Academy football

[DT-the-gull]

As well publicised, Torquay United this week have closed their Category three youth set-up. This has got me wondering, so questions, I'd be grateful with some help on.

How many clubs have closed their academies after relegation from the football league ?

How many clubs run academies in National league premier, and in what form ?

Cheers in a advance.

 

[BeesKnees]

We disbanded the development squad within a couple of weeks of relegation but kept under 18's and below. We were a category 2 academy before relegation, downgraded to 3 and signs are we will now upgrade back to that level.

 

[Greenacres]

We have an academy, run by Scott Bartlett, which is linked to a local college. We gave one year contracts to two of the second year scholars from last season, one of whom had already been named as a substitute for a league game. We also have youth teams, male and female, across all age groups. It is impossible to say how many will go on and play for the club, a star in a team at the age of say 12 or 13 may not go on to a career in football, but giving them all a chance to receive coaching and play the game is hardly a bad thing.

 

[DT-the-gull]

Thanks for the replies. Greenacres, is your academy under the EPPP banner ? is it funded by the club ? or do the parents and youth team lads pay a training fee ?

Love to hear from some others on what your club does, regards academy.

 

[Richard Cranium]

We got rid of ours. Not sure if we did it straight away or not but we did get rid. We started it up again in 2011/12 though whilst we were still in the Conference. Don't think you get any funding for it unless you're in the league? Not sure if that's correct or not though.

I'm abit shit on this subject but we have announced something about this EPPP thing today. Anyone have any idea what it means? All I seem to have read is it means bigger clubs who are Cat 1 or 2 can take our youth players for free? If that's the case it sounds wank.

 

[BeesKnees]

We got rid of ours. Not sure if we did it straight away or not but we did get rid. We started it up again in 2011/12 though whilst we were still in the Conference. Don't think you get any funding for it unless you're in the league? Not sure if that's correct or not though.

I'm abit shit on this subject but we have announced something about this EPPP thing today. Anyone have any idea what it means? All I seem to have read is it means bigger clubs who are Cat 1 or 2 can take our youth players for free? If that's the case it sounds wank.

It means you get a wedge of cash to run an academy but in return top clubs can buy your academy players for a fixed fees. Cat1 cost £2.5 - 5mil to run, Cat2 £1 - 2mil, Cat 3 £300 - £500k, Cat4 £200- £300k. We are currently Cat3 but will upgrade back to Cat2 now we are back in League 2. It doesn't affect the transfer fee you receive for over 16s as far as I'm aware.
I feel it's worked fairly well for us, yes players have gone on to other clubs relatively cheaply but it has funded a setup that produces 1-2 first teamers a year.

This maybe out of date with the figures but you get the idea.
Age 9 to 11: £3000 for players registered at any club
Age 12 to 16: £12,500 for players registered at a Category 3 club
Age 12 to 16: £25,000 for players registered at a Category 2 club
Age 12 to 16: £40,000 for players registered at a Category 1 club
16 year old moving from a Category 2 academy to a Category 1 will
be £109,000 (three years at £3,000 and four years at £25,000).
There are also cumulative fees based upon the number of
appearances (up to a maximum of £1.3m) if the player makes 100
Premier League appearances. Add-ons will also be incurred for a player transferred between the ages of 12-16 (20% of the next fee if the player moves before turning 24 plus 5% of all future domestic fees).
https://www.goalreports.com/EPLPlan.pdf

You get funding based on your Category
Category 1 – £775k, 2 – £480k; 3 – £210k, 4 – £100k.
So Cat3 effectively costs a club between £100-£300k to run less the money they receive from player compensation.

 

[Luke Imp]

We had a decision to make regarding ours and we stuck with it but it's obviously no-where near as big as it was in terms of staff, so there's a lot of volunteers and first team staff help out at youth training when they can. May have changed now, but on relegation the youth coaches were salaried but that got changed to hourly pay.

In the league, the Board of LCFC made all the decisions on it but on relegation a new Board was formed purely to look after the youth academy (I think we go U7's to U18's) and to try and make is self-sufficient. In our first season out of the league, it still got some grant money (£100k?) and that was apparently matched by Chris Moyses to give it some breathing space to sort things out.

After the grants stopped, the Club gave the youth department around £25k a season but that will no longer happen because they cover their yearly costs of circa £50k by fundraising (curry nights, sportsman dinners, collections, 'youth days' on one match day a season etc) and also by training fees (£300/year I think). Kits/ training gear usually get a sponsor.

Regardless of whether they're good enough, youth generally gets a chance here. We had a period of three years under Schofield and then Jackson where we must have had 20+ youth come through and play a decent amount of first team games. We'll have 4 or 5 from the youth system in our first team squad this season.

Our U18's are usually very good sides but with having no U21/reserve team the step up is difficult and we can't afford to keep them until, say, 21/22 and see how the develop a bit more. Most seem to end up at Lincoln United, playing PT and going into higher education.

 

[dan_wrexhamafc]

We have a "center of excellence" it actuallu produces so players for us tbh. Over last couple of season we've had Rob Evans and Ross White come in to the 1st team. Bradley Red before he went to Wolves. We quite often sell youth players between 10-16 to the likes of Liverpool. Everton and United. Also likes of Jon Royal and Nick Rushton came through in last few years have done well in conference North on loan I beleive. John Hunt was from there before he moved to Cambridge

 

[slaphead]

We closed our academy on relegation, which in turn led to administration. Had we stayed up that year ours would have been Cat 2 by now as that is what they were on target for when it all went tits up. We now run a scheme for U15-U18's which is government backed and like the YTS schemes of old, though there isn't a cat in hells chance of anyone making through, it's more of a training program to keep kids in education whilst playing a bit of football.

Our FITC team are restarting the Centre of Excellence this year which was raped by Crawley when we went pop, so we are looking at re-establishing the very good U8-U15 ages groups we had a couple of years ago. Small steps in the right direction, but a far cry from what we had.

 

[Habbinalan]

Interesting article on how Watford decided to drop from cat 1 to cat 3.

http://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/sp..._between_a_Category_1_and_3_Academy_/?ref=rss.

We have just applied for and got cat 3 status having raised and spent a lot of money developing the youth academy alongside a wide and growing range of community activities with no FA funding during our years the wilderness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jez_George
Jez was also the driving force behind Protect Football's Future in 2010. It had the support of non-league Wrexham, Mansfield, York, Oxford and Rushden at the time.

http://www.cambridge-united.co.uk/news/article/us-complete-eppp-audit-2252708.aspx

In fact, having dropped our youth team in 2005 when relegated (losing such players as Ben Coker, Bradley Johnson and Jack Collision), we then pinched Jez George and a bunch of young players from City (some see that as an early stage in the Jezolution - with Jez in the driving seat at all stages) in 2006. We'd had a few other things on our mind at that time.

(edit: just noticed the typo above but liked it so much I thought I'd leave it.)

 

[BeesKnees]

Watford are now after Cat 2
http://www.watfordfc.com/news/article/watford-fc-academy-eppp-category-2-vicarage-road-2310555.aspx

 

[DT-the-gull]

Thanks for your replies been helpful. New Torbay MP asked the question in the house of commons and looks like it's going lead to a parliamentary debate on the subject, for me this is not about an ex-league club with a chip on it's shoulder, and this might seem a bit over dramatic.

However, we are talking about the future of the national team, not all those highly paid superstars, started their careers with top premiership clubs, for our club we've seen the likes of Gary Monk (local lad to boot) of course now manager at Swansea, start his career with Torquay, as did Lee Sharpe who went on to Manchester United and England. The premiership is littered with players who started with lower division football clubs.

There surely has to be way found, to get funding down to this level and keep academies open, otherwise players who've had to work had and made it at the highest level in the professional game in future may well be lost to football at a very early age.

 

[Davidimp]

We had a decision to make regarding ours and we stuck with it but it's obviously no-where near as big as it was in terms of staff, so there's a lot of volunteers and first team staff help out at youth training when they can. May have changed now, but on relegation the youth coaches were salaried but that got changed to hourly pay.

In the league, the Board of LCFC made all the decisions on it but on relegation a new Board was formed purely to look after the youth academy (I think we go U7's to U18's) and to try and make is self-sufficient. In our first season out of the league, it still got some grant money (£100k?) and that was apparently matched by Chris Moyses to give it some breathing space to sort things out.

After the grants stopped, the Club gave the youth department around £25k a season but that will no longer happen because they cover their yearly costs of circa £50k by fundraising (curry nights, sportsman dinners, collections, 'youth days' on one match day a season etc) and also by training fees (£300/year I think). Kits/ training gear usually get a sponsor.

Regardless of whether they're good enough, youth generally gets a chance here. We had a period of three years under Schofield and then Jackson where we must have had 20+ youth come through and play a decent amount of first team games. We'll have 4 or 5 from the youth system in our first team squad this season.

Our U18's are usually very good sides but with having no U21/reserve team the step up is difficult and we can't afford to keep them until, say, 21/22 and see how the develop a bit more. Most seem to end up at Lincoln United, playing PT and going into higher education.

Think the lack of reserve side hurts us as well, nowhere to develop the youngsters further, keep the squad players fit and get the injured ones fit again.
Sadly we can't afford it now.

 

[Sparrow]

We have a centre of excellence which then feeds into an academy setup in which players are involved in for two years before being offered a third year/apprenticeship thing. I expect our academy to improve from this summer following the appointment of Scott Harrison from Aldershot (thanks!) as the Club's Development Manager. Joe McNerney, Giuseppe Sole and Ollie Palmer are three recent examples of graduates who have gone on to have an impact in this division.

 

[Southern Shayman]

Not being funny but if you want to run an academy you shouldn't be relying on handouts.

The whole EPP system is shocking but this just screams of "we haven't got any money, why aren't people paying for our prospects to come through".

You have an academy to the level you can afford. Simple.

 

[Greenacres]

Thanks for the replies. Greenacres, is your academy under the EPPP banner ? is it funded by the club ? or do the parents and youth team lads pay a training fee ?

Sorry but I don't know the answers to those questions, it isn't something I have been directly involved in. I had a quick dig around the club website but that wasn't forthcoming with any answers either. One of the other Rovers fans may know the details, hopefully they will post some comments if they do.

 

[White Army]

Ours will still be going next season and has been a massive part of the club surviving over the past 10-20 years. Numerous players have come up through the academy including Aaron Cresswell now at West Ham, Jason koumas who may or may not still be with us next season, ryan taylor, iain Hume, dale jennings to name just a few. Not sure of the plans if we don't go straight back up, I'd like to think we would be able to keep it no matter what.

 

[BeesKnees]

If you want to know which clubs have academies under the EPPP academy system then the easiest way is to see who competes in the Professional Development League.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Development_League

Cat 3 clubs play in 4 regional leagues. This was last season
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014–15_Professional_U18_Development_League#League_3

 

[Luke Imp]

Just been reading up on Torquay's forum about this and came across our name being mentioned by forevertufc (I think they post on here?), but they've got us wrong on there:

"Lincoln yet another club to close their academy completely upon relegation from the football league, now run a system again similar to what our club is trying to do, however theirs is run separately from the club, their parents pay a training fee, and it also obtains it's finance through sponsorship and grants. So as said we're by no means alone and it does not have to be the end of our club developing it's, home grown talent."

We didn't close ours. It's always continued to run, it was just the number of permanent staff that changed and a heavier reliance on volunteers.

Ours isn't run like Torquay are trying to do.

We get no finance from grants anymore. A bit of sponsorship but the vast majority comes from fundraising.

 

[Davidimp]

Yep they've got very wrong Luke, they've clearly not asked us how we run our youth academy.

 

[clarkosa]

Are you forgetting solar campus? Hope to keep it? We're expanding it to class 1 and will be open December

 

[clarkosa]

Ours will still be going next season and has been a massive part of the club surviving over the past 10-20 years. Numerous players have come up through the academy including Aaron Cresswell now at West Ham, Jason koumas who may or may not still be with us next season, ryan taylor, iain Hume, dale jennings to name just a few. Not sure of the plans if we don't go straight back up, I'd like to think we would be able to keep it no matter what.