Talent factory
Even though we are still three weeks before third-round day, you could call Thursday night’s result the FA Cup shock of the season so far – a classic case of the football hierarchy turned on its head by a lower-league club on a limited budget eliminating one of the modern giants of the game.
The FA Youth Cup tie between Plymouth Argyle and Manchester City at Home Park was won 6-5 on penalties by the boys from Devon against a team from one of the best-resourced academies in world football. City do not put a figure on their annual academy spending, when it comes to a budget that involves scouting players all over the world, coaching, private schooling and then contracts for their best young professionals, but a figure of £25million is not disputed.
To put that in perspective, the entire annual turnover for Plymouth, newly promoted to League One this season, is £6.2 million, and that has to pay for a senior squad and everything else that goes with being a football club as well as the academy. In their team on Thursday, City had the World Cupwinning captain of England Under-17, Joel Latibeaudiere, that England team’s goalkeeper Curtis Anderson, as well as Eric Garcia, the centre-back who was part of the Spain squad that lost the final and the most recent La Masia protege to depart Barcelona.
City have reached the past three FA Youth Cup finals, losing each to Chelsea, but this time they were stopped in the third round by a club who draw all their players from across the South-West and have only eight full-time staff for their entire academy. When we spoke on Friday, Argyle’s academy director Kevin Hodges was fielding congratulatory calls from all over, but also trying to organise a wider staff of part-timers and interns to cover every one of the club’s junior teams.
An Argyle legend himself, with more appearances than any other in the club’s history, Hodges was first scouted by Bournemouth in his Dorset village, and it would be fair to say that Devon has not been a production line of great footballers either. There was the great pre-war Arsenal goalscorer Cliff Bastin and then Trevor Francis and Marc Edworthy, and more recently George Friend, Dan Gosling and Ethan Ampadu. While Argyle have always tried to produce home-grown players, they naturally struggle against clubs with larger population catchments.
Yet what makes Argyle Under-18s’ achievements all the more remarkable is that, as well as having a relative low-density population catchment area, the club, along with rivals Exeter City and Torquay United, face external competition on their own South-West patch. Chelsea have a development centre in Ashburton, on the southern side of Dartmoor, from where they recruit local boys. Southampton have a centre in north Devon and Arsenal are said to be active in the area, too.
One of Hodges’s own development centres simply got a better offer. “They had been working with us for 20 years, but Southampton put coaching staff in and things like that. We weren’t able to compete with that and they took over one of our centres. It’s competition, but it is healthy competition.”
Under the Elite Player Performance Plan there is an acceptance that players will be lost, and Southampton have taken two of Argyle’s best youth prospects – Jack Stephens and Sam Gallagher
– in recent years. Liverpool paid £150,000 in May 2011 for Argyle’s then 15-year-old central defender Lloyd Jones, although six years on he is yet to make his debut for the club. Plymouth have made some money selling home-grown players who have reached the first team, but they know that any real teenage talent will be hard to keep.
They are rated as a category-three academy, two levels beneath City and, as a consequence, there is no under-23 team at the club to act as a pathway into the first team. “It is galling to lose players, but at the same time I am a great believer in seeing players achieve the highest level they can at the biggest club,” Hodges said.
The victory over City shows small clubs can compete in development football, with a hard-working group of coaches and support staff calling on all their local contacts to build a side capable of being competitive. Hodges’s designated academy sports scientist is still part–time while he finishes his university degree, and there is a similar arrangement with the video analysis technician. Of course, development football is chiefly about how many boys get through to play first-team football, and it is there that Plymouth can offer something bigger rival clubs can not. Hodges is justifiably proud of the fact that 18-year-old Michael Cooper, his goalkeeper on Thursday night, has already made his first-team debut, as has striker Alex Fletcher, also 18, who also scored two for the first team in their Checkatrade Trophy draw with Chelsea in August this year. There will be opportunities for these teenagers to play for the first team that their City counterparts may not be so sure of.
At Argyle, they scout all the way down to Cornwall and one thing the
Is there a player currently more irreplaceable to his team – and central to their fortunes – than the remarkable Wilfried Zaha? Since he came back from injury in October, into a Crystal Palace team that had lost seven league games without scoring a goal (the first of which he had played in) Zaha’s influence has been huge. Palace have picked up 17 points from 11 games and Zaha has scored four crucial goals along the way including another in the win over Leicester City.
He will be a natural target in the boys have to get used to is a lot of travelling, Hodges says, which is “part and parcel of being successful” as they play competitive games against professional club academies farther west.
“We have come up against some of the finest young players in England and beaten an academy that is one of the best in the world,” Hodges says. “It is good for the EFL, it is good for category-three academies, and it is good for football.” summer for any leading club looking to pick up Premier League-ready talent and at 25, with that move to Manchester United behind him, there seems little doubt he would be ready. But what does Zaha want? It feels inevitable that he will want Champions League football at some point, but being older and wiser and a better player than when he went to United, this time he knows what can go wrong. Given the affection he is held in at Selhurst Park, might he stay for another year?