has fallen well behind in youth development and a lot of our methods and training was painfully out dated and left our young players ill equipped to progress at the highest level. LvG has come in and given our youth set up a massive shake down and is starting to implement the kind of procedures that should have been in place. Unfortunately with youth development it takes a long time to see the fruits of your labours, changes made now will have the yes effect on the youngest players in our system as they will have longer to develop through it. Meaning those guys might not be knocking at the door of the first team for 7 or 8 years. The club still needs to keep moving forward during that time and will have to lean more heavily on young players brought into the first team form outside the club to develop into top class first team players in the mean time.
As for can we claim that we developed a player if they say join the club at 18 or 19 and then we start working on them? Of course we can any player regardless of age that we bring into the club and improve them with our training and our coaching methods can be claimed that we helped develop them. Obviously someone else had done so before they came to our club and obviously they have to take a large part of the credit as it was them who put the work in. But we developed them. Would Ronaldo be the player he is today without the help and guidance we gave him, would David De Gea?
We have some very talented young players in the first team squad, players such as McNair, Shaw, Blackett, Martial, Januzaj, Depay and Wilson. I also expect us to add to that in the next couple of windows. Some will develop into top class players, some will develop into good players. But they will all develop and improve.