How is it more realistic?
Saints only need another 3 wins from the remaining 22 games for them to have as many points as the 17th placed team last season.
Why are you continuing with this nonsense? I hope for your own sake you are on a wind up and don't seriously believe what you say!
If he does sign, I'm going to have to make his profile from scratch rather than the normal having him passed over to me from his previous researcher. That'll take a while.
Have you considered every other team in this league has a worse record in 2011/12? Saints have more points than all of them, so why should any of them get in the top 2 ahead of Saints if you are basing it on previous games this season?
Not prolonged enough for a game to need a pitch inspection. St Mary's has only once had a game off for waterlogging and it was much heavy prolonged rainfall than this, so what we had today won't make a difference. It isn't raining at the moment and isn't forecast to for the rest of the evening.
They probably won't fulfil other criteria needed though. Palace are considering forking out for category 1, but will probably end up category 2. Watford certainly couldn't afford category 1.
There are lots of good things about it. For example it is going to significantly increase the number of coaching hours each kid has and puts England in line with the rest of Europe.
There will be limits as to how many players you can have registered in each age group to try to prevent mass hoarding. Also if academy products don't play for your first team they will take away category one status.
In theory those behind the plan would love every academy to be category one. The FA wants to improves coaching for youngsters in order to improve the National team. However this is largely being driven through by the rich clubs in the Premier League that have an ulterior motive of mopping up all the best kids on the cheap and have the FA somewhat over a barrel.
At the moment the plan allows poaching between category one clubs to still take place. However this may change as it gets refined before next season as some feel it is unnecessary to allow this.
To run a category one academy for a year it needs to have a minimum budget of £2.3m. I think a category two is probably half that. Plus you need the high quality facilities in place on top of the running costs. You also need to continue to have academy products playing for your first team or they take category one status away.
From a purely selfish point of view, Saints with the category one status they are aiming to get should benefit from the changes. So do we want to stop it?
Category status is not based on what league you are in, it is based on track record, facilities, staff quality/numbers etc. Saints are going for category one regardless of promotion. Pompey will probably be category 2 or 3.
The Independent article isn't very well researched, Luke signed a 3 year professional contract in December 2010...
http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/NewsDetail/0,,10280~2228492,00.html