30-05-2021, 04:04 PM
"Brentford have bought low, sold high, built a warchest through compound gains, blown it for a proper go and succeeded. This is the exact model we were promised..."
I'm not sure that this was the exact model we were promised. I thought the main idea was to focus on the youth academy and develop our own players. This isn't what Brentford have done. They closed their Academy five years ago and since then have just run a Development Squad/B team (no pun intended) comprising mainly 19/20 year-olds on two-year contracts presumably rejected from elsewhere (certainly true in one case I know of personally, now a L1 defender). They play under-23/under-21 teams from other clubs and some games against non-league teams. But none of the big-money sales they have made in recent years, such as Maupay, Watkins and Benrahma have come through this system, so to that extent scumslayer is right. Being attacking players, they are also going to fetch more than defenders, on the whole. Under Brentford's data-driven system of recruiting, they signed Toney, who has clearly been a great hit there. But based on their respective records at Peterborough and Doncaster, I don't think you'd have put Marquis too far behind him, on the face of it. What concerns me is that in the past four years, only Ben Close has established himself in the first team, and even he in the past two seasons has played fewer games than in the previous two. I don't think our youth set-up was generally that highly rated in the past (presumably the reason for us not getting Mount, Ward-Prowse and Oxlade-Chamberlain into it, I don't know) but previously we had actually produced quite a number of very good players, Webster and Wallace most recently, Ritchie and Ward before that (but I can't remeber when we last produced a successful striker - Ward scored a lot but from midfield.) So just when we most need the academy to produce, it hasn't done so. And the gap from academy to first team is a difficult one to bridge, even at lower league level. Time for a rethink?
It is also true that expectations have been low at Brentford. My son used to go their Football in the Community programme and we quite often went to Griffin Park. They had a small but pretty consistent following in an area where the temptation is just to follow Chelsea. I don't think anyone ever contemplated Brentford playing a league match against them ever again.
I'm not sure that this was the exact model we were promised. I thought the main idea was to focus on the youth academy and develop our own players. This isn't what Brentford have done. They closed their Academy five years ago and since then have just run a Development Squad/B team (no pun intended) comprising mainly 19/20 year-olds on two-year contracts presumably rejected from elsewhere (certainly true in one case I know of personally, now a L1 defender). They play under-23/under-21 teams from other clubs and some games against non-league teams. But none of the big-money sales they have made in recent years, such as Maupay, Watkins and Benrahma have come through this system, so to that extent scumslayer is right. Being attacking players, they are also going to fetch more than defenders, on the whole. Under Brentford's data-driven system of recruiting, they signed Toney, who has clearly been a great hit there. But based on their respective records at Peterborough and Doncaster, I don't think you'd have put Marquis too far behind him, on the face of it. What concerns me is that in the past four years, only Ben Close has established himself in the first team, and even he in the past two seasons has played fewer games than in the previous two. I don't think our youth set-up was generally that highly rated in the past (presumably the reason for us not getting Mount, Ward-Prowse and Oxlade-Chamberlain into it, I don't know) but previously we had actually produced quite a number of very good players, Webster and Wallace most recently, Ritchie and Ward before that (but I can't remeber when we last produced a successful striker - Ward scored a lot but from midfield.) So just when we most need the academy to produce, it hasn't done so. And the gap from academy to first team is a difficult one to bridge, even at lower league level. Time for a rethink?
It is also true that expectations have been low at Brentford. My son used to go their Football in the Community programme and we quite often went to Griffin Park. They had a small but pretty consistent following in an area where the temptation is just to follow Chelsea. I don't think anyone ever contemplated Brentford playing a league match against them ever again.