21 Jan 2020 22:28:35
What a lovely day for rumours. Havertz, Werner, Mbappé. These rumours may be wrong 99% of the time, but they sure do make the wait between matches more entertaining. Love it.


1.) 22 Jan 2020
22 Jan 2020 08:28:03
my favorite is the media frenzy for the likes of Mbappe or Werner one day, followed the next day by a confirmed signing from Le Havre or Dusseldorf lol.


2.) 22 Jan 2020
22 Jan 2020 13:52:13
To be fair, Le Havre have a pretty decent reputation for producing top quality youngsters, Faithinworks.


3.) 23 Jan 2020
23 Jan 2020 08:23:04
Didn't the French wonderkids - Le Tallec and Pongnolle - come from Le Havre, from memory?


4.) 23 Jan 2020
23 Jan 2020 09:32:39
Can’t anybody see the irony in their statements that very few Liverpool youngsters have made it in the top flight, this is exactly ed002’s point if Liverpool has a better structure for our youngsters then we would be producing a lot of stars and not just the odd one or two, granted we are a little bit better under Klopp but still a long way to go.

{Ed001's Note - nobody produces lots of stars. Nobody. It doesn't work like that.}


5.) 24 Jan 2020
24 Jan 2020 16:43:40
We have an excellent standard of young players and the coaching to make them better. But as Ed001 says, no club has a conveyor belt of 'stars'. It's not a factory floor or Borg cube.


6.) 24 Jan 2020
24 Jan 2020 19:05:27
Exactly Ed1. Out of the countless academy players that come through at premier league clubs very few will make it to play regularly in the premier league. It’s elite level and not many people are elite players in any sport.
I have a friend who’s a youth coach at Spurs and his job is of course to feed the first team and he’s delighted that players like Harry Kane made it but he’s also delighted that players like Tom Carol get to have a career in the game and that makes him just as proud.

{Ed001's Note - it is always going to be the way. The job of the academies has to be more than just providing players for the first team of the club it belongs to. Most of the lads going through it will not make a professional career, so academies have to provide education and give people life skills. If they can have one breaking through a season, then they are performing miracles or the first team is weak (like at Spurs where Winks would be nowhere near a decent Spurs side).}


7.) 24 Jan 2020
24 Jan 2020 21:04:48
In what world does our academy not produce talent?

Suso, Gulacsi, Sterling, Coady, and Alexander-Arnold are 5 off the top of my head playing at the highest level. All spent critical years of their development in our set up. Coady pretty much his whole youth career.

Flanagan, Brannagan, Martin, Hammill, Ince, Robinson, Smith, Ibe, Wisdom and Sinclair are a handful of others at a decent level of the game too. Again just off the top of my head.

Football does exist outside the Prem for christ sakes.


8.) 25 Jan 2020
25 Jan 2020 02:39:01
Plain bread I do agree with your point that we have seen numerous players forge out careers in professional football ranging from the highest level to the lower league levels but I think every club will naturally see numerous players make professional grade over span of 10 years roughly the period that your list of players as examples ranged between but also we never consider the vast number of lads who don't make that step and in that time 100s of kids have seen dreams squashed and facing harsh reality of life without football.

Ed001 made a good point about us never seeing or really acknowledging that uglier side of the youth setups where success or failures in each clubs academy can be judged not only by the successful list of productivity but also it would be interesting to be able to see how clubs may differ in levels of wasting talent, letting potential stars slip through their fingers or by use of bad coaching maybe suck the life out of certain players by not letting them play to their strenghts etc.

These are the type of scenarios that the average people like us don't have insight into and once a player fades into obscurity at that age we will never have exposure to the reasons why a certain player was not deemed good enough

Ed my question would be if there's any clubs who have certain bad reputations regarding the number of players they were deemed to have wrongly or badly managed to the extent of effectively ending their careers before it even started.