Group: Awaiting Activation
Posts: 22K,
Visits: 0
|
SPECIAL REPORT: A new study has shown that Serie A clubs are lagging behind in their development of top-class talent
As if the lack of progress in European competition, the dwindling audiences and the loss of star pulling power wasn’t enough, Italian football has also massively unperformed in its youth development, a new study has suggested.
When the CIES Football Observatory released its research into the big five leagues’ production of major talent this week, there was little surprise that Serie A failed to figure prominently.
But the width of the gap between the production lines in the biggest European leagues and the Italian top-flight comes as a stark warning to the peninsula’s major clubs that they are set to see their slide continue if they do not get their houses in order.
The CIES study shows that Serie A clubs are neither developing players for their own first team nor using their academies to their benefit in the transfer market, matching the growing malaise in the Italian game as a whole.
Inter rank only 19th in terms of the number of club-trained players now plying their trade in the top five domestic competitions across England, Spain, France, Italy and Germany, while Milan come in 34th. Worse still, Juventus don’t even feature in the top 50. It is a damning indictment on each of the big hitters in Italian football.
La Liga and Ligue 1 both boast more than twice as many club-trained players in their first-team squads, while clubs from those same two leagues and the English Premier League have each generated twice as much in transfer revenue from youngsters developed within their acadamies.
For too long, clubs across the bel paese have ignored the countless areas in which improvements need to be made and few are guiltier than the big three. The institutions with the greatest capacity for change have been too slow on the uptake.
That Juventus – the club with a phenomenal fan base all across Italy – cannot put the systems and structures in place to develop more young players into first-team hopefuls than 1860 Munich, Celta Vigo, Guingamp or Rayo Vallecano says much about calcio’s complacency.
Moreover, Milan have done nothing to help themselves at a time when they are losing money hand over fist and are struggling on the field under Filippo Inzaghi. The successful training of youth players capable of stepping into the first-team would alleviate many of their issues, but they cannot expect to catch up when Barcelona are producing more than three times as many young footballers.
With increasing regularity in recent years, star talents at Italy’s biggest clubs have reached the cusp of the first team and then seemingly hit a ceiling. The likes of Bryan Cristante, Luca Marrone and Lorenzo Crisetig have been talked up massively but have made no real impact, and that has happened partly due to the inability of coaches to take them up the final level and partly because of complacency.
Why can Southampton, Swansea and Real Sociedad develop footballers worth millions of euros but Juventus, Milan and Inter cannot? Forget Xavi and Lionel Messi, Italian clubs can’t even produce a Thiago Alcantara or Antonio Sanabria right now.
Antonio Conte was widely questioned when, during his spell as Juventus coach, he lambasted the lack of realism around Italian football and the shortage of urgency in finding avenues for progression.
“I can’t see an Italian team winning the Champions League in the coming years,” he said in April 2013.
“It makes me laugh when I hear that with just two or three new signings we can win the Champions League. Italian football has come to a standstill and that should be a concern for everyone.
“I think everyone has to pull together to try and change things in Italian football. When I say everyone, I mean the clubs, the supporters, the media and all the institutions.”
But, despite Conte’s warning, there remains a huge chasm between the bigger leagues and the rapidly failing Serie A.
Results on the continent are getting no better, with only one club making it to the last 16 of the Champions League for a second successive season. The bigger outfits continue to trail provincial clubs such as Udinese in their scouting structures, meaning they miss out on getting optimum value out of young talent.
And the latest figures show they are failing in their youth setups too, with the comparatively-richer production line at Atalanta - they unsurprisingly lead Italy with 22 club-trained youngsters now playing in the big five leagues - being proof that quality is there to be found if the likes of Juve, Milan and Inter look hard enough.
Juventus’ move to a new stadium, and Roma and Milan’s promises to follow suit, have breathed new optimism into Italian football as it looks to bridge the gap which has developed in the last 10 years. But that is only the start of the task at hand, and failing to provide talented youngsters with the platform from which to succeed could continue to hit them in the pocket and in their results for some time to come.
Percentage of club trainer players
Lique 1 24.6%
La Liga 22.4%
Bundesliga 16.4%
EPL 13.9%
Serie A 9.6%
http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG ... _eng-2.pdf
http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG ... 86_eng.pdf
|
Group: Forum Members
Posts: 5.6K,
Visits: 0
|
Edited by switters: 16/3/2015 09:48:14 PM
|