05-06-2021, 07:24 PM
(05-06-2021, 02:11 PM)Hammie Wrote: It is all but impossible for a non prem club to compete now. That is just what the prem and FA planned and put in place a few years ago.
Chelsea, especially, flood local primary schools with leaflets, holiday football clubs and all the rest.
I think for now, we are better to forget about the younger age groups and scout and sign up the prem/champ cast offs at 18+
Invest in an U23 team set up and wait until we have a ground and space for a top grade youth set up.
Not anything I would want to see us do but we don't have the space at present to do both.
There is certainly an argument to do just that, as Brentford did some years ago.
The above anecdotes are very true and here are a couple more to add to the collection of the difference between lofty words and reality.
First story concerns a well run Pompey in the community scheme, where a guy (wont mention his name), was employed to go and give PE lessons to primary school children in our city. He built up a good rapport with all concern, made many contacts and got to look at the 5-10 year olds in Portsmouth. Long story short, we couldnt afford to keep him going, and he was immediately snapped up by Chelsea, doing the same thing.
Second story involves the youth team i help coach. One of our lads was invited to go and train with QPR. His father didn't particularly want to do the hour each way trip to the top of the A3 where they had a training outpost. As a result i emailed the club to say he had been approached, and also suggested that the club reached out to the local youth football clubs. The club where i am has 24 teams from U7-U18 (and we are not alone). I suggested that we arranged a day where the club sent a few coaches down to take some training sessions. We could arrange for all 24 teams and managers to be there.
The benefit would be to make contacts and ties (with coaches and players), to form links with the boys at a young age (hopefully lifelong bonds) and to also give them the chance to scout the cities players on mass. The outlay to Pompey would have been 3 coaches pay for a Saturday. Who knows what the rewards would have been.
Anyway, after chasing up on the email 3 or so times, I was told it had been forwarded to the academy manager. After no response, i finally sent it to Ian Mcinnes, whose secretary passed it on to Johnny Moore. He responded by saying that the club didn't want to commit to having ties with one club.
I did respond by saying i thought the club should be doing this with all the cities youth football clubs.
That was pre Eisner days, but we really haven't experienced any difference in attitude, which is a crying shame, especially as we don't have a lot of money. Most of the coaches and managers are Pompey fans, and if we had a contact, would be only to happy to pass on info on players or other clubs approaches.
So i'm afraid to say that it is no surprise that we miss out on local lads. But I don't accept that we can't compete solely due to money. I think we don't take advantage of the cities goodwill to the club, and have either had people running things who have been unwilling or unable to be a little bit creative in their thinking.