Olise

[Hound]

Oh and personally I’m all for using the academy as much as possible. I’d take 3-4 years in div1 if it meant seeing home grown come through. I’d much rather see it

Give me a team with Ehib, Azeez, Craig, Scott, Camara, CBC, Clarke(s), Abrefa supplemented with a couple of experienced players next year and I genuinely don’t care what div we are in

(I fear however this isn’t a given and well buy some old duffers in an attempt to boot our way out of div1)

I have seen enough of Scott to know he`s not 1st team potential- however someone you haven`t mentioned Matty Carson definitely is.

Fair enough. Yes Carson been getting some good reviews

[Greatwesternline]

Some interesting discussion.

I do think the Reading Academy churns out players just a bit below the level Reading have been aspiring too, or they've churned out some players that other clubs thought were better than they were.

Tshibola Richards Hector might have actually been very good Reading level players, but other clubs wanted them way too much.

Players who played long careers at Reading for the academy are basically HRK and Alex Pearce, and possibly Karacan.

Everyone else wasnt good enough or was too good. The players who are too good help because the next best thing will look at them and think the Reading academy did that for them. But if you only get 1 season out of a player before being sold you do wonder is it worth it. The answer is still yes financially, a £5m players must pay the wages of the academy staff and facilities for a number of years.

But emotionally seeing Gylfi go after 1 season, Richards after 1 good season, Olise the same, it is frustrating.

When exciting players come out of the academy their attacking talents if young mean they will leave Reading very quickly. HRK only hung around as long as he did because we were in the PL when he emerged and we looked like being a yo-yo team for a while.

I think the best our academy can hope for in contribution to playing minutes on the pitch, and reducing the reliance on transfer fees and sigining on fees, is defensive players, which attract less speculative interest, and to an extent can be accommodated more easily into a side as defensive organisation is slightly easier to step up into than being a creative outlet which requires a certain amount of talent over and above.

My favourite mix of Reading is still when we are signing failed youth prospects from PL teams (John Swift) combined with picking up players succeeding in lower leagues (Alfie) (one of the reasons i was so dissapointed that McNulty didnt work out, it was a proper reading signing....combined with a few academy players in useful positions.

[Elm Park Kid]

The current system is specifically designed to allow PL clubs to pick up academy talent for as little as possible. It's what the EFL had to give up in the return for the 'solidarity' payments.

However, you just have to acknowledge the 'realpolitiks' of a situation where a PL clubs can easily offer these players wages 10-20 times more without thinking about it. I mean - imagine that you were running a company where you're training apprentices on £8 an hour - and there's some company across the road that is happy to offer anyone that performs well £100 an hour. There simply isn't any strategy you can implement - regardless of contracts or bonuses or anything like that - that will keep your good employees.

[Jackson Corner]

Very nice piece Clyde thank you for that. If you go the club site it lists the 75 players who have come from the academy. Let me give you a typical example. When Pardew was manager early 2000’s we had an end of season game at Watford which I went to. We were 3-0 up with 10 minutes to go and Pardew bought on a player called Peter Castle who at the time was the youngest ever player to play for us. Those were his only 10 minutes of professional football. He left the club and has never been heard of since. And his name is on the academy honours board as you go through the main entrance. Is that really something to get excited about? And when you look there are loads more like it.
Compared to Southampton’s academy they produce world class players Bale, Walcott, Shaw,Shearer, Ward Prowse, Wayne Bridge.Oxlade Chamberlain. All which get sold on for millions. Only Gylfie and Olise after 23 years have been successful in the Premiership.

[PATRIQT]

Just to put in perspective how rubbish our academy is. Apparently 75 players from the academy have played in the first team. How many have been any good? Brentford don’t have an academy. A small example of players sold. Hogan £11.5 million Maupey £20 million Watkins £ 33 million. Toney probably £50-60 million, in today’s market. Not to mention several other defenders and midfielders. The academy is not working 20 years with a couple of exceptions who have all gone on to better things with other clubs.

Have to agree with that. We'd be better off with a better scouting network again and forget about the £2-3m annual cost to run a Cat 1 academy. If we do oue duediligence, we could be poaching up and coming youngsters from L1 and L2, even the odd Premier League kid who realised he wont get a look in where he is.

[SCIAG]

Players who played long careers at Reading for the academy are basically HRK and Alex Pearce, and possibly Karacan.

Karacan was a much better player for us than HRK. First choice in a team that got to the playoff final and one that won the league. HRK was never actually first choice- spent his whole Reading career waiting for Jobi or Jimmy or McCleary to get injured.

You’re missing a few in any case. If you don’t count Long (the club does) then there’s still Church, Obita, Rinomhota, Richards, Holmes, and McIntyre all making 100+ appearances and Kelly and Hector making 90+. Could argue Church was only kept around because we couldn’t afford an upgrade, but all the same.

I think the best our academy can hope for in contribution to playing minutes on the pitch, and reducing the reliance on transfer fees and sigining on fees, is defensive players, which attract less speculative interest, and to an extent can be accommodated more easily into a side as defensive organisation is slightly easier to step up into than being a creative outlet which requires a certain amount of talent over and above.

I see where you’re coming from. The advantage attacking players have is that they are more likely to come on as substitutes and work their way in that way, whereas defenders have to wait longer for their opportunities. But we do seem to produce more defenders than attackers. Last Championship level striker we produced was probably Simon Cox, though Danny Loader could still come good.

[SCIAG]

Just to put in perspective how rubbish our academy is. Apparently 75 players from the academy have played in the first team. How many have been any good? Brentford don’t have an academy. A small example of players sold. Hogan £11.5 million Maupey £20 million Watkins £ 33 million. Toney probably £50-60 million, in today’s market. Not to mention several other defenders and midfielders. The academy is not working 20 years with a couple of exceptions who have all gone on to better things with other clubs.

Have to agree with that. We'd be better off with a better scouting network again and forget about the £2-3m annual cost to run a Cat 1 academy. If we do oue duediligence, we could be poaching up and coming youngsters from L1 and L2, even the odd Premier League kid who realised he wont get a look in where he is.

There is no reason why we cannot do both. The Dais are not short of money and academy costs do not count towards P&S.

If we scrapped the academy then we wouldn’t magically get better at scouting. There is no connection.

[SCIAG]

Very nice piece Clyde thank you for that. If you go the club site it lists the 75 players who have come from the academy. Let me give you a typical example. When Pardew was manager early 2000’s we had an end of season game at Watford which I went to. We were 3-0 up with 10 minutes to go and Pardew bought on a player called Peter Castle who at the time was the youngest ever player to play for us. Those were his only 10 minutes of professional football. He left the club and has never been heard of since. And his name is on the academy honours board as you go through the main entrance. Is that really something to get excited about? And when you look there are loads more like it.
Compared to Southampton’s academy they produce world class players Bale, Walcott, Shaw,Shearer, Ward Prowse, Wayne Bridge.Oxlade Chamberlain. All which get sold on for millions. Only Gylfie and Olise after 23 years have been successful in the Premiership.

Shearer came through in the 1980s! If you include him then you should be including Neil Webb!

Southampton were in the top flight between 1967 and 2005. Reading were in the third tier for most of that time. It should not be surprising that they produced more top-tier players than we did in that time.

If you look at the players they’ve brought through since Walcott and Bale, they have Lallana, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Shaw, Chambers, Stephens, and Ward-Prowse. In the same time, as well as Olise and Gylfi we’ve sold Hector to Chelsea, Richards went to Bayern Munich, McCarthy has spent his career playing in the Premier League, and Osei-Tutu and Bynoe-Gittens are playing in the Bundesliga. So we’re keeping pace with a club who have a longer tradition of youth development and are playing in the top flight.

I think there are lots of legitimate criticisms of our academy but “we haven’t produced Alan Shearer” is not really one of them. We’re not trying to be La Masia.

[Greatwesternline]

You’re missing a few in any case. If you don’t count Long (the club does) then there’s still Church, Obita, Rinomhota, Richards, Holmes, and McIntyre all making 100+ appearances and Kelly and Hector making 90+. Could argue Church was only kept around because we couldn’t afford an upgrade, but all the same.
.

Good point re Rino and Obita.

I just dont think Richards was around that long but i appreciate more than 100 appearances is a lot. I sort of class being here a while as a good solid 4 year stint in and around first team. I feel Holmes and McIntyre are only getting so many appearances because we are so bad at the moment, perhaps this is unfair on them. I always felt Karacan was the worst player in the promotion side, and was only in there because he was an academy product and worked hard. Pearce however was one of our best defenders at times in those years. Rino was a solid but unspectacular holding midfielder again like Jem.

There is a question in here, do players from the academy get given more starts and are tolerated for longer because they are academy players? Is the existence of Holmes and Mcintyre as academy players the reason why our defence is bad, and does their existence mean we don't go out and sign better players because we dont necessarily have to?

cheapo academy players are fine until they are lowering the overal quality of the team. I often felt if we didnt have Karacan we would have gone and signed a better holding midfielder to play alongside Leigherwood. Although Jay Tabb was a signing and was not better than Jem.

Simon Church definitely was not good enough for the club, and definitely got more playing time because he was an academy product.

[Snowflake Royal]

Very nice piece Clyde thank you for that. If you go the club site it lists the 75 players who have come from the academy. Let me give you a typical example. When Pardew was manager early 2000’s we had an end of season game at Watford which I went to. We were 3-0 up with 10 minutes to go and Pardew bought on a player called Peter Castle who at the time was the youngest ever player to play for us. Those were his only 10 minutes of professional football. He left the club and has never been heard of since. And his name is on the academy honours board as you go through the main entrance. Is that really something to get excited about? And when you look there are loads more like it.
Compared to Southampton’s academy they produce world class players Bale, Walcott, Shaw,Shearer, Ward Prowse, Wayne Bridge.Oxlade Chamberlain. All which get sold on for millions. Only Gylfie and Olise after 23 years have been successful in the Premiership.

No one is getting excited about Peter Castle.

[Snowflake Royal]

Olise alone pays for 3 to 4 years of the Academy just with his transfer fee. Then if you consider the value of his appearances vs signing someone (inevitably on higher wages) you're probably looking at another 2-3 years.

Basically, just in Olise, Richards, Obita, Rinomhota, Sigurdsson, Pearce, Karacan, Robson-Kanu, Holmes, McCarthy and McIntyre, the Academy has paid for 20 or 30 years worth of its cost.

[SCIAG]

You’re missing a few in any case. If you don’t count Long (the club does) then there’s still Church, Obita, Rinomhota, Richards, Holmes, and McIntyre all making 100+ appearances and Kelly and Hector making 90+. Could argue Church was only kept around because we couldn’t afford an upgrade, but all the same.
.

Good point re Rino and Obita.

I just dont think Richards was around that long but i appreciate more than 100 appearances is a lot. I sort of class being here a while as a good solid 4 year stint in and around first team. I feel Holmes and McIntyre are only getting so many appearances because we are so bad at the moment, perhaps this is unfair on them. I always felt Karacan was the worst player in the promotion side, and was only in there because he was an academy product and worked hard. Pearce however was one of our best defenders at times in those years. Rino was a solid but unspectacular holding midfielder again like Jem.

There is a question in here, do players from the academy get given more starts and are tolerated for longer because they are academy players? Is the existence of Holmes and Mcintyre as academy players the reason why our defence is bad, and does their existence mean we don't go out and sign better players because we dont necessarily have to?

cheapo academy players are fine until they are lowering the overal quality of the team. I often felt if we didnt have Karacan we would have gone and signed a better holding midfielder to play alongside Leigherwood. Although Jay Tabb was a signing and was not better than Jem.

Simon Church definitely was not good enough for the club, and definitely got more playing time because he was an academy product.

Woah, calling Jem Karacan worse than Shaun Cummings is fighting words!

Tabb and Mullins were both pretty highly regarded players who Karacan kept out of the side. At his best, sure he wasn’t the guy scoring the winning goal every week but there weren’t many better in the Championship. Our counter-attacking style wouldn’t have worked unless he was good at his job.

Since the academy actually started producing useable players, we’ve only really had four or five windows where we have been able to sign players. Under Madejski we had to sell to buy, we made a bunch of signings after getting promoted, we then had to sell to pay off Vibrac. A few years of splashing on Ilori, Aluko, Puscas and Joao. Since EFL have clamped down on us, we’ve still signed Lewis Gibson, Scott Dann, Terrell Thomas (!), Sam Hutchinson, Naby Sarr, and Amadou Mbengue, which suggests to me that we’re not just complacent about the centre backs we need - McIntyre and Holmes have earned their places by being better than the players we can recruit.

[Snowflake Royal]

You’re missing a few in any case. If you don’t count Long (the club does) then there’s still Church, Obita, Rinomhota, Richards, Holmes, and McIntyre all making 100+ appearances and Kelly and Hector making 90+. Could argue Church was only kept around because we couldn’t afford an upgrade, but all the same.
.

Good point re Rino and Obita.

I just dont think Richards was around that long but i appreciate more than 100 appearances is a lot. I sort of class being here a while as a good solid 4 year stint in and around first team. I feel Holmes and McIntyre are only getting so many appearances because we are so bad at the moment, perhaps this is unfair on them. I always felt Karacan was the worst player in the promotion side, and was only in there because he was an academy product and worked hard. Pearce however was one of our best defenders at times in those years. Rino was a solid but unspectacular holding midfielder again like Jem.

There is a question in here, do players from the academy get given more starts and are tolerated for longer because they are academy players? Is the existence of Holmes and Mcintyre as academy players the reason why our defence is bad, and does their existence mean we don't go out and sign better players because we dont necessarily have to?

cheapo academy players are fine until they are lowering the overal quality of the team. I often felt if we didnt have Karacan we would have gone and signed a better holding midfielder to play alongside Leigherwood. Although Jay Tabb was a signing and was not better than Jem.

Simon Church definitely was not good enough for the club, and definitely got more playing time because he was an academy product.

Richards got appearances across four seasons.
17/18 - 9(4)
18/19 - 8(2)
19/20 - 23(5)
20/21 - 38(3)

With 46 games a season, if you want players to be regulars to count you're looking at making something like 150+ appearances, a tiny pool of players, let alone Academy players.

McIntyre and Holmes have performed just as well as our signings, more so in many cases, like Sarr, Dann, Moore (more recently), Lewis Gibson, Matt Miazga v2, Tyler Blackett, Tiago Ilori.

Likewise, Rinomhota out performed or equaled the likes of Bacuna, Pele, Semedo, Loum, Meyler arguably matched Laurent.

So the Academy prospects who make good numbers of appearances are matching or out competing the sorts of signings we make in many cases.

Church got more playing time than he should at least partly because his record when playing with Sigurdsson was actually decent.

[Mid Sussex Royal]

The proof of the pudding is our academy is one of the most successful in England on the basis of a points system on games played in first teams, with Prem/Europe top tier scoring most points.

I think over the last 20 years only Crewe and maybe Norwich are ahead of us outside prem league and we are ahead of several of those sides

[YorkshireRoyal99]

Just to put in perspective how rubbish our academy is. Apparently 75 players from the academy have played in the first team. How many have been any good? Brentford don’t have an academy. A small example of players sold. Hogan £11.5 million Maupey £20 million Watkins £ 33 million. Toney probably £50-60 million, in today’s market. Not to mention several other defenders and midfielders. The academy is not working 20 years with a couple of exceptions who have all gone on to better things with other clubs.

Have to agree with that. We'd be better off with a better scouting network again and forget about the £2-3m annual cost to run a Cat 1 academy. If we do oue duediligence, we could be poaching up and coming youngsters from L1 and L2, even the odd Premier League kid who realised he wont get a look in where he is.

There is no reason why we cannot do both. The Dais are not short of money and academy costs do not count towards P&S.

If we scrapped the academy then we wouldn’t magically get better at scouting. There is no connection.

Not to mention you could probably put out a Championship squad now from players who have come through our academy that would be able to compete, at minimum. The academy has plenty of talent, some we've wasted, some moved down and moved on to better things and some impressed whilst they were with us. We've got plenty of talent in the academy now as well, providing we manage them correctly, no reason why they can't come into our side and be successful, especially as we consistently churn out Championship level quality.

Why bother wasting £2m on a player when we could bring through an academy prospect who we can then sell on for big money potentially. But yes, no reason as to why we can't bring through academy prospects and bring in players from the lower leagues or from PL clubs for smaller fees, ideally you'd want to do both anyway.

[SCIAG]

To be honest I’m pretty pessimistic about our current academy lot, I don’t think they’re progressing much and the talent level seems to be the lowest it has been for about 15 years. Lots of players with a good first touch and not much else.

[Snowflake Royal]

To be honest I’m pretty pessimistic about our current academy lot, I don’t think they’re progressing much and the talent level seems to be the lowest it has been for about 15 years. Lots of players with a good first touch and not much else.

That's a good first touch more than most of our signings tbf

[Lower West]

Compared to Southampton’s academy they produce world class players Walcott

Walcott chose Southampton. Born a Berkshire boy. Hampshire border is only a stones throw from Newbury from a scouting perspective.

[Lower West]

To be honest I’m pretty pessimistic about our current academy lot, I don’t think they’re progressing much and the talent level seems to be the lowest it has been for about 15 years. Lots of players with a good first touch and not much else.

Top clubs get there first , often at a very early age. Ruthlessly discard, Money no longer filters downwards. What's left is the late developers. Who fall to the lower rungs before working they way upwards,

[SCIAG]

To be honest I’m pretty pessimistic about our current academy lot, I don’t think they’re progressing much and the talent level seems to be the lowest it has been for about 15 years. Lots of players with a good first touch and not much else.

Top clubs get there first , often at a very early age. Ruthlessly discard, Money no longer filters downwards. What's left is the late developers. Who fall to the lower rungs before working they way upwards,

I dom't think that's anything new, though, the same dynamics were in play when McIntyre or Obita were wee lads.

I think the big issue is that the modern academy environment focuses too much on trying to make everyone a "creative" player. The England team has loads of depth in attacking midfield and the wide spots. We have only one international-standard centre back, defensive midfielder, and centre forward (Stones, Rice, and Kane).

The result is that we, and a lot of academy teams, have a lot of players who float around in the half-spaces and relatively few who can dictate pace, get in behind, or hold off a challenge. Defending is either all about pressing, or about getting large numbers behind the ball, not so much about individual positioning of defensive players.