Academies have never delivered so little for so many, with Irish football one of the system’s many losers.
Gavin Cooney LIAM BRADY DEDICATES a chapter of his new autobiography to his time running Arsenal’s academy, in which he crowns an unlikely hero of England’s stunning production line of elite talent.
So if England go on to win the Euros next summer – and steel yourself, because it’s a very real possibility – we will be swamped with pieces hailing the success of their academies and the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan. Advertisement You can argue that the entire point of elite, professional sport is the survivorship bias; that sport is a process of finding the best and winnowing the rest. But it is one thing to do this among adults, and another thing entirely to do it with children and young teenagers. Major football academies have become successful and lucrative operations, but they are morally objectionable.
Locked in brutal competition, Premier League clubs say they cannot afford to overlook a talented eight-year-old near them. Another fact: clubs are increasingly training academy players not to play for their first-teams but to finance them. We have seen this in operation at Chelsea, where Financial Fair Play rules have incentivised them to sell off their academy players as they can be recorded in the books as “pure profit”, as their sale price does not have to take any initial transfer fee into account.
It’s a staggering statistic: players who joined a club abroad before the age 0f 18 were three times more likely to have quit the sport than have played a league game for that club by the age of 23.
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