John Stones Mason Holgate James Bree Jordan Clark Jacob Brown 5 Premier League players all through our Academy in the last decade or so. Not a bad record...
Luck doesn’t exist. As someone with an economic background you’re never going to convince me otherwise.
Should be able to do this sort of thing but on a slightly higher budget though. The extra gate receipts, sponsorship (we ought to rake in more than them!), and other commercial stuff, should allow us to operate like this but with a higher expectation. Not that simple of course, but at least it’s a plan. We don’t seem to have any kind of plan or direction at the moment.
Over the period that are looking at from takeover to now they average about 5k though they are trending upwards. Ours is around 13k for the same period but our match day pricing etc is higher so I’d say you are looking at 3x income
That’s the point isn’t it? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it but we are broken by our current model so need to do something to fix it.
To some extent but as a academy you can only work with what you have. Around us we have a host of clubs with attractive academics. I'd also argue talents like Watkins, stansfield, ampadu you can't teach that into them it's a talent. It's like them having danny rose in there academy or RNL no disrespect but I doubt they would have turned out premier league stars.
Jacob Brown joined us at 17, think he’d been at the Blunts, so not really through our academy. As for Clark he made us nothing as we let him go on a free.
Jordan Clark was tipped for big things at one bit, sure he turned down Man City academy or sumat. Was really hoping he would make it with us with him being local lad, can’t really blame us for letting him go though as he weren’t really doing it. After he left it took him 5 or 6 seasons to realise his potential. Glad it worked out for him though.
I'd argue us signing a 17 year old who'd been released by another academy is a tick in our box. Fair point on Clark, but if the club whose academy they went to is that important we should take some credit...
We got lucky with the Stones transfer to City but the rest of them you could make an argument that we sold them on the cheap.
