Friday Freebie: Is it time for a return to reserve team football?
Better preparation needed for younger players to avoid dropping out of the game
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If we go back quite a few years long before academies were seen as they way forward for clubs there was such a thing as reserve team football. The Football Combination was the well-known midweek league although the northern clubs had their own equivalent competition called the Central League.
If you speak to or ask a lot of the games retired pro’s they will tell you this is where they cut their teeth as young professionals. Players came up through the Under 18’s and into men’s football via this route, and it also gave those injured players who were returning to fitness a chance to play at a decent level on their way back to the first team.
Once the Premier League came into being reserve team football was disbanded at the top level and in came Under 21 and more recently Under 23 football. That move followed down the pyramid and non-league also dispensed with the same but has it made the difference?
I guess you can argue this in a few ways. At the top level the honing of technique, playing systems and patterns it’s made a massive impact in improving standards and players across the board. However, as you move down below the Premier League this is where it falls apart because each level is different of course the further you do down.
These players are almost programmed in the way they play one specific way, but as we know non-league doesn’t conform to that notion, results come the best way they can and with the resources you have.
I saw a few stats that staggered me last week, I was fully aware some almost 700 academy players were released at the end of last season at the top level, a phenomenal amount of players that will only then filter into the lower levels right down to non-league.
97% of former Category 1 academy players that are now aged 21-26 never made a Premier League appearance. 70% failed to get a further PL or EFL contract and just 1 in 10 of those players made over 20 appearances in the professional game.
That’s staggering numbers and that’s not a deep dive either, also take into account 1.5 million boys play organized youth football in England, only 180 of those will sign professional Premier League contracts at the end of their academy time, a success rate of 0.012%.
You might think, well what point does that affect non-league football? Well, the answer is there, if these released players don’t end up in the professional game the non-league levels are their only route to keep playing.
I am pretty sure we can all pick out one player or maybe even a few from our clubs or around the game who have dropped out at the top and entered the non-league pyramid but who were well out of their depth.
That’s not to say no talent, the current England youth teams are some of the best around currently, but the different world they live in just doesn’t prepare them for rejection and moving on elsewhere.
Non-league football can be brutal, there are no hiding places as we all know well, technique alone doesn’t get you through games and sometimes it isn’t pretty.
Many are knocked off the ball easily and you can see a few drift into themselves and not contribute to the game. I’m not here to say reserve team football would help every single one of them but I’m confident it would keep a few more within the game for longer and in some terms prepare them to go back up the ladder again with a stronger grounding.
Unfortunately I don’t see it changing as much as it would be a benefit, anything other than first team football runs at a loss for almost every club and where money is tighter and squeezed every year for clubs at our level it might be financial suicide but in the end it’s the players, just another reason the sheer greed in football takes over and not for the good.
What do you think? Should there be more provision to help the younger players with the success rates so low? Let me know in the comments below.
With so much money that can be made from the sale of one player, clubs seem not to care how many kids they have in the academy. The stats show that academies are a failing system. They do not create enough professional footballers as a percentage of trainees.
When young children are signed to clubs, parents get very excited. They may later realise that it was all vanity and may have to cope with a child with bitter disappointment. The system needs to change.
Probably the only comment I have is I guess is the problem with having a reserve team these days is the cost of running it. At Barnet at present for example all the available funds are going in trying to compete with other clubs in an unbelievably hard league to get promoted from. What I do remember with fondness is when we did have a reserve team way back, first we had another team ready to fill any injuries to the first team because with no subs allowed then you were either in the first team or you were not. I also loved standing at the end of a reserve team game at Underhill and waiting for the tanoy to announce the first team result from where ever they may have been playing that day, OH and the score at half time with either cheers or groans mostly cheers. Know this throws little light on the problem you have raised but it did revive some more memories of Underhill days gone by.