Either way, it's hard to deny that we're failing to bring through academy players to the first team.Originally Posted by Lawnmower
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Either way, it's hard to deny that we're failing to bring through academy players to the first team.
Exactly. Seems to me that the club have now got themselves into a position where they could have a good go at getting level one status if the desire was really there. Alternatively, with the precedent of the season just finished, where the Under 23 fixture list became a series of glorified trial matches from which the better Academy players were, nearly always, excluded, we could just stop bothering and shut the whole thing down, because the system we saw in 17/18 seems even less designed to produce first team players from our pool of youngsters than what we have had throughout the rest of this decade.
Brentford have scrapped their academy .After reading this article I find it hard to argue with their decision.
Huddersfield have also scrapped their under 16 football, once again makes complete sense to me. I love to see home grown talent coming through, can’t remember the last youngster who made any real impact at Cardiff.
https://inews.co.uk/sport/football/f...closed-scouts/
With apologies to my friend Richard Holt if I got this wrong in some way, but it doesn't really matter much because it is the message of what his question conveys which is important here rather than the precise details involved.
Around two or three years ago, Richard asked on here "it only happened twice last season (from memory, he was talking about 2014/15), but throughout the whole of the twentieth century, there were only six times when it didn't happen - what am I talking about?". The answer was City played a game with at least one Welshman in their squad.
Throughout most of our history, we have had teams with a strong nucleus of home grown players - there have been plenty of times when we've had worse teams than the one we have now, but there have also been times when we've had better and more successful sides than the current one which had plenty of Welsh representation.
The irony is that it's almost certainly true to say that the degree of Welsh representation is in inverse proportion to the amount of money, in relative terms, being spent to try and ensure a Welsh presence in the team!
Therefore, there is a strong argument to say that the Academy system at Cardiff City has been a failure since it started in 2004.
However, I think on more of an emotional level than a financial one on these sort of things, while also recognising that, in essence, our "natural" level when relying far more on local talent than we do now was the old Second Division and it's been the Championship since we became a non Welsh club in terms of first team selection.
I just think that the club's heart (in terms of the people with real influence at least) has not been in providing the best system possible for Academy scholars to break through in recent years, so while it can be claimed that the system hasn't worked, it can also be said that it hasn't been given a fair chance to work either.
I don't want to keep repeating myself on this but I think it's a wider problem. As far as I can tell we're recruiting plenty of local talent of all ages, probably in greater numbers than at any time, but it keeps turning out that they're not good enough to play at our level. The table says that if one win had been a draw this season we'd have missed out on automatic promotion, Warnock didn't have a lot of room to gamble on a couple of local lads. It's the reality of it, do you think we'd have sold over 20,000 season tickets for next season if we'd missed out on promotion but Warnock had said 'don't worry, I'm going to play Coxe, Veale and Harris next season'?
I'm not pretending there aren't problems at youth level but I'm not aware of any great local talent slipping the net and none of the players we've released have played at a higher level than us yet so it's hard to say for definite that the club is doing anything wrong. We can't expect the coaching staff to turn water into wine, maybe we should be asking why the area as a whole is producing so little genuine talent. Is enough being done by schools and local authorities to encourage kids to take up football or is rugby taking the sporty ones? I've no idea. For the catchment area we've got I'd expect more local lads to be making it here but I don't think the club is entirely to blame for that.
loramski there are far more youngsters in south wales playing football than rugby than ever before so that blows that argument out of the window . the simple fact is the standard of players at the top level are much higher than ever before and can be seen by not only our club very few academy players make the grade these days . i do sometimes wonder if there is any point in these academy systems at all in the uk in terms of value for money .
Within that lot you've captured something which sums up the attitude to picking young players these days - "Warnock didn't have a lot of room to gamble on a couple of local lads". Our manager said back in August that he didn't think this was the right season to be looking at youngsters, but then when would be a good time to give a teenager a debut, when we're in a relegation struggle?
Seems there is always an excuse these days as to why it not's the time to look at a youngster when there's a gap in the first eleven. To be fair to Neil Warnock, he did recognise that the opportunity was there to give a couple of young players a league debut at the back end of last season, but that's the first time I can remember it happening since Ole gave Tom James and Rhys Healey some game time in the dead rubber against Chelsea four years ago.
You are coming at it from the point of view that the youngsters cannot be good enough because they would bound to be picked if they were - is that really true though? Ten years ago, Aaron Ramsey had just played in an FA Cup Final before he was eighteen and he had been a lot nearer his sixteenth birthday than his seventeenth when making his first appearance for the senior side a year earlier.
Do you think that Ramsey would have played any first team football at that age if he was coming through now? I've got no way of proving this of course, but I'm convinced he wouldn't have - I repeat something I've said a couple of times on here in recent months, it's lazy just to say the youngsters aren't good enough full stop, the goalposts have moved in recent years in a way which has done them no favours at all.
I'm assuming that our youngsters were available to go out on loan this season; Meite went to Crawley, Byrne to Chorley, Duffus to Hereford and, as far as I can remember, that's it. If no one else, even at non-league level, wanted to take a chance on our DVP lads then it's hardly surprising that Warnock didn't want to gamble on them in a Championship promotion race. He didn't even trust Healey or Harris by the end, it's a bit sad but if you want to tell Warnock he stuffed up then be my guest.
I agree that the kind of football Warnock plays isn't encouraging for the youngsters we have but he gave Bostock his debut for Palace at the age of 15 and I can't think of a reason why he wouldn't give a youngster a game here if he thought they were good enough. I'm sure Tan wants to know why the money that goes into the youth system is producing so little, I'd expect that everyone from him down would love to see local lads coming through to the first team for a number of reasons. Why would the club's heart not be in that as you suggested earlier?
It'll certainly be in Warnock's interests to have a couple of under-21s pushing for the first team next season to give some options on top of our 25 man squad. I assume that's what the endless trials have been about at DVP level and they have been another indication that Warnock has little faith in the youngsters that the club are producing, in the short term at least.
That’s the other approach I guess and might make more sense at many levels. However, it prevents young local kids from aspiring to play for Cardiff and I think over time would end up diminishing the club
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