The faith in youth pays off for Spurs
AFEW weeks ago some of Tottenham’s academy staff sat down for a coffee and started to put valuations on the players who have graduated into Mauricio Pochettino’s first team squad.
It was back-of-a-fag-packet stuff, but £40million-plus for Harry Kane, £10m for Ryan Mason, £6m for Andros Townsend, £3m for Alex Pritchard, £2m for Tom Carroll and, say, £1m each for Harry Winks and Josh Onomah are not unreasonable figures.
If they stretch the boundaries for what constitutes an academy graduate to include players picked for the under-21 development squad, then they were suddenly talking about more than £100m of talent.
Danny Rose (£15m), Kyle Walker (£ 12m) and Nabil Bentaleb (£10m), who were sent to Tottenham’s finishing school before playing in the first team, can all be squeezed into that category.
It is paying off for Pochettino (right), but the idea that the club’s highlyregarded academy has been an overnight success would do a complete disservice to the men behind it. Under the guidance of John McDermott, the club’s academy has been 10 years in the making. It is proof that, with patience and the altruistic approach adopted by Tottenham’s academy staff, the academy system really can work in English football.
Tottenham are a beacon of hope. At a time when the elite clubs in English football are trying to work out how to bridge the gap between the under-21 development squad and the first team, Spurs have shown that it can be done.
Their project began in 2005 when McDermott, working with a modest budget of around £900,000 a year, recruited Chris Ramsey, Richard Allen, Perry Suckling and Alex Inglethorpe.
McDermott was fully committed, like at most Premier League clubs, to the education and technical improvement of the players who were being developed at the junior level of the game. He demanded mastery of the ball in every training session at every level, and he also wanted his players to adapt to different positions on the pitch. Off it, one of his biggest problems was having Arsenal on the doorstep because at the time, one year after the ‘Invincibles’ had gone a season unbeaten in the Premier League, every kid in the world wanted to be schooled by Arsene Wenger. Even if a player failed to make the first team grade under Wenger, the club remained a passport to a career in the professional game.
The battle behind the scenes in north London has not been easy, but Tottenham can look back on the past few years at academy level and regard it as something of a success story.
Their layered integration, dripfeeding players into the first team squad each year, has provided Pochettino with a steady stream of potential from the academy.
Kane was marked out early on in his career, brought into the Spurs system when Ramsey, recently sacked by QPR, signed the forward at the age of nine.
He was among a group of players at various levels of the club who showed no fear as kids. His reaction to his miscued effort in the 4-1 victory over West Ham on November 22, when he was clean through, took academy staff back to his younger days.
The Spurs striker did not let it affect him, regaining his composure and waiting for another chance, which arrived in the 50th minute. He converted it to put his team 3-0 ahead.
These qualities have been ingrained into the academy over time, giving players room to breathe in the youth system and encouraging them to express their personality on the pitch.
The financial squeeze on the club, particularly after they blew the Gareth Bale money on some highprofile signings, has also given the academy an added incentive to bring young players through.
For all the success on the field, Tottenham’s academy is the biggest winner.