SLF Interview

And your last sentence makes me think this business model is rubbish, or at least the way he describes it is. Your best assets will always be poached young, for peanuts. You are left with what we actually do - try to ‘improve’ other people’s cast offs. When it works, as with Eze, good stuff. But no need to have an expensive academy with loads of coaches to do that. Sadly the other players we thought might bring in some cash - Willock, Chair and even Dieng, are probably worth less now than at the start of the season. Only Field might have appreciated in value.

We won’t get £15m plus for individual players all that often, but surely the business model dictates that we have to sell for a sizeable profit pretty regularly? I might have brain fade but since Eze….?

 

I wonder if what he said about points deductions also will apply to Citeh?
Obviously not.

 

He talks about losing young players under the EPPP scheme, which seems designed to make sure that the best young players wind up at Premier League clubs. They then get loaned back out to lower league clubs, of course. As you suggest, we may as well not bother trying to develop our own youngsters.

From Wiki...

The Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) is a youth development scheme initiated by the Premier League. The intention of the EPPP is to improve the quality and quantity of home-grown players produced by top English clubs. Measures introduced by the EPPP to free up movement of younger players by establishing a hierarchy of association football academies in England and fixing the transfer fees between academies have proved controversial and some smaller clubs closed their academies in response to the changes.

 

Yeah, but Sky and the EPL are happy. Where's the problem?

 

It’s a rigged game. Brentford saw through it and shut down their academy in favour of developing outcasts from all over Europe. It worked, at least so far. Now they are being forced to set an academy up again because the majority of PL clubs voted that every PL club should have an academy by 2024-5.

It’s like being a member of a medieval guild, except with less innovation…..

 

Sadly, yes, I think there's no point in having a Category 2 academy when we're surrounded by clubs with a Cat 1 academy that can just poach our best players. The only rationale for keeping it is if the plan is for the new training ground to allow us to become a Cat 1 academy in the near future and the current situation is just a stop gap. Somewhat doubtful given the investment that would require, however. That is also a good test of the SLF claim that the owners 'want' to spend more money but can't - as I think that spending would be outside the auspices of FFP, so the owners could do that if they wanted to.

 

It seems to me that clubs of our size and in our position (outside the Premier League) are pretty much doomed to staying where we are or falling lower.
All financial regulations are geared to support the big clubs or clubs that are already in the Premier League. Everyone else is a second class citizen.
Either we take a massive financial gamble or get very lucky with an outstanding squad to have any chance of getting out of the Championship.
The club, while understandably are resistant to spending, also seem absolutely hopeless with recruitment or else lack the ambition to improve our chances with clever scouting etc.

 

Couldn't agree more Col.
We basically will have to fluke a cup run or top 6 finish. The whole set up sounds pretty ridiculous to be honest, not helped by the EPPP.
We are relying on another 'Eze' scenario, which to be honest, may not happen again in our lifetime and that's just to enable us to keep plodding on.

 

Selling our best players is our ambition. Les basically said as much. To produce young talent to sell on for profit or to develop existing talent to turn for profit. That's the ambition of the club.
To do that, we have to produce good young players, we don't have any really? Or at least this manager and previous managers don't think we have. Truth be told and it really is a stinker, this is as good as it's ever going to get, for various reasons.
Brentfords model has been fantastic, they obviously have a far superior scouting system that has access all over the world. They built from the championship with a small ground and fanbase and look at them now. When they sold their best players, they reinvested very wisely due to doing their homework.

 

Selling our best players is the current business model, necessitated by FFP sanctions. It's not an ambition.

Brentford shut down their academy because they saw no point in developing young players only to see them poached by bigger clubs for bugger all. Ferdinand said we've lost 13 young players to bigger clubs in recent years for a grand total of £750k. Would you agree then that we should close our academy and focus on scouting overseas?

 

One thing that would help immensely would be to end parachute payments and transfer that cash to the ‘solidarity payments’ fund shared by the PL with all EFL clubs. This would benefit 97% of EFL teams. As Rick Parry has been arguing for for years, ‘negotiations’ ongoing……but won’t happen this season, Florists, Bournemouth and Ruperts have been promised that, if relegated, they will get £99m over the first two seasons after relegation as their ‘share’ of PL tv revenue. Great way to reward failure. A championship club not getting parachute payments gets a massive £4.8m this year in ‘solidarity’, about 10% of the relegated teams.

It’s a ****ing scam, a Ponzi scheme. They are setting up a ‘super league’ by default, where it looks like there is promotion and relegation but in fact it’s only open to a very few teams who have recently been in the elite club.

Apparently before COVID, about 52% of league teams were technically insolvent.

 

We should've been scouting overseas years ago irrespective of the academy. It stands to reason you'll find more across the whole rest of the world than resides purely at home. Our recruiting and scouting has been scandalous for as long as I can remember. Every season I put up 10 possible transfers, all of young promising players from abroad, and I guarantee you that we don't even know of them yet alone check them out. It's been utterly pathetic, the last player to come through our academy that was any good is ? Yeah I can't remember one either. Let's not forget that Eze didn't come through our academy, we got him after Millwall released him and we improved him. The entire set up needs to change, and our scouts need to get the boot, especially the ones that are meant to be finding us talent from abroad !

 

It's a ****ing joke.
Does the 99million count towards FFP?

 

It's already been pointed out that our best academy players get poached due to EPPP. That's why we haven't produced anyone worthwhile. Everything is set up to favour the PL clubs. Would you shut the academy?

 

I assume so, it’s income. But I don’t really understand the FFP rules, something about losing less than £35m a rolling 3 year basis?

This is a subject for our old mate Roller. I’ve asked him……

…..and as if by magic he’s responded - yep, the parachute payments do count as income for Championship FFP calculations. Roller also points out that the parachute payments saved us from multiple FFP fines…..doesn’t make it right in my opinion.

The fix really is in. Corrupt to the core.

 

Of course it's an ambition (a strong desire to do or achieve something). To produce a player to sell on for a profit. That's doing something and achieving something is it not?
If your academy is literally getting robbed of its best talent, the same talent you actually need to make a profit on selling then what's the ****ing point in it?! Doesn't make any sense at all. So yes would be my answer.

 

Bang on the money, our whole system is pretty ****, even that video from the chief scout fella on here was pretty poor and very amateur.
Take the Richards loan, an obligation to purchase him at the end of the season. The lad may never be fit again! Who sanctions these deals, they seriously don't know what they are doing at this club.

 

Do you really think the owners want/long/crave/desire to sell our best players? It's just a financial necessity in our current circumstances.

I really don't know enough about how EPPP works, but, based on what Raving said in an earlier post, we have a Category 2 academy and as such are prey to clubs with Category 1 academies. If there is no ambition to become Category 1 (****s knows what's required to achieve that) then we really might as well shut it down. It would be a great shame though, because there's little better than seeing youth players break into the first team.

 

It will be a necessity for the rest of the clubs history unless ffp rules change (which they won't).
Yes I do think they want to sell our best players but only for a profit. That's the situation to keep the club running so that's their ambition. We can all lay blame at Redknapp, Hughes doors etc but it was the owners who got us in to this mess. We are in a much worse place now from the day they took over.

 

We have some ****wit owners, a dof who **** knows what he does, a scouting system not fit for purpose, a manager more suited to u14's. The clubs a shambles.