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Just watched Wolves on match of the day and a guy called Morgan-Gibbs was making his debut from the youth team. He was fantastic. When was the last time we had someone from the academy break through? What is the point of them?
Produced some good players for barry town recently to be fair.Originally Posted by simonp_ccfc
Curtis Watkins, macauley southam Hales and robbie patten, once all promising city graduates- all now key members of the Barry team that could go top of the WPL today.
As it stands, it's failing. I think that Declan John was the last player to come through, and a central defender at Afc Wimbledon? Ramsey is by far the best player we've produced, but that was ten years ago. There must be a fundamental flaw in how these lads are coached-developed etc. I've watched a couple of academy games and they look like nice games to play in, almost orchestrated such is the obsession with a style of play that almost seems robotic and straight out of the coaching manual. Young players have to know when to do certain things, like staying the right side of a defender, showing players onto their weaker foot, pressing and communicating, but they also need to express themselves and be allowed to make mistakes, from what I've seen, the creativity is coached out of them to a certain degree. Years ago young players would play in a very competitive reserve league (Avon Combination) it was regional, this was before u23 leagues. If you were showing anything at 16 or 17 then you would be promoted to the reserves, playing against seasoned professionals coming back from injury, the bitter pro's who had been dropped, youngsters on the fringe who new that they had a really good chance of making the first team squad if the performed and trialists giving everything as this was probably their final chance. It made for a very competitive league and gave young players real experience of what it is like to play against players who had all the tricks.
The academy has only been going in its current form for a few years and it takes time to produce the right level of talent to move up to the first team. There are some excellent prospects coming along now under Bellamy etc and in a couple of years we should reap the benefit. Patience is required, which is something that is in short supply in our current position. You cant just chuck them in at the deep end though.
I agree with not throwing them in the deep end but we've heard this over and over again over the years. When are we going to see actual evidence rather than hearsay? As it is the academy is a failure and will continue to be so until we actually see one of these players break into the first team!
My favourite is when the club tell fans the current under 13 is particularly strong and just wait a couple of years....
I think all clubs do this.
Yes our academy has been a huge failure for one reason or another. However we had more than our fair share come through a few years ago- we produced some excellent talent for wales.
Go back 5 or 6 years ago and big things were expected of Tommy O Sullivan. I'm guessing as a result of playing in too many non competitive development games his career stalled. I'm not a 100% sure, but I don't think he's even playing this season at all.
Matondo, M Harris, Tom James.
Players that will have a career as a footballer.
He signed for Hereford, and is now 23.
I kind of agree with you but there is a massive issue in that the first team and the academy are so far apart in how they actually play football.
You see teams like Ajax and Barcelona who play "the Ajax way" from cradle to grave but our academy has also adopted a similar approach in recent years, the problem is however, that our first team couldn't be further away from this style of football.
I'm not sure how productive adopting this approach in our academy really is if I'm honest anyway. I think it's fine if you're Ajax or Barcelona etc because it's been a long held tradition and their fans are primed for this genre of football.
If Bellamy was made manager next season for example and attempted to adopt this footballing approach, what if he didn't get results in the first ten games??
I don't think our fan base would be anywhere near patient enough to go through this transition. And let's be honest the transition job would be massive.
I think our academy may be more beneficial putting players through a variation of styles of football to make footballers rather than mimicking the Barcelona system which lets be honest usually belongs to the most successful teams.
I've watched the academy right through the age groups amd there are some outstanding footballers who have a real chance if they are given opportunity to flourish.
Only the other night I watched a lad in the u14s vs Swansea who I thought was outstanding. He had every attribute needed to make it in my opinion but unless he's given a chance here he'll probably just drift into footballing oblivion, which always seems to happen at Cardiff as they get to the age that really matters!
Gavin Tate was a good youth manager (pre academy) a number of players made the first team
When we're not playing I'll watch a National League South or Southern League game, these leagues are littered with ex-City academy players and I've got to say that the majority of them have looked mediocre or at least at the right level very few have looked capable of making it at league level. Jarrad Welch is probably the most talented but only turns it when he feels like it and I wish someone would have given Gethyn Hill a chance, he holds it up well and has an eye for goal. Too many flatter to deceive. I get the opinion that too many were held on for too long by City and perhaps they need / needed to be harsher.
We're 11 games into our premier league season and have won once, should have drawn twice more and comprehensively lost every other game without the fans turning on the players or manager - I think our patience levels have increased since we realised the club has basically reset the clock with Warnock's appointment. Warnock won't be here in two years so a perfect chance to explore more emphasis on the academy and balanced football as Leicester did yesterday.
For this reason there is perhaps less pressure on youngsters in the premier league. If we had a young striker now he’d be given a shot without a doubt- and he couldn’t do any worse off the bench than the current options.
You don’t get that luxury in the championship,
We may well see an academy player on Saturday if both Ralls & Arter are out
the next big thing to come out of wolves is Max Kilman who is destined to have a big future
plucked from the england futsal team only 2 months ago
nuno knows his stuff being from portugal the 2.nd home of futsal
https://www.theguardian.com/football...-futsal-wolves
There is no half way house.
Given that choosing our Academy would already be less attractive than many others it is already difficult for us to attract the best. So we either try or we don’t as without an Academy we would have even less chance of attracting young players.
There aren’t many businesses in life that would continue to produce products that dont meet their specification.
Malky Macky and Ole were prepared to play Declan John in the Premier League as a teenager, but he's been something of a one off during this decade (Joe Ralls was only with our Academy team for a year before making his first team debut, so can hardly be called a home grown product), so I'd say Dave Jones was the last manager we had who had no qualms at all about putting youngsters into the first team for league matches with something riding on them.
The easy way to look at the lack of first team players being produced by the Academy in the 2010s is to say that none of our young players have been good enough. However, even if we accept that we have had no locally produced players who have been good enough for the first team at the age of, say, eighteen in the current decade (apart from Declan John), does it automatically follow that they never showed the potential to become Cardiff City first team players at another age?
Although it's impossible to prove this, I would argue that the number of Cardiff players in Wales international squads at the earlier age groups down the years is suggestive of there having been the raw material at the club which should have led to more first team footballers coming from the Academy. However, it has always seemed to me that City have more trouble than many other clubs in turning very promising fifteen and sixteen year olds into senior players capable of playing plenty of first team games for the club or netting it big fees in the transfer market.
So, you have to wonder at the quality of coaching (both in football and "preparing for life" terms) given to older teenagers at the club and on the organisational side of things whereby some promising teenagers have been allowed to stagnate and decline at City until their early twenties.
I agree that, if the current inability to produce first team players continues, then Academy status (with all its costs) should be scrapped by City. However, while I'm not saying they are a "Golden generation" capable of winning the FA Youth Cup or anything, the current Under 18 side is the best we've had in some time if you judge them purely by their results - the latest table shows that, while they were winning their Welsh Youth Cup game 17-0 on the weekend, City's two closest rivals at the top of the league were being beaten, so, currently, we are three points ahead of the wurzels having played the same number of games and two points in front of Ipswich who have played a couple of matches more than us.
It should follow therefore that the chances of this group produce first team player(s) for the club should be a little higher than in other years, but a concern of mine is that recent City managers have shown a marked reluctance to give youth a chance - Russell Slade was as bad as any one we've had when it came to youth development and, although Neil Warnock has been willing to give youngsters a game now and then during his tenure, it has been very much in matches which he regards as meaningless.
Somewhere along the line Cardiff City have changed from a club which relied greatly on local talent (be it through their youth system or older players signed from local non league teams) throughout it's history into its recent entity with a marked reluctance to play Welsh footballers in the first team - people talk about it being a different game these days, but I make it that seven of the Premier League sides we've faced so far have had an Academy product of theirs in their eighteen.
How much does the academy cost overall ? A Million ? Wouldn't surprise me. Probably more. What would £1 million spent on quality scouting achieve ? Probably a lot more. We could have scouts in Europe as well as UK. Our academy should be producing a lot, lot more. There's little competition in the area.
Think you're definitely talking in terms of a million plus as opposed to hundreds of thousands - you make a good point about scouting costs.
That's got me thinking about what the role of a scout is nowadays? These are days where so much is televised and agents tout their players that scouting must be different to what it was, say, 20 years ago. Would they concentrate more on looking for youngsters with potential?
I don't see why we need to be looking further afield though. Just think of the amount of top-class (or potentially top-class) players that we've missed out on over the years. Maybe it's a bit of a simplistic thing to say, but surely our scouts should be picking up (or holing onto) players like Bellamy, Bale or even someone like Regan Poole. I'm sure there are more. We should at least have Cardiff Schools and Valleys schools extremely closely monitored so that anyone showing even a bit of potential is watched.
Totally agree. Incompetence to miss out on that lot. On another point didn't we have that kid from Tremorfa on our books and Man City ended up stealing him anyway. What's the point of having an academy if the piss taking big clubs just come along and take our best players anyway?
This article says that Brentford were paying 1.5 million a year to run a cat 2 academy.
http://whitehouseaddress.blogspot.co...-eppp.html?m=1
Sunderland Cat 1 academy costs 4 million a year to run
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/keeping-sunderlands-category-one-academy-14692014
Sunderland should consider putting them in their first team🤪
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