The Academy Conundrum

Found this great article on a Chelsea forum. The author raises some brilliant points and goes into great details explaining the difficulties Chelsea faces in promoting young players to the first team.

I copied and pasted parts of the article that raises key points. Its a rather long read, nonetheless worthy of your time.

A common theme about readiness when speaking to everyone for this article is the role that the manager plays. Carlo Ancelotti tried (or maybe was forced to by the lack of spending) to give more opportunities to youngsters. We have had 6 managers since Ancelotti: Villas-Boas, Di Matteo, Benítez, Mourinho, Hiddink and Conte. This instability has created a culture that requires the manager to win at all costs now, rather than look at a longer-term philosophy. Ancelotti was sacked for finishing second, while affording youngsters the most chances I can recall. After seeing that, is André Villas-Boas going to focus on cultivating youth or trying to win instantly? This was a manager appointed with trying to move on The Old Guard™ – do you think he cared one iota about the promising teenage midfielder he had in his midst? Even interim managers were brought in with similar tasks in mind. Guus Hiddink, during Chelsea’s most disappointing league campaign in recent memory, continued to play the same appalling players ahead of youngsters when absolutely nothing was at stake.

Does the “win-now" culture actually promote this eternal circle of short-term thinking? If no one in the Premier League is really producing players on a consistent basis, is this managerial instability a big part of that?

There is so much pressure at the top, managers want instant results. They don’t have time to work on players and grow them".

Even if teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich do import a lot of their star names, they still afford more opportunities to academy graduates than Chelsea while (a) remaining as/more successful than Chelsea and (b) invariably having a better standard of player than Chelsea. If a manager at Real Madrid can give thousands of minutes to graduates (even the less spectacular ones), why is it so hard at Chelsea? Nacho is certainly not a world beater by any stretch of the imagination, yet he can still play 2,301 minutes of La Liga football for Real Madrid. Their culture of sacking managers is similar to ours and they put a similar price on success.

People can argue about the relative strength of the Premier League compared to La Liga, but with the Premier League’s declining performances in Europe year-on-year, are we really pulling the “strength" card? Nathaniel Chalobah was not good enough to start a single game when N’Golo Kanté and Nemanja Matić looked tired? Lewis Baker is not good enough to play against Brighton or Huddersfield? Jérémie Boga is not good enough to play at least 1,000 minutes next season?

Chelsea’s academy has been utterly exceptional for the best part of a decade. I would, however, wager that Neil Bath swaps every single academy trophy for just one of this golden crop becoming an established first team player.

Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the Manchester City chairman, recently spoke at length about the end goal of the City academy by condensing the process into a single question: “[…] how are we going to get these young men to be part of our first team?".

Emenalo once stated that “there is a coordinated effort from everybody to want to make this happen. The owner wants it, the first team coach wants it, the academy manager wants it, I want it, the board want it, everybody wants this to happen". Then why are we purposefully creating a dichotomy? We are concurrently spending an inordinate amount of money on the academy each season, while offering the players who emerge no opportunities within the first team. In a world where Chelsea are happy to buy Romelu Lukaku for £17m and then send him on loan (with no guarantees he will return a Chelsea player despite his goal scoring record), what chance does a home-grown kid have?

Think back to the Alexandre Pato debacle in January 2016. The Brazilian arrived at Chelsea overweight, with very little chance of getting match sharp let alone remaining a Chelsea player the following season. Why could we not have given his opportunities to an academy player? This is not about playing kids for the sake of it, but we spent half a season trying to get Pato fit at the expense of giving someone more deserving an opportunity elsewhere. We can talk about favours to agents and networking, but are we actually seeing anything positive off the back of that? Yes, we are great at selling players, but when it comes to bringing in world class players, where are they?


https://weaintgotnohistory.sbnation.com/platform/amp/features/2017/7/24/16018544/the-chelsea-academy-conundrum

Enjoy it fellow Chelsea fans