On Wednesday night Liverpool’s academy were handed a 5-1 hiding by Sporting Lisbon in the NextGen Series – a competition derived to ‘step into the future of football.’
The result was largely immaterial given the Reds had already qualified from their Champions League-esque group, but with two wins, three defeats and a draw, their step into the future has featured a couple of trips, slips and falls.
According to its own website, NexGen ‘heralds a thrilling new era in competitive football, featuring the next generation of world-class players who have been trained and nurtured by some of the greatest clubs in Europe’ but similarly to the continents elite competition, it also highlights an alarming disparity in resource.
The Sporting academy which topped Liverpool’s group winning five of their six ties is almost entirely compromised of Portuguese components throughout its playing and staff ranks whereas Liverpool’s equivalent has been the source of huge investment and recruitment from all over the world.
The Reds state of the art academy in Kirkby was opened in 1998 and was envisaged as a step up from the previous set-up which provided the Anfield club with a regularly rich production line of talent which still includes Kop legends Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher.
Their three tiers of academy players currently consists of almost 40 players from 15 different nationalities with feeder clubs in Ireland, the United States, Hungary, Belgium and Indonesia. But despite being able to lure players and coaches from all corners of the globe, just how well are Liverpool nurturing the resource?
When he became Liverpool boss in 2004, Rafa Benitez recognised the facilities at his disposal and set about trying to access the academy as a conduit to the first team, with Liverpool procuring and developing young players to integrate into their side to combat ever increasing transfer fees. Liverpool were far from the only club to latch on to the concept and similarly almost every club across the Premier League has attempted to do likewise with fluctuating degrees of success.
Benitez’s Spanish armada was not consigned to signing Xabi Alonso, Fernando Torres and Antonio Nunez. The former Valencia boss convinced Barcelona youth coaches Pep Segura and Rodolfo Burrell to come to Merseyside to oversee the scouse version of Barca’s fabled la Masia stables.
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The initial response was good with Liverpool winning the FA Youth Cup in 2006 and 2007 but graduates from the academy were fleeting and the reserves became bottlenecked with players who either weren’t eventually good enough or who weren’t allowed to prove themselves for the seniors.
Benitez famously signed close to 80 players during his six seasons at Anfield with the vast majority of those designed to be the next generation. Quite what happened since has followed a familiar theme, with names like Barragan, Roque, Paletta, Duran, Nemeth and Ayala amongst many others briefly appearing before swiftly disappearing. In total, Benitez brought in 40 players under the aged of 20 with only Daniel Pacheco (on loan at Rayo Vallecano), Peter Gulacsi (on loan at Hull) and David Amoo (on loan to Bury) still at the club.
The case of Pacheco typifies the sort of scepticism which is not only contradicting Liverpool’s faith in youth, but that too of many Premier League clubs with similar infrastructure. Pacheco was signed from Barcelona as a 16-year-old in 2007 and subsequently went through the well-trodden steps across the clubs youth and reserve teams. Pacheco fleetingly popped up in the seniors largely as a substitute during the 2009/10 season yet starred for Spain at the Under-19 European Championships in the summer of 2010 when the forward was top-scorer as his team reached the final.
That should have been the springboard for a prolonged promotion yet Pacheco was granted the indignity of making up the stiffs in the Europa League and League Cup before being farmed out on loan. Intriguingly, Spain were beaten by France in the final of the Under-19 tournament with Chelsea’s Gael Kakuta being named Player of the Tournament only to find similar isolation from his club despite almost incurring them an international transfer ban for trying to sign him in the first place.
So, given the low ratio of players that do successfully command a place in first-team squads, do these academies represent good value, and what can be done to increase the amount of talented players who so often fail to make the grade?
Many concepts have been put forward including the creation of an elite academy league to increase the competitiveness of academy games. Feeder teams are another impractical solution and in theory young players would gain nothing more or less than the loan spells they are regularly sent on anyway. Youth quotas have been implemented of sorts with their effects again questionable so whichever way you look at it, surely these suggestions are taking the emphasis away from the infrastructure clubs have so heavily invested in?
After scouting and signing the best players and staff from around the world, training them in facilities that few clubs can match and providing players with the sort of football education that should provide a seamless path to future progression, still there is a dearth of players seemingly capable of making the step up?
The key word in that last statement was ‘seemingly’ as time and again players have to go elsewhere to prove their worth, often in less expectant surrounding where they are given the time and encouragement to prosper. If that is the case, the real answer is that clubs should show more faith in their youngsters, and allow them to integrate themselves into the fold. However, given the necessity for instant success biding time is often simply not tolerable and as such, makes the money thrown at academies appear obligingly mis-spent.
Follow John Baines on twitter @bainesyDiego10
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