Top clubs should do more to boost game
AS I look at the roster of players now playing in the Championship, I can build a healthy list of players that I worked with and helped in some way or other to develop in Leagues One and Two.
At the top end of the table are lads like Conor Washington and Paul Coutts of Sheffield United, Bailey Wright at Bristol City, and Declan Rudd, Ben Davies and Paul Huntington at Preston.
Elsewhere, Jon Taylor is at Rotherham, Luke Freeman is at QPR, Joe Garner is at Wigan, Erhun Oztumer and Ben Alnwick are at Bolton and Steve Morison is at Millwall.
There are many more. I am just one manager.
My point in highlighting this is to give evidence that League One and League Two clubs are breeding grounds for clubs higher up the ladder. Our lower league clubs play a strong role in the development of talent for the higher echelons of the game.
Inequality
As the Academy structure rightly continues to receive substantial investment at the top level from Premier League television deals, so lower level Football League clubs will be used increasingly to provide first team opportunities.
But therein lies a huge inequality and, therefore, opportunity which really does need addressing.
Despite the substantial money made available to the Premier League, clubs lower down the food chain are still starved of vital funds and, therefore, facilities. So much so that many lower League training facilities are not even a pale shadow of those available to eight-year-olds in Premier League Academies.
There are consequences to this problem. If we are serious about evolving our game, we simply cannot afford to feed our best young talent into inadequate training grounds for 6/12 month loans during vital stages of their evolution as players. They need parity so that their coaches can give them the very best ongoing work.
League One and Two clubs do their absolute best to create indoor, outdoor, gymnasium and match facilities which befit the privileged status of the game in our country. But they simply cannot establish and keep up without some help.
I often read about £300,000 per week contracts being awarded to Premier League stars. Well, imagine if the top clubs contributed just one half of one player’s annual wage to a fund each season which was evenly divided between the 48 bottom tier clubs.
That would create £3.25m per annum per club for the bottom tier clubs to improve facilities. Halve the contribution to just one quarter of one player’s wages and the bottom 48 clubs would still receive £1.625m pa. The resulting facilities would significantly enhance the involvement of communities in their clubs and the quality of player development would be exponentially enhanced. Players who have earned their spurs at bigger clubs to become lower league professionals would no longer be left wondering what they have done to deserve a training mud patch which makes relevant technical improvement a near impossibility. Young Premier League players would no longer go on loan and be left driving to a local park or stuck in a poorly equipped gym in bad weather. I have seen it all happen.
This is not the voice of a man with a personal agenda. Nor the voice of a man renowned for pampering players. I believe in working players hard and smart in pursuit of a better version of themselves.
Honest
It is the honest view of a man with over 900 games in a dugout throughout the country from Stevenage to Preston and from Newport to Peterborough. I want professional managers and coaches to be given a proper chance to have the maximum impact on a player.
There will be many more Jamie Vardy stories if the top of the game shows a little more consideration for clubs throughout the levels. The family of football needs to show a little more sharing and caring. The onus shouldn’t just be on the owners of lower league clubs to fuel success both on and off the pitch. It is enough of a burden for those people to create winning squads on the pitch. They need help. Clubs need help.
I can talk from personal experience and say that ‘it cannot be right’; it cannot be right that I have had no other choice than to take a group of professional Football League players into a small hired fitness studio on days before a fixture, because of snow, to play an improvised game of ‘crab football’ whilst on the same day my young son prepares fully and properly to play a weekend Academy friendly by training on a fully equipped indoor 4G pitch in a Premier League Academy. Can it?
It can’t be right that his progress, on loan five years later, could be to swap good technical development coaching to be playing crab football. Can it? I am not alone in my experiences. Trust me.
A little trim at the top will make a world of difference to the big picture of our national football infrastructure.