What we’re missing without a youth team
I appreciate the reasons why it happened but WWFC are missing so much without a youth team.
This evening I saw a fantastic game of football in the FA Youth Cup 2nd Round as Barnet edged out Cambridge Utd 3-2 with a goal in injury time from a 15 year old centre-half.
The reward for Danny Senda’s side is an away trip to AFC Bournemouth in the 3rd round - the first time Barnet have reached this stage in the club’s history. Having scored 17 goals in 12 matches, centre-forward Okem Chime was promoted to the 1st team & made his debut as a substitute on Sunday in the FA Cup match with Fleetwood.
He weighed in with another 2 goals tonight, firstly putting Barnet ahead after 4 minutes then putting them ahead again in the second-half. Cambridge United played extremely well and had 2 outstanding wide players who caused problems all evening.
The quality of the football was of the highest order and must have impressed note-taking David Pleat who was sitting behind me. But it was sheer guts and character that got Barnet over the line and on to a history-making match at a Premier League ground next month. Something we need back at Wycombe.
Comments
David Pleat will have been watching a specific player who Tottenham are looking to take from Barnet or Cambridge for minimal compensation. Isn't that exactly why we no longer have an academy?
What do you call minimum compensation? It might be a coaches salary for a year. Sell on and appearance fees could be millions. Not every player is picked off at 14 or 15, if they get close to the first team they have the option to stay and play league football. There's so many benefits to the community and the club. Get kids involved who might be players , fans , coaches or volunteers. Get committed local players, get transfer fees and sell on clauses. We know we (Dobbo) are good at it. The Hause money seems to have been overlooked in the takeover talk but it's certainly helped this season.
I don't call the level of compensation Exeter regularly get as minimal!
All the positives posted above are true, and once you get players to 16?/17/18 and sign them up to pro contracts, you can make good money. The problem is until then, the big clubs can pretty take who they want for peanuts because of EPPP
I really hope we do get a youth setup back - but it needs to be done in full knowledge that it'll cost us money. Unfortunately I can't see any way that we'll be in a position to sink 500k/ year into an academy any time soon, I'm not sure how any club our size could from a standing start.
It's minimal compensation compared to what a club would have got before EPPP.
How do Barnet afford a youth system out of interest?!
And what people are missing with Exeter versus ourselves is that they have no big clubs anywhere near them, meaning they can't be poached due to regulations on maximum distances travelled by kids.
Even Southampton is 2hr 45 and 110 miles away!
Any quality we have could be poached by at least 10 bigger clubs.
Of course, the flip of that, is that our location is a lot more appealing to players generally, not being such an outpost.
I believe most of Barnet's revenue comes from non-football stuff. They own all sorts of facilities and buildings around The Hive. It's how they can sustain a football league club in London with sub 2,000 attendances.
Except that they aren't a football league club
I know that, but they have been a FL team for the majority of the time since 1991.
Interesting. What are the EPPP rules on how far a club can have an u16 player travel do you know?
Googled it quickly, and found
You must live within 60 minutes travelling distance of a club to join its youth development programme, if you're under 12. If you're under 16, this rises to 90 minutes. There is no time restriction for under 17s and older.
Now what is unclear, is what happens between 16 and 17, as it appears that a pro contract can only be signed at 17.
Does that actually mean someone can get to 16, and then be poached? Even with Exeter's advantage?
Realistically someone would still have to move, as you're not going to drive 2hr 45, or 110 miles to say Southampton
Would it be more profitable for Wycombe to run a youth academy at Wishaw? ?
Surely the problem with a youth programme now is that we are where we are.
If we had an existing programme, we could take kids in at say 8 or 9 but have kids coming out the other end at 16/17 now and hopefully being sold on or put through the first team to provide the cash to pay for this years new intake this year.
In our case now, take kids in at 8 or 9 and it is a guaranteed cost with no hope of income for best part of ten years before you have hope of a cash payback.
that's even before you factor in the presumed difficulty in getting the best kids to join your new scheme with no track record in an area where the best kids presumably have the choice of perhaps ten competing well established schemes.
Its a shame it was ever cancelled but as soon as it was, it made it that much harder to ever restart. perhaps more logical from where we are to instead focus on a 17 and over rehabilitation scheme for those kids who haven't quite made it in one of the big clubs youth setups but have enough promise that with a bit of polishing may yet have careers in the game. It looks like this is precisely the road we have started following. Makes sense to me.
I remember someone once saying Wycombe have a good captive area.
I can't quite understand what they mean by that, as surely unless you're in London or in the thick of the NW, there's barely a worse location possible in terms of bigger clubs.
We have Tottenham, Chelsea, Arsenal, QPR, Reading, Brentford, West Ham all within 20-35miles or so.
Here's a link to the EFL 2018/2019 Charter.
Category 1 academies can recruit nationally from U12, with provisos, so ultimately the better club's can attract the best players from anywhere.
https://www.efl.com/siteassets/efl-documents/201819/efl-youth-development-charter-players-and-parents-guide-2018-19--e-book4.pdf
Not to mention Fulham, Oxford, Barnet, Watford, Luton, Franchise!
We're not accepting half of those as big clubs I'm afraid
@Malone I had no idea about that travel time thing, thanks. That does seem to make things a little easier for Exeter.
Certainly is their big trump card.
Although, there will for certain be cases where big clubs dirtily fund families moving within their range. But that's getting into very difficult territory to police!
Southampton bend the rules by operating satellite 'development centres' to get around the travel time restriction. They have one in the Bath area, for example. However there is a proposed rule change currently being discussed that would prevent them and other clubs from doing so from next season onwards.
That's greedy of Southampton, as they already have one heck of a domination of the area around them, especially since Portsmouth's drop down the tiers.
Most top clubs do. You get blokes in Taunton telling you their son plays for Arsenal but he's really at the Arsenal centre in Taunton.