Reply To: Closing academy

[Anonymous]

WonderGoals wrote:

The closure wasn’t handled the best from what I’ve read but it needed to be done. We can’t keep investing money into things when there’s very little pay off.

We only had 8 players in that age group and 2 of them already had moved to Grimsby. This is a pretty good crop of youngsters we’ve got now, so let’s concentrate on these and hopefully when we’re making progress and stabilizing as a club, we can then reinstate the academy.

Until that time comes, if we start inviting a number of released premier league/championship youngsters in for the off season, starting from next season and run the rule over them. If we find that 1 or 2 of them have something about them, we can add them to the group and have them all train together.

Why wouldn’t that work ?

Why set the ceiling at Premier League?
Let’s pick up Champions League cast offs!
FFS
They were based in a port-a-cabin at the rear of a school and using sub standard school pitches. Facilities were non existent, kits at one point were 4 seasons old and balls, bibs & cones etc were second-hand, hand me downs from the first team from the previous season.
Staff ate at their desks as there was no staff room / canteen and whip rounds were done in order to purchase milk, coffee & tea to give visitors, guests, officials, parents etc as the club didn’t provide any.
Staffing was minimalistic with people undertaking two or three roles (but obviously only paid one salary) and clocking up many hours above a standard 40 hour week.
Hundreds of players & parents, hundreds of trialists & their parents, match officials, EFL staff, auditors, academy coaches, opposition players & parents, opposition staff and indeed some of the school staff have witnessed / experienced “living the dream” at the academy.
They quite literally didn’t have a pot to piss in and had to go inside the school to use their facilities.