The academy

[Tamesaint]

Let’s leave personalities aside for a moment and talk about what’s wrong with this club institutionally.

 

At the heart of our problems is something far more damaging than the PLC status: the academy. It’s expensive, it yields fewer benefits than you might think, and it distorts the whole philosophy of the club.

 

To see how bad it really is for us, keep one statistic in mind: Swansea City’s entire squad cost around £500,000. That’s not half a million per season – but in total. And all for a squad that certainly plays good football, and is in with a chance for a play-off place to the Prem.

 

I don’t know what the annual running costs are for the academy. But I would bet they’re a lot more than £500,000- probably double or even treble that amount. In other words, we could build a Swansea City team every single year, and still make substantial savings over the present set-up.

 

In the midst of a credit crunch, how on earth is such an expense still carried? It can’t be justified – not for a Championship club, even less for a League One club. And less still for a club on the financial brink.

 

There seems to be a widely held belief that the academy ‘pays for itself’ – that player sales more than make up for its running costs. Is that still true? Who is the next Theo? Or Bale? (and we’re just talking about revenues here, not whether Gareth Bale’s ever going to make a decent Premiership player). In the present – and near future – economic climate, there are no big sales to make. No Premiership club is going to take a 5 mill punt on one of our youngsters possibly making the grade. Everything now is safety first – buy players who’ve proved they can do it at the highest level. If anyone doubted that, consider what happened in the last transfer window. Of course the club received offers – but they were, in their own words, derisory. The academy is absolutely not a cash cow.

 

The worst of it, though, is that the academy, and the idea of buying low, selling high on young, largely unproven players, has badly damaged the first team. On the one hand, we buy Morgan Schneiderlin for ‘up to’ £1.2 million – presumably in the hope (since we clearly don’t have that kind of cash to splash) of selling him on quickly and for a decent profit.

 

Now, not only is this not going to happen – we’ve spent more than twice the cost of the Swansea City first team on a single player (injury-plagued at that), while having to make do and mend with the gaping holes up front and at full back, to name a few.

 

In other words, the whole philosophy of the club seems to be driven around the City-inspired speculation on unproven talent (rather like betting on start-up company shares in the hope that one of these companies will be the new Microsoft), rather than build financial success around a focused and skilful building of the first team, just as Swansea have done.

 

Shut the academy.

 

Find a manager with the talent to spot ready-made rising talent in the lower leagues (there is plenty out there, and always will be).

 

And give that manager the room to construct a TEAM, not a motley collection of idividuals playing in the shop window with price tags around their necks.

[Thedelldays]

but when arry was in charge and early last season..fans cried for the "kids" to be given a chance over the "wasters"..

[WealdSaint]

I think it will be harder for the academy to be successful in the future purely because our status as a football club has now sunk so low.

 

If you had a promising 14yr old and the phone kept ringing would you go for Saints?

[bridge too far]

First rate OP!

 

Maybe RL should go in for running a garden centre. He could spend a lot of money rearing saplings that snap at the first sign of frost and that no-one wants to buy anyway.

 

He has the perfect business model for this in the way he runs SFC.

[bridge too far]

*Bump*

 

Because the OP is so very good.

[sambosa75]

Okay fine, I'll be the one that rises to it...

 

You say the academy is one of the most damaging aspects of the club. Perhaps for a club like Swansea with little or no reputation for producing top players ever in their history this may be something they can consider.

 

Quite frankly, to say the academy should be shut is ludicrous. We are always producing good players and even now, if the club was in a position where we could augment the team by cherry-picking the very best talent from the academy instead of putting out more or less a whole team of academy products people would be cooing over how good our youngsters are. Players like Surman, Lallana, Dyer etc... are sought after players and will command fees of over £1m should/when they leave. The simple fact is at the moment due to financial constraints put upon us, we arent in a position where we can pay the wages of seasons professionals, so as a result we are forced in to playing academy products and cheap loans.

 

You say the cost of the academy cannot be justified. I can almost guarantee the costs to operate the academy will be a damn sight lower than Swansea's wage bill, regardless of how cheap the team was to assemble.

 

Morgan Schneiderlin was signed up for a fee of "up-to" £1.2m. I would imagine given the clubs precarious financial position, we didnt cough up anything near to that fee to sign him. I would be fairly confident the fee was more based on perhaps a set fee that has been agreed for when we sell him on, with clubs like Arsenal rumoured to be monitoring his progress.

 

You also make a throwaway comment about getting in a manager capable of assembling squads for £500k. Who out there is capable of doing that? Martinez has done a fantastic job but if it was simply that easy to do it, do you not think everyone would be doing it?

 

What you propose is totally unrealistic and totally unsustainable.

[Torres]

I don’t know what the annual running costs are for the academy.

 

And for that reason, I'm out.

[Fowllyd]

but when arry was in charge and early last season..fans cried for the "kids" to be given a chance over the "wasters"..

 

There's a difference though. At that time we had a squad which largely consisted of a bunch of overpaid journeymen; the OP's view is that we should be looking for younger, cheaper - and keener - players elsewhere, not bringing in more players along the lines of Euell, Jermaine Wright or whoever. So the two views aren't as contradictory as you might think.

 

Not sure if I agree with the main premise of the OP though, largely as I have no idea how much it actually costs to run our academy. Without that knowledge it's impossible to say how well or otherwise it's working.

[Window Cleaner]

I suspect the Academy will be one of the first things the administrators shut down,the building will be put up for sale, that and the megastore. Then they'll sell off Jackson's Farm the second Bovis's option runs out.

 

These things are obviously a drain on our finances (well not JF but it's a saleable asset for some money, not much but some anyway) and they'll be deemed as surplus to requirement. The store at the ground will probably carry on as well as online sales.If you look at our staff numbers compared to a comparable club you'll see that we've nearly double the number. The administrators will act very quickly on that.

[sambosa75]

Also forgot to mention, a lot of people already know but my nephew plays for Saints' academy and is one of the UK's brightest young players if what the scouts at Chelsea, Pompey, Saints and Reading have said is anything to go by. The fact Saints managed to outmuscle the likes of Chelsea (who incidentally offered a chaufer driven car to their Cobham-based training ground for all training sessions and matches for him) means that they are still putting a lot of emphasis on player recruitment and scouting still.

 

Not that it particularly matters but I have it on very good authority that our under 16 side is amongst the top 2 or 3 sides in the country. There will no doubt be a few that turn pro in a couple of years time, but sod it... lets just close it all down and let the likes of Chelsea and Arsenal gobble them all up. That makes sense...

[bridge too far]

This is a genuine question - not a loaded one .

 

Does anyone know how many juniors from League 1 academies make it to the big time?

 

Do any League 1 teams actually have academies?

[Window Cleaner]

This is a genuine question - not a loaded one .

 

Does anyone know how many juniors from League 1 academies make it to the big time?

 

Do any League 1 teams actually have academies?

 

Few players from academies actually make the big time at all these days.

No matter how well your academy is run you can always find a 15 year old street urchin from Caracas (or wherever) who is infinitely better than the lads you've been grooming for years on end.That's why blokes like Chris Eagles are playing for Burnley and Man U have Tevez and Ronaldo up front.

[Tamesaint]

Ok - lets look at it another way.

 

I want Saints to do well. I want Saints to get back into the Premiership. We could try to do this by doing what Swansea have done which is to get a manager in ,encourage him to find up and coming talent and build a team. I quoted Swansea in my original post but I could just as easily have quoted Burnley as a team that has done this. Reading a few years ago were another such team. This can be done. It need not cost the earth.

 

Instead we seem to have burdened ourselves with the reputation / expectation of having a team of youngsters built round the academy. We cannot afford to keep the top scorers from the last 2 seasons on our payroll. We cannot afford to plug the oh so apparent deficiencies at full back and up front . But we can afford to spend £1.2 million on Schneiderlin who when he isn't playing because he is injured , isn't playing because he is suspended (not playing tomorrow by the way due to suspension!!) . Schneiderlin fits our profile of having a team of youngsters. Stern John with his 20 goals a season does not.

 

When we were in the Premiership we could afford the academy but can we still? Our pipeline of good players who paid for the infrastructure seems to be drying up. The football world has shown what it thinks of the ability of our academy by only making "derisory" offers for our players in the transfer window. Perhaps these youngsters upon whom so much is now being expected are not so good after all ? The much vaunted Arsenal setup which we want to copy produces youngsters who can beat full strength Premiership teams in the Coca Cola cup. Our youngsters have only been able to beat one team at home all season in the Championship!! If this is the best that our investment in youth can produce, why don't we re deploy our meagre resources?

 

When we do produce decent youngsters what happens to them ?? A sniff of the Premiership was enough for Bale, Walcott, and Baird to leave. Even a Premiership reserve team proved too much of an attraction for Mills. Dyer looks like joining the ever growing list of players (Blackstock, Best and Crainie being just 3 ) who we have brought on but who have failed to reach their potential at Saints. I am a well meaning fellow and am pleased to see ex Saints do well for themselves. But aren't we better off by trying to assemble a TEAM that can get us promotion rather than impose a philosophy of youth upon the club which means that we send out 11 individuals onto the park each week ??