Cibaman wrote:
The entire strategy behind City's academy has had to change in the last 2 years. Before the takeover the emphasis was on producing a conveyor belt of players. Some, such as Richards, SWP, Ireland & Johnson, were more than good enough for City's first team at that time. A larger number weren't but moved on to other clubs, mainly in the championship, for fees of £250-500k or so enabling the academy to fund itself and keep on churning out players. That approach met City's needs prior to the takeover.
Now the emphasis is changing to quality rather than quantity but that change in approach will obviously take time to have a noticeable effect.
Fair points.
The club are investing more in youth – the amount we are spending each season is obviously not sustainable. The club have apparently looked at Barcelona’s model of youth development, and are looking at replicating that. I guess that will take several years to pull off. This will involve bringing in youth footballers from all over the world. That’s reflected in our current youth team squad – even though we had more players in the England U18 (or was it u17) squad than any other club in the PL. I think last year we had four international captains in our u18 squad.
One of the major changes the club had to make in order to improve the recruitment of players (including youth) was to improve the scouting network. I think I read somewhere that United and two or three other clubs in the PL had as many as four times more worldwide scouts than we did. If memory serves, Blackburn had more scouts than City. We now have more scouts and the scouting network said to be far better organised.
On a separate point, you made a good post on Bluemoon in the last day or so re Mancini. I thought you were spot on.
