Thread: Premier League Youth Development

If I had been a youth player with some talent I would rather stay at one of the med-tier/lower team, then go to big club. At least you have the opportunity to play first team vs sitting on bench.

Not read the whole thread, so apologies if I repeat some things that have already been said.

I think this should be expanded to all of European and South American football. A lot of European teams from lesser leagues, i.e Holland, Portugal, etc, lose their home grown talent to big English/German/Spanish teams. However, they usually get a good few years out of them and then can sell them for a huge fee, which is used to improve facilities, get better players in, or in some cases to simply break even. Most South American players with reasonable talent stay in South America, most are happy to leave even to play in the likes of Belgium or Greece, but the respective South American teams still get a good few years out them and a nice pay-off. So it actually does make sense to develop a player, get good use of him, and then sell him off.

I also think that as Financial Fair Play develops, teams with stronger youth teams will have a higher chance of keeping their stars.

Also remember that there are some 'affiliations' between clubs. A very low division club can be sponsored by a bigger club. Also most deals include a 'solidarity' fee which means that Goetze's youth club would have seen a small kick-back off of the fee to Bayern Munich.

In the case of West Ham, they actually could have kept all of their stars back then but they were not run very well at the time.