This is an excerpt from a discussion over on another forum which I found interesting. What are people's thoughts here - who is right, the chicken or the egg?



Chicken wrote:
from a financial perspective it's probably not viable for clubs to develop youth players.


Egg wrote:
Cheaper than coughing up 700k for a marquee player and the potential to get much more in transfer fees...


Chicken wrote:
Australia produces perhaps 1 EPL quality player per year, maybe less. The chances of that player going through an A league youth setup is probably 1 in 100 and probably never going to happen as they are going to be identified and picked off well before any A league structure wakes up to them

If I was coaching kids and one of them was a outstanding player I would do everything I could to ensure he took the correct career path, and that would be via a UK league, the structure that A league clubs have in place is probably more detrimental than sending little Jonny to live with his second Aunt in the UK and playing underage/youth football for Colchester United or one of the non league club that it’s associated with.

Realistically A league clubs would be better off trying to make money out of the lottery rather trying to develop a system to make money out of developing a system to supply kids to the international football market.

From a mathematical perspective there are 10 A league clubs, each has 11 starting players, of that 5 currently are imports, that means Australia only has to supply 60 “Australian” player per season, if a player has a 10 year football life then only 6 players are required per year to refresh the starting 11 pool, of that 1 or 2 will come back from OS, 1 will be a foreign player who will become an Australian citizen.

At best the starting 11 pool only has to be refreshed with 3 or 4 Australian supplied youth players per year, and one of them will probably be a SL (Howarth type) late bloomer.

Even if the figures we extrapolated out for a full squad you’re probably only looking at refreshing the A league pool with about 12-15 Australian players per year, IMO there is no point in having an entire youth setup to supply 3 starting 11 players, and 10 or so squaddies per year, the SL can do that.

Edited by f1dave: 10/2/2012 05:38:02 PM