Tin Pot FC Part Four: “The Academy of Football”

Back in May, David Gold added to the ever-expanding collection of communication disasters that have emanated from the board. When questioned by a fan on Twitter about the club’s youth policy after a table which detailed the number of Premier League minutes played by teenagers emerged, Gold’s reply caused some controversy:

Gold then went on to point out that the number of minutes played by teenagers had no correlation with success (Hull were 5th in that table and went down; Chelsea also failed to play any teenagers whatsoever and won the league) and also suggested that young players should be expected to go out on loan to gain experience, rather than commanding first team minutes.

Obviously this speaks to part of a wider debate going on in English football at the minute — rendered more pressing by the success of English national teams at a variety of different age groups over the course of this year— with questions being asked about the dearth of opportunities for talented academy players in top-level first teams, which is probably why Gold’s comments touched such a nerve.

Sadly, what Gold said is probably true and, outside a few notable exceptions, the views espoused by our joint-chairman are likely shared by the majority of Premier League club owners. The difference is, of course, that they have the good sense to keep it to themselves and not express this reality publicly.

The reason it felt so galling to a number of West Ham fans was that Gold’s views directed contravened the “Academy of Football” label that has been so central to the club’s attempts to forge an identity and has played such a large role in West Ham’s self-mythologisation, especially over the last twenty years.

It might have had some merit for a while, but the truth is that those days have been over for a long time. Whether it’s through a lack of investment, poor quality coaching, poor talent identification, or just poor quality players, our academy hasn’t produced anyone outstanding over the last 10+ years.

James Tomkins is the last academy player to be anything like a first team regular and Junior Stanislas is the only other graduate from that period to play top flight football consistently (Glen Johnson, Jermain Defoe, and Leon Britton all played to varying degrees last year, too). Beyond that, there’s a few who play at Championship standard (Jordan Spence, Freddie Sears, and George Moncur are squad players at Ipswich and Barnsley — all of them having first dropped down into League One before moving upwards again) and a couple like Rob Hall and Kyel Reid who are doing ok in League One, but the rest of them just seem to slip down the leagues, such as Elliot Lee who has just rejoined Luton Town, who have no fewer than five former West Ham academy players on their books.

Something’s clearly not been working for a long time now. It’s not as if the players we’re not giving chances to are going on to set the world alight elsewhere — but is that because they weren’t talented enough to make the grade or because they had their development stunted by a lack of competitive football at a crucial period of their early career?

It’s not been helped by appointing managers who are only interested in protecting themselves in the short term, which is understandable from their perspective given the cost of failure and aligns with the board’s general focus on today, rather than tomorrow.

It feels like another missed opportunity for them, though. If the players our academy is churning out aren’t up to standard, we could do well by hoovering up the best young players from bigger teams.

A number of players at the academies of top teams in England are realising that there’s a glass ceiling at their parent teams and are starting to seek moves to clubs where they’re guaranteed game time at an earlier stage of their career — Dom Solanke, Nathaniel Chalobah, and Nathan Aké have all departed Chelsea’s stockpile of talented youngsters, while the much heralded Jadon Sancho moved away from Manchester City due to a lack of a pathway to the first team at the Etihad for youngsters, much in the same way that Kelechi Iheanacho left for Leicester.

If West Ham established themselves as a place where young players — not even necessarily products of our own academy — were given plenty of game time, we could be an attractive destination for frustrated, elite-level talents. It has the chance to be a mutually beneficial arrangement — we benefit as they elevate the club with their superior quality for a few seasons and then make a large profit when they depart; they’re offered a chance to develop with consistent first team minutes at a high standard and are given a showcase for their talent. It’s win-win.

Unless you’re one of those fans who decries being a “selling club” and think that’s a product of some sort of “small club mentality”. However, the reason that we haven’t really been a selling club in recent years is because hardly anyone has been interested in buying our players. Besides, the Payet debacle demonstrated that any player who feels as though he’s outgrown us will eventually be sold, regardless of how much posturing the club does to suggest otherwise. If PSG bid £50mil for Manuel Lanzini next week, he’d be at St. Pancras before you could call Jack Sullivan a cunt on Twitter.

The truth is everyone other than probably Real Madrid and Barcelona are selling clubs.

Another, more drastic, solution to the academy problem is to go down the Brentford route and just bin it entirely. As a cost-cutting measure, Brentford decided to close their youth academy in 2016, instead moving to a ‘B’ team model. With such fierce competition for talented youngsters in London, they felt their academy wasn’t producing enough first team level players to be financially viable, so they “ focused on recruiting young players between 17 and 20 who have been released by academies in the Premier League, as well as talent from “undervalued markets” overseas.”

Or, if you’d rather have a more glamorous reference point, we could follow Monaco’s method. Due to the small local population of the principality, and restrictions placed on players under the age of 14 preventing them from relocating their area of origin, Monaco don’t run traditional grassroots under-10s football etc. They allocate their resources into scouting and acquiring the most gifted players from other clubs at a later stage of their development.

Clearly this would be a radical departure from the existing system, but if David Gold truly believes what he says, there seems to be little point in continuing with the way things are. In the recent past there’s little justification for the continuing existence of the current academy structure. It’s not just that it hasn’t been producing first team-ready players; it’s not even producing players they’ve been able to receive fees for when selling them on. The club is expending its resources in developing these players and then discarding them for nothing to clubs lower down the hierarchy.

The caveat to this is that the current batch of players has perhaps shown more promise than any another recent cohorts. Oxford, Burke, Rice, Martinez, Quina — all are looking quite promising but are in desperate need of first team minutes. As a club, we need to decide whether that’s going to be with us and, if we can’t find a place for these lads, what should our approach be to youth development going forward.

The board’s insistence on focusing on the immediate future doesn’t bode well for them and it might not bode well for the long-term future of the club either. It’s not that things haven’t gone according to plan — it’s more that there doesn’t appear to be a plan at all.