A little bit of a debate for you to take with you into the weekend.
I must credit @alexquantock for giving me the jumping-off point for this article. During the international week, there’s not a lot of on the pitch action to talk about, so I’m always looking for ideas and this was a fascinating one when I first saw it.
In a tweet congratulating Gary Brazil for his time as Forest’s academy manager he said:
“Since he joined Forest, we’ve made around £42 million in transfer fees from academy products, and currently have a further 5 home-grown players in and around the squad.”
So I find myself asking, just what is the purpose of an academy? Is it to generate funds for the club, or is it to generate players for them?
We’ve seen two of the academy graduates leave this summer in the form of Ben Osborn and Arvin Appiah, but at the same time, one graduate Brennan Johnson has seen a couple of minutes with the first team. Is he someone that will stick around for a while and be part of the fabric at the City Ground? Or will he follow in the footsteps of Osborn and Appiah in a few years’ time and end up being
I personally think that it’s a combination of the two. If you get that one star player come through every now and again that can earn a big fee, then that can essentially run the academy for another couple of years where you can get a few more players who are effective, but not quite world-beaters that make their way into the team.
Whilst it’s great for us to sing ‘one of our own’ at someone, and seeing someone come through that you didn’t have to spend a great deal of money on, would you be willing to trade that in for success on the pitch straight away? Say the money raised from selling Arvin Appiah is used in January to fund a move that proved to be the key to Forest getting promoted. Would that be worth it to you?
Would you rather see more players from the academy make their way into the first team? Or do you think selling them young and using the money to buy more experienced that can help the team right now is the better way to go?
