Reply With QuoteWhat exactly need to be done to achieve this?Originally Posted by Penarth Blues
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I'd much rather we spent some of the Prem money on gaining Category 1 Academy Status so we could acquire and retain younger high quality players. The size and location of the Club means that our best long-term survival bet is likely to be as a team that provides opportunities for good young players to play in the first team that they wouldn't get in the bigger Clubs.
I think this would also appeal to the average Cardiff supporter who has long favoured home-grown players to expensive imports.
What exactly need to be done to achieve this?
I agree completely with Penarth Blues.
As to what you need to do to attain Category One status, I seem to remember some years ago that City needed to improve the educational facilities they could offer to Academy members - not sure that was the only reason we couldn't get it mind.
Here's a link to an article from six years ago regarding Stoke being granted Level One status - couple of things to note about this. First, Stoke's relegation this season shows that level one status doesn't automatically ensure the first team will benefit and second, if the story is correct, it looks like our woeful record when it comes to producing our own players in recent years might be held against us if we tried for level one status.
https://www.stokecityfc.com/news/aca...ory-one-status
I'm not sure. This link provides a bit more detail but it is not clear what we'd need to do to reach this level:
https://playerscout.co.uk/football-a...my-categories/
http://trainingground.guru/articles/academy-audit
There's a table in there that shows we probably have some way to go before even thinking about category 1.
That's pretty damning for us, but even worse for the Jacks given their Cat 1 status.
Bit chicken and egg though as we have lost a few players to Cat 1 Academies in recent years who you'd have expected to improve our numbers. It also seems that it is excluding players like Ledley, Ramsey, etc who have come through our Youth setups.
I agree it doesn't look good but without Cat 1 status any of the really good players can just be taken from us without our being able to do anything about it.
Swansea's figures are woeful, but the only positive for us is that ours are slightly better than theirs - they're still pretty pathetic though.
Great OP Penarth.
TOBW, I remember reading that education was our biggest obstacle a few years ago. Does the academy need to be tied with a high end boarding school or something like that? If academy graduates are a draw back for our assessment, then it might be a reason to hang on to Kadeem Harris a while longer and could increase Ralls's value to us, as they probably count for this sort of thing.
I wonder if Swansea's figures may improve over the next few years, especially if they can't win promotion, or if their owners want to pocket the parachute money while virtue signalling giving their academy players opportunities.
Not checked but isn't that table relating to ENGLAND QUALIFIED players
"Then he compiled first-team squad lists (using footballsquads.co.uk) and decided which of the players were both England-qualified"
Off the top of my head; Tom James, Tom Lockyer, Regan Poole, Adam Matthews, Joe Ledley, James Collins, Tommy O'Sullivan & Josh Yorweth all came through our academy and made Premier League/Football League appearances this season
These are very good points
Getting a bit of deja vu here
Not sure how the official productivity figures would work (does Regan Poole count as ours, Newport's or Man Utd's?) but Gunter, Ramsey, Ralls, Jon Meades, Aaron Holloway, Aaron Wildig, Joe Jacobson, Ben Nugent, Deji Oshilaja, David Tutonda, Wes Burns, David Richards, Rollin Menayese, Ashley Baker and Josh Magennis were all with us at some point before they turned 18 and played league football this season. Declan John too, of course.
Well, that'll be why we come out so badly then!
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.
Academies - overrated.!
Id scrap them if that could happen.
I'd say they are probably pointless if they are half hearted. One look at Liverpool's academy and the players they have and are currently producing paints the opposite picture. They also poach many a talent from across the Welsh boarder, territory that I feel Cardiff at it's full potential should be tapping into.
Not a dig, I think you're one of the best posters on here. Can you expand on that? Is it the repetition of us same names complaining about the academy set up that is a problem? Or is it that the club has never delivered on a top rate academy?
I think you're hitting on something there and is perhaps something that hasn't been said much. I'm getting the impression that there is a complacent attitude at the club when it comes to the 18 - 21 age category. I would like to see some ambition, specifically there. Maybe the club needs to think outside the box and bring in someone to oversee the entire academy set-up? Much like the way Osian Roberts does for Wales under his "head of technical" banner. Perhaps the club need to take a look at some of the staff? If there is a consistent failing at certain age groups, then the evidence to suggest that we are falling short at coaching levels is pretty damning.
The deja vu was that a similar thread started when those stats came out last time and rolled around with the academy being ripped to shreds until someone pointed out they related only to English players.
👍
Either way, it's hard to deny that we're failing to bring through academy players to the first team.
Is that unusual though ?
With the massive influx of foreign players into the game opportunities for the top say 30 clubs are limited.
Not saying it can't be improved.
Also arguably the best player we've produced in the last few years got poached by Man City, so until we get Cat 1 is there any point ?
Hence the point of the thread
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/
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