Clubs return to youth in pursuit of prosperity

As debts mount, Premiership managers are once again looking to home-grown talent as foundation for future

Darren Baxter, Leslie Byle, Warren Cummings, Shayne Demitrious, Geza Hajgato, Mark Hook, John King, Paul Nicholls, Courtney Pitt, John Rattray, Mark Royal. Names very largely to forget. Names of Chelsea's trainees and scholars during their one season in the Champions' League, 1999-2000.

Needless to say, none of them has played for Chelsea and by the time Rothmans Football Yearbook for 2001-02 was released, only two of those names still featured in the professional game. Cummings, a 21-year-old defender, had enjoyed loan spells at Bournemouth and West Bromwich Albion; Demitrious was given a free transfer.

At this level of football, the wastage is enormous and as Chelsea entered the Champions' League, with a foreign manager and an overwhelmingly foreign squad, they could probably afford it. Now, with debts approaching £100m, some of their Under-17 side, playing out a tough 1-0 win over Arminia Bielefeld at a Premier League sponsored tournament at Keele University, will have to come through. The financial realities demand it.

For the past four years clubs such as Chelsea, whose youth team is now supervised by Steve Clarke, who once had the unenviable task of being Ruud Gullit's assistant at Newcastle, have been furiously developing an academy system – the kind the French, Dutch and Germans had taken for granted. The way in which Sir Alex Ferguson sacked Manchester United's two youth-team coaches, Dave Williams and Neil Bailey, angered at his club's defeat in the FA Youth Cup by Barnsley, demonstrates how high the stakes are – as does the fact that shifting Brian McClair from reserve-team coach to run the academy is considered a promotion.

Dave Richardson, the Premier League's director of youth, dates the switch of emphasis long before football's current financial downturn. Just as airline safety is only reviewed after an airline crash, so England's failure to qualify for the 1994 World Cup triggered a root-and-branch examination of all aspects of the game. "When things go wrong at the top, you examine the bottom. Nowadays, nobody can take a youth side without qualifications, whereas a few years ago the milkman could run it."

This resulted in a system in which each Premier League club has its own academy. It has now been running for four years, and Richardson is more concerned with the Under-13 tournament Keele will stage because it will feature players nurtured entirely under the new system. "When Gérard Houllier, who was then French technical director, addressed a managers' and coaches' conference a few years ago, he said it would be six to eight years before we would see the fruits of our labour and on those terms we still have a couple of years to go."

Houllier is fiercely evangelical about English youth football, estimating that the country has twice as many good young players as its major European rivals, aided by the fact that clubs now have access to far younger players, who used to be the preserve of the school system.

When Frank Clark took Nottingham Forest to the quarter-finals of the Uefa Cup in 1996, he confessed to being alarmed by the enormous gap in technique between his own side and Forest's opposition. This he put down to the fact that English clubs were forbidden to coach youngsters under 12, which was the preserve of the schools system. The best years for a child to learn anything is between the ages of five to 10.

"If you had a nine-year-old son who was a talented violinist, who would you send him to for lessons?" Clark said. "The most highly-qualified teacher you could afford or the geography teacher at the local school who played the fiddle a bit when he was younger and still fancies he can knock out a tune, although he never mastered the instrument?"

The academy system has changed this, although Richardson does not wholly agree with Clark. "The Dutch, French and Norwegians are now aware of our youth programmes in a way they were not before, and this is because five years ago we didn't have access to young children in a way we do now because of the hold of the schools system. With time we will become technically more proficient; the transfer window means that clubs won't be able to shop in Croatia in September, October and November but will have to use the players they themselves have developed."

The thrust now is to alter lifestyles. When Liverpool lifted their first trophy under Houllier, he noted that the only players drunk at the post-match celebrations were British. This, and the intrusion of agents into the world of youth-team football, are the main battles Richardson has identified to be fought.

For John Barnwell, chief executive of the League Managers' Association, the development of academies will both reduce the number of foreign players in English football and promote youth-team coaching as a separate career option. Pop Robson earned a great reputation as a youth-team coach at Manchester United, Sunderland and Leeds, without going on to senior management, and Peter Beardsley hopes to do the same.

Barnwell remarked: "I once told a House of Commons sub-committee on foreign influences on the game that, although they could name Vieira, Zola and Bergkamp, all of whom are great assets to our game, could anyone name a foreign player who turns out for Barnsley? The point I was making was that Barnsley were relegated [from the Premiership] with 13 foreigners. That has blocked the development of young players.

"What is the point of having an academy when opportunities are so limited? Four years down the line an accountant will turn round and say that you have spent £3m a year on the academy and produced one kid for the first team and close the thing down. You pick up a Chelsea team sheet and it's like an Italian wine list. Where's the chance for those kids coming through? That's what has to change."