There was a report last week suggesting Huddersfield Town are considering closing their academy.
The club neither confirmed nor denied it but why wouldn’t they shut down the youth set-up?
It’s a hell of a lot easier to let Chelsea and the like produce your players.
Rent one of their surplus kids rather than have the expense and hassle of trying to rear your own.
Anyway, if you are a precocious footballing child in the Huddersfield area, chances are Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, or even Chelsea, will quickly be along to have a ‘chat’ with your parents.
No inducements, of course. That would be wrong, completely. Just the lure of the name, the facilities, the high-quality coaching.
When Liverpool were busted for tapping up a 12-year-old Stoke City player with a series of inducements, including paying for the faulty exhaust on his dad’s car to be fixed, that must have been a one-off, surely?
At least, it must have been until Manchester City were also done for tapping up an 11-year-old from Everton and a 15-year-old from Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Both Liverpool and City were given two-year academy transfer bans, the second year suspended for three years.
They will be back in action next Spring, competing with the other big clubs to poach the most promising talent from up and down the country.
It is expensive to run an academy and Huddersfield Town have produced just one player for David Wagner’s current squad and Philip Billing was signed as a 16-year-old from Esjberg in Denmark in 2013.
In terms of paying its way, the Huddersfield academy has brought in little more than £2million over the last five years in player sales, Jack Hunt’s transfer to Crystal Palace in 2013 being responsible for most of that.
Is Huddersfield’s academy financially viable? It is extremely unlikely.
More viable is loaning players from lavishly-funded academies. Chelsea’s Kasey Palmer is in his second season on loan at Huddersfield. Chelsea took Palmer when he was 16 from Charlton Athletic, where he had been since the age of eight.
That’s two academies shafted in different ways.
Something is rotten with this system, especially if it causes a club such as Huddersfield to even consider the notion of closing its academy.
Owned by local businessman Dean Hoyle, no Premier League club has more of a local feel than Huddersfield.
A professional football club’s junior teams should be part of a community’s fabric.
What a crying shame it would be if clubs followed Brentford’s model and scrapped development and only recruited over-17s.
While they appear to be offering no official guarantees, the feeling is that Huddersfield will not go down this path but they are not obliged by the Premier League to have an academy.
They would not get a UEFA licence if they had no development system but not being eligible for the Champions and Europa League is probably not one of their great concerns.
You would have thought there is enough money flooding into every Premier League club for them to be able to take a hit on the academy costs but why should they?
Big clubs such as Chelsea, City, Liverpool etc are stockpiling talent which can be distributed or dumped at a later date.
For the smaller operation to produce their own gets tougher and tougher.
There are plenty still trying … let’s hope none of them, including grand old Huddersfield Town, never give up.