Academy head of recruitment set to quit after becoming disillusioned.
- Thread starter Adisa
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No mate it's not.. But what we have successfully done is give youth players professional football careers. If you look through the 4 leagues I wouldn't be surprised if our academy is one of the top for producing footballers. A fine example Is Drinkwater and Matt James(injured at the minute).
After Messi, it's arguable that even that great Barcelona academy hasn't produced anyone of note which has benefited their team. All this talk of creating a Scholes etc is purely nonsense, these are once in a decade players and we had two players like that in the last five years who either left(Pogba) or either too stupid(Ravel) to realise their potential.
There is surely a corporate social responsibility element to keeping an academy going? It is the best way of making the community around you involves and vested in the fortunes of the club.
Plenty of local families will have young lads dreaming of making it through the ranks and starring for United. If not they'll still give them a career in football at the end of it.
The way United has approached womens football and now youth football is despicable. If it doesn't contribute to the bottom line or make financial sense, relate to our first team.. it is got rid of. That is not how you run a football club, a strong community aspect is vital to the soul of a club.. we are becoming more and more of a soulless club.
If there is a plan behind revamping the youth set up and gearing it to producing higher quality players - fine but does anyone have any faith in the club to be thinking along those lines. I can't trust them at all.
Plenty of local families will have young lads dreaming of making it through the ranks and starring for United. If not they'll still give them a career in football at the end of it.
The way United has approached womens football and now youth football is despicable. If it doesn't contribute to the bottom line or make financial sense, relate to our first team.. it is got rid of. That is not how you run a football club, a strong community aspect is vital to the soul of a club.. we are becoming more and more of a soulless club.
If there is a plan behind revamping the youth set up and gearing it to producing higher quality players - fine but does anyone have any faith in the club to be thinking along those lines. I can't trust them at all.
Not sure if it's been mentioned in here yet but deep, deep within the article it actually mentions that he's retiring. So that would explain why the job has been available, they've known for a while he's retiring.
There are clearly issues at youth level but the narrative in the media appears to just be giving United a bit of a bashing. As per usual.
Tweet for those that cant see it:
@writtenoff_mufc
From the Times : Disillusioned academy chief quits United. Or as it should read "employee retires"
There are clearly issues at youth level but the narrative in the media appears to just be giving United a bit of a bashing. As per usual.
Tweet for those that cant see it:
@writtenoff_mufc
From the Times : Disillusioned academy chief quits United. Or as it should read "employee retires"
Have you seen the academy and under 21s look boring this season playing the same formations and possesion based philosophy of the first team? You are naive indeed if you imagine LVG is having zero in put in how are youth teams operate and play.
It could be viewed in other way that Reserves and academy managers are trying to mirror the way the first team plays to make it easier for the players to adapt to the "philosophy" in the case of being called up.I'm sure Warren Joyce did say something along that line in one of his interviews.Though I doubt you can say a team that won 3-1 6-1 3-1 3-2 in their last 4 matches "boring".
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I feel sorry for you,i really do.
I agree. In that scenario why don't we have partnerships with smaller clubs who can do it for us, paying them annually for the privilege with a reduced transfer fee upon crystallisation. If accepting mediocrity is the compromise we may as well close the academy down.
If we don't have those talents, then we bring them in from abroad. The majority of top talents in aren't going to be from Manchester or possibly even England. They'll be brought in from across Europe and developed from 16 years old; just like Periera, Pogba & Januzaj. Either our academy isn't developing these talents or our scouting department isn't finding them; or more than likely both.
We didn't "produce" Pogba, we bought him at 16 and he left 2 and a half years later having barely played for the first team. Credit has to go to either Le Havre for developing him as a younger or Juve for integrating him into their first team setup and developing him.
Again, I'm not just talking about world class players. I'm talking also about the kind of players that we're now spending £15-25m on. If we can't produce a Rojo, Blind, Schneiderlin, Herrera, Memphis, Darmian then what are we producing? I also disagree with your assessment on Barcelona; the likes of Busquets only graduated 7 years ago, whilst players like Rafinha, Adriano and Roberto are coming through at the moment. Saying their well has gone dry is hugely premature when everyone agrees you're only going to get a top player once every 5-10 years. Lets also not forget that Alcantara looks a top class player and he only broke through 6 years ago.
When did the club make a statement that our academy had become a charity whose aim was to help deprived youths find a career? I don't understand who cares if we have hundreds of players littered throughout the lower divisions, or how many players we've helped along the way. The entire point of an academy is to feed the first team with talent and for the last 20 years we've been woeful in this regard.
You can't just bring talents from abroad, for example international transfers(from outside of the UEFA zone) are near impossible and United isn't the only academy in the Europe, german kids will prefer to stay in Germany, Spanish kids will prefer to stay in Spain, French kids will prefer to stay in France and in most East European countries the FA don't allow transfers for U18 players, so basically you have to convince parents that their u14 kids should move to Manchester, I say u14 because you need to poach them before they sign an apprenticeship contract.
Thanks; Sounds like it does pay its way.
The most expensive academy is La Masia with 10m€ per year without counting Barcelona B.
I think that most football fans have unrealistic expectations when it comes to academies, according to the ECA, the academies are essential but they consider that the first goal of an academy is to provide squad players and fringe players, which allow the clubs to spend less in wage and allocate more money to transfers while keeping the bills at the same level.
There isn't one club out there who expects to develop the likes of Scholes, Xavi or Messi, these type of players are a blessing, you stumble on them, they are the product of luck.
We already do bring these talents in along with Arsenal, Chelsea and City. The likes of Fabregas, Coquelin and Bellerin all came from abroad and either are or look well on the way to becoming the kind of players we'd be spending £20-30m on. That's before talking about Wilshere and Gibbs who came from their academy. The problem is that we're either not developing these talents correctly, not identifying them early enough to bring them to United; or both.
The basic issue is that media are not very happy with Van Gaal, and most of the journo's desperately want us to take the "fallen giant" trajectory as a club so that they can sensationalize more stuff and get more clicks and reads.
The sheer size of our fan-base means they don't need a lot to get people in a tizzy and make a sensational headline viral, so they are always looking for the smallest thing to make a mountain out of, like this story.
I agree that we haven't been the most aggressive in terms of recruiting top foreign talent like other clubs. But I always put that down to us wanting to stick to the rules in terms of youth recruitment and also preferring to trust and develop our local talent. I guess we're finally realizing that we can't keep with the other clubs if we're so passive, but at the same time it seems like we're taking our time to make the right appointments at these key positions.
The sheer size of our fan-base means they don't need a lot to get people in a tizzy and make a sensational headline viral, so they are always looking for the smallest thing to make a mountain out of, like this story.
I agree that we haven't been the most aggressive in terms of recruiting top foreign talent like other clubs. But I always put that down to us wanting to stick to the rules in terms of youth recruitment and also preferring to trust and develop our local talent. I guess we're finally realizing that we can't keep with the other clubs if we're so passive, but at the same time it seems like we're taking our time to make the right appointments at these key positions.
You really don't understand, we are competing with dozens of other clubs and all those clubs share the finite number of talents available, we are not going to take all the talents and all the talents aren't going to make it. We brought Piqué and Pogba in the last 10 years and they succeeded, we developed Morrison nicely but his off field activities killed his career, we also brought Giussepe Rossi and he was a very good player.
Also when you sign a big prospect in a position, you lose potential prospects in the same positions, so you can't really poach all the best prospects in a given age class.
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This isn't strictly true though. This doesn't include the salaries of players who sign professional contracts, but may not yet make it or the costs to keep the academy facilities mordernised. Blackett & McNair are examples of players who are unlikely to make it but have signed a new deal worth somewhere close to £1m a year until 2017. These are costs related to the academy. We're paying them handsomely for the hope that they will some day make a difference. If they don't their salary for a few years is money down the toilet.
Crediting us with developing Pique, Rossi & Pogba is a huge stretch; we buy them as talented youngsters, barely play them and then they disappear for next to nothing.
. Perhaps. Though going by LVG's past, it has always been a strategy of his to have the youth age group team's mirror the formation, tactics and style of the first team in order to make transitions from youth level to senior level for those ready to step up to or be called upon to first team level much easier. I'd be very surprised if he has no say or input in what goes on under the first team. I'm almost willing to bet what goes on below first team level in terms of development and strategy is the real reason he still has the manager's job given recent results.
Agreed.
We bought them at around 15. How did we not develop them? They worked everyday with our acadamy coaches.
We developed Ronaldo and he was bought at 18 ffs.
Fine, I'll rephrase: We had no real ascertainable benefit from them being at the club. What I want to see is an academy that provides a real benefit to the club. An academy that does not provide a benefit to the first team is a pointless academy.
At the exception of the last couple of years our academy provided, Fletcher, Evans, Brown, O'shea, Welbeck and others. These players allowed us to concentrate our money on other players. Our academy is fine, there is room for improvments but we are not in a bad situation, we are not even in an average situtation, we are above average.
The fact that we're talking about Wes Brown as a recent success who came through the academy 20 years ago is my point.
Fun fact.
City pay all expenses and for the education of kids to the parents of those in their academy.
We give them bus fare.
City pay all expenses and for the education of kids to the parents of those in their academy.
We give them bus fare.
It's not a point, United aren't going to produce a huge amount of players good enough for United's ambitions no club does that at that level, particularly when you have to share the talent pool with other clubs. Bayern waited 10 years between Lahm and Babbel.
There are clubs out there who seem to always produce players though, Karlsruher, Lyon, Ajax, Feyenoord, Barcelona. But from what I understand it's also due to the quality of their environment, the local clubs are very good. If England want to have better players they might need to invest in the local clubs.
Fun fact: education in the UK is free.
So an employee retiring is news now. 
We still live in the UK, right?
City are clearing winning the PR war if they appear generous for paying to send their starlets to the local comp.
Expenses for the education. I worded it poorly
Well I don't
I think that they send them to a fancy private school.
They've the best PR team in the Premier League right now. Journalists are given free tours of their academies and given loads of freebies from time to time.
He's exaggerating when he says we've not had a single decent youth graduate since Scholes in 1994, but he has got a point in that none of the players you've highlighted are world class. O'Shea, Brown and Fletcher were all successes in that they were very useful squad players who had some good seasons over a long period of time. I'll even give Welbeck the benefit of the doubt as he was a useful player despite eventually being surplus to requirements. Cleverley had a decent spell, but was mostly average.
We've not really produced a top class player in a couple of decades though, and that it a bit concerning. Granted, we may not be able to do what Barca and even Bayern have done, but we should be aspiring to match them considering the club's pride in its history with youth, and we should be at least producing some top class players.
Yeah, there's a couple of levels between Cleverley / Fletcher and Scholes, youd hope we could get one or two players at that level once in a while. So there is definitely room for improvement. But I still think overall the academy has done a pretty good job producing squad players and players we can sell to smaller clubs for a bit of extra pocket money.
We do send some of our players (schoolboys or below) to a partner school but we only do it to some of the youngsters that we deem as "best talents" in the group.Different approaches.
There's a word for that sort of behaviour.
Normal?
So my argument goes back to my original point: why do we bother with an academy if our expectations are a couple of mediocre backup players every decade? A couple of mediocre players that might cost us maybe £10m each from a smaller club?
Why aren't we exploring different ways of getting top class talents since the current model is spectacularly failing; such as partnering with clubs such as Ajax, Porto, Sporting, Feyenoord, Lyon, Marseille, Genk, Internacional, Lazio etc so that when they have a top class talent coming through we'll have first refusal. Possibly with annual partnership fee's/friendly agreements and possibly whereby we buy them at a young age (18-19) and loan them back for a few seasons.
What is the current advantage of having an academy and scouting system that isn't a real benefit for the first team and our only means of attaining quality players is paying £30m a time for players that every Tom, Dick & Harry know are quality? We may as well close down the academy, sack all our scouts and let the manager buy a new team every 10 years (it seems we're doing exactly this currently, only paying for the academy and scouts to tell us Herrera and Shaw are good players).
It is? Maybe I'm just a bit naive in these matters. I prefer LvG's insulting them approach better myself.
Because the same players will cost you a lot less if you develop them, because the rules require that you register homegrown players and local players, because if you don't develop them someone else will and that club will make you pay the rarity, because it gives to the club and the supporters a sense of identity and because once in while you will develop a difference maker for cheap.
And once again remember that the clubs who spend the most on their academies allocate 5% of their budget, that's nothing.
These clubs are too big for that, they have nothing to gain from it and it has nothing to do with academy football, if you buy 18 years old players you have to keep them otherwise they won't be considered homegrown or local players.