It might explain our low position in that table, but it doesn't explain Cardiff City's chronic inability to produce good home grown players capable of sustaining a place in a side that has been playing in the Championship virtually non stop for more than a decade.

I'll always remember Sam Hammam saying that the target was to produce one first team player from the Academy when it was opened nearly fourteen years ago. At the time, that seemed a modest target to set and can remember thinking I'd be disappointed if it turned out to be as low as that.

However, I think times have changed markedly since then and there definitely seems to be a resistance to trusting in youth at the majority of the ninety two Premier and Football League clubs now, with Cardiff City being one of the teams least likely to pick a teenager in their first eleven.

I noticed this story from the club website

https://www.cardiffcityfc.co.uk/news...rice-cup-2018/

celebrating our success in winning four out of the six leagues in a competition with other club's youth teams in the eight to thirteen age groups this week. Similar such stories have been fairly regular occurrences down the years and I can remember reading reports of one of our age group sides going over to the grounds of some really big clubs in mainland Europe and winning in the last year or two.

However, City would seem to have lost the art of completing the final stage of young player development where the transition is made from mid teens "prospect" to senior first team player. It seems that the raw talent is there, so I can only wonder at how good those who are there to oversee the whole of the development process are at doing their jobs because the Academy has been coming up a long way short of producing Sam Hammam's one first teamer a season for the best part of a decade now.