The problem with having a youth focused approach at an English club is that English kids are just nowhere near as good as German or spanish. Villa can do something about that but it requires a concerted effort
Quote from: Matt Collins on January 20, 2014, 09:13:02 PMThe problem with having a youth focused approach at an English club is that English kids are just nowhere near as good as German or spanish. Villa can do something about that but it requires a concerted effort The wisdom at the moment (see the recent Martinez interview) is that we do okay up to the late teens, but fail in the early twenties. Martinez blames the fact that the youngsters do not play enough (need feeder clubs).
Quote from: Matt Collins on January 20, 2014, 09:13:02 PMThe problem with having a youth focused approach at an English club is that English kids are just nowhere near as good as German or spanish. Villa can do something about that but it requires a concerted effort That's just not true. Genetics are important but the gene pool isn't anything like 'pure' enough for some countries to have a huge genetic advantage, if you could measure it I'm sure you'd find that the percentage of kids with the aptitude to be professional footballers at the age of 8-9 is pretty standard across europe. There are 2 major problems for the home nations:1. There are a lot of alternatives to football. I'd bet that a number of people in other sports have everything they need to football players at the highest level but it's not the path they've chosen. This is the same reason why America struggles.2. Our coaching and scouting are poor. The ratio of scouts and qualified coaches to players in British football is abysmal compared to the top nations in europe, with each coach being responsible for 5 or 6 times as many players as in other countries, just like any form of teaching smaller groups are much more likely to succeed, if the standard of teaching/coaching is suitable.Sticking with La Masia, they have around 300 players and 24 coaches with every coach fully qualified or working towards that with every age group focused on core requirements to ensure that when they get to Barcelona B and the first team they're ready to be there, look how many of the kids come into their side and look like they belong there, it's because they do, they've trained since they were 8 or 9 years old to play for the Barcelona first team. The vast majority who drop out after 12 go on to be professional footballers because even if they weren't good enough for Barcelona they have the basic technical skills to be picked up by someone else pretty quickly.
Um, I certainly didn't say anything about genes!!But our kids aren't as good. I've seen them play.That's why I said it needs a concerted effort as Germany did after euro 2000. I'm not sure we've got the will, patience or structure to mirror that.
I sometimes think that the problem with our youth set up is around winning.We are great winning at youth level, but is the focus too much on winning rather than the technical aspect of actually playing the game?