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

first off i do not accept that the uk is the best port for all Australian youth players.
Second i think the a league will continue to grow and therefore need more players.
Third i think the standard and net of the selectors will expand and improve and they will find many more talented players than they do now, this will in it self improve the standard.
finally their is a lot of money available in on selling players to the middle east and asia.

Ps just wait till India goes football mad,with our close sporting ties our players and coaches will be well in demand.

I thought this part was quite interesting




Likewise I don't believe that the UK is necessarily the best place for young Aussie players to go; but I get where 'Chicken' is coming from when he says if you're a talented 16yo at Green Gully you'd rather be developing at West Ham's academy than Melbourne Victory's youth team.

This is true but i heard of one talented kid who was selected into an academy and was so home sick he could not stay.
This ended his football career but i can not help but feel that had he been a little bit older he may have made a go of it.
So if a 16yr old kid from green gulley can go to victory and sees his mum and family a little more often than if he is in west ham, he may be mature enough to go overseas at 18.

Very true - but he may also receive coaching and development of a lower standard, not to mention experience less game time against a variety of opposition.

It's a hard call either way, really.

I agree but not west ham that's old school due to lampard, cole .

Great posts guys right ,wrong who knows great that there is no bagging or negative against any one a fresh air theme.
but can you tell me how many Aussie kids are being looked after full time in England under the age of 15.

Under 15? No idea. The Williams twins went over when they were 16, I think. Unsure about Herd, etc.

and the coach of mv youth was at port talbot league of wales acadamey prior to moving here in 2009,
not exatly a production line of talent.

English academies are a desert of talent and ideas, crippled by the old pros network that continuallly regurgitates the scared football practices that the rest of the world moved on from decades ago.
It would be a better decision to have your brain replaced with old mans gonads than remove a player from an a-league academy or state institute to an english academy.

The Williams boys, Chris Herd, Shane Lowry, etc are all products of those academies. They're hardly bad players. It's not exactly Barca's production line, but then again I don't see much coming out of A-League academies either :roll:

I'm not necessarily saying England is the place to go for Aussie kids, but I outright reject sweeping generalisations at the above when we hardly have anything better at present.

i would rather have a child in English Academy than in any program here , I could quote some major people here but that would not be fair.
These Acadamies have a mixture of Old and young in numbers coaching ,but leaning towards younger coaches.
And now with clubs being classed 1 to 4 you will see the leap go even further.. As far as the A -League goes if people think this a good form of football that's fine?.
I personally think its poor.

I send taped games to 6 country every week and i can tell you it's poor.
we currently have one lad overseas under 15 signed at 13 and we have another at 16 wait ing for ITC.
Or compensation upon signing to oz clubs.
I wish every child the best and freedom to be allowed to go any where in the world to learn this great game.
,

The fact of the matter is that Senior Australian coaches will not pick players that are not in professional leagues overseas. What does that tell you about our system here?

It tells me that our senior national coach does not think our a-league is up to overseas quality as yet to pick players in the national senior side that would be successful.

With regards to the A-League NYL there are some very very talented potential players. From their point of view the way things are currently if they want to wear the green and gold they will need to cement first team places in overseas reputable clubs first to even be considered.

It also says the A-League needs and supporting leagues need a lot more development.

How handy would that $48 mill the government pissed up on the 2022 bid be now in a development sense to our A-league and State leagues...

I think FFA need to pull down the shutters and open its eyes to every resource we have available and start using it. Because the way it looks now it's like FFA have a very thin line with so many obstacles on it that is impeding success.

Edited by Aussiesrus: 11/2/2012 06:16:00 PM

Agree hardcore.

Tell me where in the world does this fact apply in Victoria they have winter league and summer program.
Now if you choose not to play summer league you will not be considered for state teams?summer league is smack into Xmas.
Now parents are paying winter fees and summer fees?.
I am told with the impending restructure at the AIS they will push for these players to represent the Joeys pay back for your lad going oversea which might be looked over.My mates son has now been asked twice to consider coming back.
At Fourteen he his being looked after full time at the club, believe me everything is covered so would his parents want him back here?.
We need to look at Japan and what they did many years ago import good quality coaches here, say 20 of them.
Now we place our best young coaches with them and allow the process to begin,we have some great talent hereand yes if we had the money spent on this last World Cup it could have been used better.

But we only got that money to bid for the World Cup, we wouldn't have got it otherwise.

I took a different approach but came up with a similar result. I took down the year and month of birth of all Australian born A-League players and thier state of origin.

I did this to prove issues surrounding relative age effect (RAE) at our club, that most HAL players were born in the first half of the year. This proved true of 164 players 102 were born from January to June. Of these 57 were born between January and March. RAE is an indicator on wether talented junior players are being selected on size.

For this example I will take the birth year 1985. Players born in 1985 are now mature players of 26 or 27yo.
In the A-League there are 12 of them, 4 born in NSW, 1 in NNSW, 1 in the ACT, 4 in VIC and 1 from WA.
Of course there is variation in numbers from year to year but the following shows that from 1975 till 1995 of the 162 Australian A-League players where they came from
ACT   3
NSW   53
NNSW   17
QLD   27
VIC   32
SA   13
WA   17

By no means are my stats 100% accurate but their pretty close, of course anyone can try if they wish.



As a Victorian we ascetained from 1985 till 1995 we as a state are producing 1 to 4 A-League quality players per year.

A lot of money is invested from the FFA the State Federations and most of all parents to develop these lads.

I can see that there is little incentive financially for A-League franchises to invest in youth development when they can have the best youth players any way, while the State League Clubs have under the current domestic transfer and compensation system have little financial incentive to do like wise. Thus the federations and parents are baring the costs.

Just recently Miljan Miljanic former Red Star and Real Madrid coach passed away, in articles about him, he stated that it took 7 years to develop a youth player into a senior player.

"He opined that it took five to seven years to develop a player but very few clubs were prepared to wait as long as that. His reward for such patience was a flow of excellent young players and a strong, well organised, fluent team which as he admitted might not have been among the best in Europe but — as Liverpool painfully discovered — could more than hold its own." Quote

When it comes to developing local talent for any club that club must have a fundamental and philosophical beleif that developing your own is the best way to go. The first time I saw this in Australia was by Tommy Docherty at Olympic when he introduced Koussas, Raskopoulos, Kalantzis, Patikas, Katholos and put Jennings at left back.
Funny how you need a foriegner to change these biases.

Over 60 million people 40 professional football academies or centers of excellence that have been established for 15 years, each year over 100 million dollars spent developing some 10,000 young players and no one can tie there laces up properly.

English academies are to world football what Disney Land is to Hollywood.

The English Academeies are only having problems developing World Class players, they still produce plenty of players for the lower levels of the game and earn plenty.

But your right in many respects the best Wenger has done is Wilshere and Gibbs after 15 plus years. What hope the rest.

Walcott, Bale, chamberlain.
All out of Southampton Academy Bale will be world class Barelona already been to watch him on a number of games.
Chamberlain will also become world class.

What is attractive about the english academies is that it's a pathway to playing EPL. They have the money to spend on developing a player professionally full time. They have a league which attracts many of the best players in the world. They have professional facilities in place. Once a player reaches maturity and gets his chance in the EPL he then has the opportunity to cement his spot in a first grade side which in turn gives him the opportunity to wear the green and gold.

None of the above are available to players developed here in Australia and are playing A-League unless they are young and move to an EPL/etc club before they mature as a player. Players are forced to look at what is available to them right now. They can't wait for the so called aussie system's 10 year plan to mature because by then their future has gone.

The NRL are about to demand and get a 1 billion dollar deal over the next five years from the media here. If football (soccer) is the most popular to play in our youth demographic why does it fall to so low interest overall when it comes to media support? Media need success because success sells media.

Football here has had well over 100 years to develope our system. The system is not that good as results in youth world cups and olympic qualifiers of recent has not been showing we are advancing.

There is also the question in my mind are we developing players specifically for A-League standards which typecasts them for that low standard. It's becoming apparent with the recent A-League stars moving overseas they are finding it very difficult to hold down a first team spot as we are now seeing with Carney and A-
Leagues winning captain Matt McKay. These are also mature players that should be flexible enough to adapt to different systems.

so to be FFA skills acq coach you have to be ex pro , to apply to go on b or c licence you have to list your playing career. OLD BOYS network here as well old bean