Insight into to Barca Academy

[calscot 0]

While we might be a preferred club to go to, I can't see how we can be realistic first choice for any young lad that is not within reasonable distance of Murray Park - unless we buy his family a house and move them, although some mature boys over 16 will just need a room in a flat.

 

Even after that there are other off-putting factors like the chances of breaking into the first team. Taking away any reference to managers not playing youngsters, they still have a lot more pressure to show more ability to play for Rangers first team than for say Peterhead. They will usually be competing for places with experienced international players as well as some of the best youngsters in the country.

 

That's a couple of reasons why I can't see how we can expect to "discover" all the best young players in the country when the whole thing is based on a numbers game with genetic happenstance.

 

We should have the best coaching and facilities and the greatest choice but we are still partly at the hands of random luck. We should have more than our fair share of "good" youngsters but then they are required to be at a higher level which means many of them are not good enough. We can bring them through when we have them but it's never going to be a guarantee or a conveyor belt. Basing our whole team on them to me would be folly as we would be severely limiting our catchment area.

 

We'll be back as the premier club in Scotland and as such will be in a position to pick up the best young players from the whole of Scotland once it has been seen what their level is. If there are not enough of the required standard in Scotland then like anyone else we'll have to cast our nets further afield.

 

There is far less determinism in developing youths than to buying a player who has already proven himself - although we need to be careful we're getting the required standard and value for money when recruiting the latter.

 

We need a combination of where we get our players from rather than putting all our eggs in an inconsistent basket.

[der Berliner 3,240]

Just wrote a lengthy reply to elfido ... only to see it vanish into oblivion when Gersnet decided to have a temporary downtime. Thus shorter ...

 

elfido

der berliner

I agree we are in the 3rd divison and don't have a great record on youth development, so we should just accept that and give up ? We could certainly do it a lot cheaper then, the current full time coaches and scouts at youth level are costing around 400k a year, a lot of money for a third division club.

 

Nothing of that sort did I say. The youth setup in Barca and at Ajax sure took a decade or so to be running on a profit, with the human resources in both countries (or in Barca's case far more than just Spain) outdistance anything Scotland has to offer. So while we can look at their set up, you have to accept that it needs time and the human resources to get it running. While it should have been better in the past (and Barca and Ajax still splash cash at good players and sure do not make a star of each chap that runs through their system either), our current setup got restarted in June and will not yield stars on a monthly basis. That said, our squad is half-full of youngsters, not all of them there out of necessity.

As for the money spend ... what of it? Cynical me would ask: Should we loan MP to a SPL team because of our status? We are a Division 3 team only by name, not by standing. That name also prevents us from getting the most talented youngsters too, who, btw, may not want to come us for different reasons too - local-/team affinity, parents, background (far more important reasons to young people than grown-up men).

 

I for one still assume that people in our youth teams are amongst the best you can get in Scotland. Likewise I have my doubts about the opinion some wield on here about the quality of our coaches and their training methods. But this is all about opinion and at the end of the day, we will see which youngsters will make a mark in the first team this and next season.

[amms 0]

amms

 

With the exception of a couple every player you mention was recruited by the previous youth setup and before the "give me an athlete and I'll make him a player" ethos of the current regime.

 

That's interesting, thanks.