Recruitment & Development: Swansea & the Premier Elite Performance Plan

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By way of contrast to the piece posted on Brentford....

Again from today's Guardian

 

The Premier League Elite Player Performance Plan - ‘not perfect but lessons are being learned’

 

EPPP was introduced five years ago and while it has been criticised for creating a feeding frenzy for the elite at the expense of those less able to keep up, Swansea are among the clubs who have embraced it

 

Nick Ames

@NickAmes82

Wednesday 5 April 2017 14.00 BST Last modified on Wednesday 5 April 2017 14.10 BST

 

It does not take a huge stretch for longer-serving members of the Swansea City staff to remember a time when, with local training facilities at a premium, the club’s youth team had to make do elsewhere. A section of the beach, a short walk from the old Vetch Field ground and just beyond the city’s prison, would be used when a more orthodox surface was unavailable and at certain times of day a reconnaissance mission would be in order to check the tides.

 

Those days will not return and, sitting inside Swansea’s gleaming new Fairwood training ground – a few miles up the road from a dedicated £8.5m Academy facility at Landore – it is hard to believe they ever existed. The club’s structure can reasonably be held up as an exemplar of what the Premier League was targeting when, in 2012, it set up the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). Swansea started in Category Three of the scheme; this is their first season in Category One and it felt a long way from the sands of Swansea Bay when, last month, their Under-23 team contested a Premier League International Cup semi-final against Porto at the Liberty Stadium.

 

A tour of the divisions would bring a kaleidoscope of opinions about EPPP. It was brought in to raise standards of youth development and smooth the pathway for homegrown players to compete at the highest level; a number of clubs outside the Premier League have felt alienated, with Brentford among those to opt out due to the financial and operational challenges involved, and the most negative readings would suggest it has created a feeding frenzy for the elite at the expense of those less able to keep up.

 

Ged Roddy, the Premier League’s director of football development, is used to such theories but believes the progress at Swansea is evidence that EPPP is having the right effect on clubs that commit appropriately.

 

The difficulty has been, as the first-team has moved up the league, to keep the academy standard aligned

 

“We wanted to try to create a ladder that would allow a club to move up if it prioritised,” he says. “Swansea decided this was a priority for their club and you can see the fruits of their labour. If this is symptomatic of the last five years’ work, then we are in a totally different place from where we started. But if you go to Derby or Brighton, you’ll see two clubs that haven’t been in the Premier League and been able to plug into its riches but have still created incredible infrastructures and developed Category One academies. I don’t think this level is unavailable but I do think it’s a stretch and it has to be. We’re talking about an elite environment and it’s not something everyone will be able to do.”

 

For Swansea, whose development has been “like Saturn Five” in trajectory according to Roddy, there have been compromises – in particular when staffing an Under-23 squad that were runaway champions of this season’s Premier League Two Division Two. While the club’s players in younger age groups are almost entirely locally born some investment was made to make the older side – for which the age threshold was raised nationally from Under-21 this season – competitive.

 

“The difficulty has been, as the first team has moved up the league, to keep the academy standard aligned,” the Swansea chairman, Huw Jenkins, says. “It’s one of the big challenges and I don’t think we have found the exact formula yet. When we reached the Premier League we realised our academy had been recruiting on technical ability and losing sight of the physique and athleticism needed for the top flight. We selected certain players so that we could bring the standard up more quickly but it was done with an aim to gradually upgrade the homegrown talent below that.”

 

In Swansea’s case results such as a 6-0 FA Youth Cup defeat at Chelsea two years ago highlighted the need to bolster the Academy group from the top and allow the younger players to develop without being forced through too early. To an extent the club’s new structure had outstripped its on-pitch resources. Oliver McBurnie, a Scottish centre-forward signed from Bradford, was among those to arrive and the 20-year-old forward has made four Premier League appearances from the bench this season, also scoring seven goals for the Under-23s in the Checkatrade Trophy. He is a talent and the task now is to ensure that clubs can achieve this kind of end product by bringing players all the way through.

 

“What we’ve seen here from our side is an unbelievable commitment to trying to solve this issue of blending between development and full-time squads, whereby you bring players in and purchase them but also develop a sustainable model that nurtures your own,” Roddy says.

The “blending” quandary is certainly one that exists across the board and a look across a number of Under-23 squads, particularly those of Champions League clubs, still suggests many are not sufficiently content with the quality or quantity of those coming through their own set-ups not to ship in young recruits from elsewhere. This season the Premier League brought in the Under-23 bracket – raised from Under-21 – in an attempt to extend the development time of players who might, at 19 or 20 and with little first-team experience behind them, quickly fall through the cracks.

 

The theory is laudable; whether in practice it encourages clubs to be more patient remains to be seen. One of the accompanying benefits – to Category One clubs, anyway – is the chance to face lower-division sides in the Checkatrade Trophy and Swansea say their own run to the quarter-finals (they were the only Under-23 side to progress that far) led to far greater interest in loan moves for their players than normal.

 

Jenkins is adamant that Wales will be the focus for Swansea’s future academy recruitment. Other clubs have not been as restrained and the capacity EPPP gives Category One clubs to sign players aged under 18 from outside the previous “90 minute” catchment area has, Roddy admits, been a double-edged sword.

 

“Category One status can trip some clubs up because suddenly it’s like kids in a candy shop: ‘I’ll have one of them and one of them,’” he says. “The most productive clubs tend to use their environment more and recruit principally from around their locality, maybe integrating one or two others after that. There’s a lot to be said for putting some restrictions on yourself, even if you’re not required to by the rules and regulations.”

 

The obvious thought is that perhaps the rules and regulations could be tweaked after half a decade of mixed results. Roddy says there will “always be unintended consequences of things you put in place” and suggests a step towards avoiding misuse of the system will be to ensure that “we’ve got people who really understand how you develop players effectively”.

 

That is one reason why coach education is foremost among the Premier League’s priorities and it is enlightening to hear Jenkins explain that he “couldn’t understand why the same attention on players’ development year on year wasn’t placed on coaching”. Swansea sought to correct that; academy staff turnover has been significant but Cameron Toshack and Gary Richards, who coach the Under-23s, have been brought through to provide a mixture of local expertise and technical acumen.

 

The Premier League’s youth coach education programme, the Elite Coach Apprenticeship Scheme (Ecas), is one of the more obvious successes associated with EPPP and Toshack, who has completed the two-year course, speaks vividly of the kind of environment into which cohorts are pitched. A survival course with former SAS soldiers in the Brecon Beacons – “we were under significant pressure and they kept us up for 36 hours but football coaches are pretty competitive so the feedback was good” – was followed by exercises in voice projection at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.

 

“Tore André Flo was on my course,” Toshack remembers. “He’s a very reserved individual and didn’t enjoy getting up on the stage and having to shout from the rafters. We said ‘It’s fine, we’ll wait for you’ … ‘No, no, you guys go first and I’ll go after.’ It’s all about putting coaches out of their comfort zone and I think the suite of skills it gives you has helped Gary and me coach in a more effective way.”

 

It also helps that Paul Clement, the first-team manager, favours a hands-on connection with the Academy and during his early months at Swansea he has frequently attended Under-23 games. Jenkins admits that the club “may have lost focus in one or two areas in the last 18 months, probably due to the pressures of trying to stay in the Premier League”, but believes they “have got back a bit of our old feeling” since the appointment of the former Chelsea and Fulham academy coach in January. “The pathway is there,” Clement says. “There’s an opportunity for the players and I liaise closely with Cameron and Gary about their development. I take a keen interest in the youngsters and seeing them win the league in the style they have is a good sign.”

 

To Roddy the set-up Swansea have landed on sets a tone for a system that still needs plenty of work. “It feels easy here because they’re naturally interested in it and Huw is immersed, always around the training ground,” he says. “There’s a can-do approach where the noises are backed up by action. That’s not the case at every club. I think the first five years of EPPP have brought a lot of good things but we’ve still got a huge amount of work to do to reach the next level. It’s not perfect and we didn’t get everything right but the lessons are being learned.”

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/apr/05/premier-league-elite-player-performance-plan

Edited April 5, 2017 by Uilleam