November 2011 Archives

I hadn't planned to write anything for this game beforehand and I wasn't much in the mood by half-time, but something clicked during the second half and I wanted to note something down to gauge other people's thinking as much as anything, but also to see if I could do it in the first place.

Let's get the simple stuff out of the way first. Charlton won well, and deserved to win. They weren't a million miles better than Town, but they didn't need to be. They scored the first from a well played free-kick and although the second was slightly dubious, it always looked likely to be coming despite all Town's pressure - which never really seemed to create many chances.

Credit to Chris Powell, then, for drilling his team well, and standing right at the edge of his technical area for 90 minutes as if he were checking it was raining. It didn't seem to be, and if it was at the end of the game, it was only on the away end. I've been much impressed with the way he's handled himself over the last few weeks, and he seems to be a good ambassador for Charlton, and League One as a whole.

The inspiration for my posts comes from a variety of places; sometimes it grows organically from things I'm wondering (these tend to be the ones that revolve around specific dates/times/incidents - the last one about the FA Cup being an example of that). Sometimes, there's something big in the news and I wonder how and if it will affect Huddersfield Town (the EPPP) and sometimes I'm inspired by something I've read online. Incidentally, I have drafted a third post about the cost of the Academy, but am uncertain about posting it until we know more about the cost of the different levels of teams under the EPPP and where Huddersfield Town will fit in.

This post is the latter. Its not something I'd ever thought about before, but this excellent post from the equally excellent Tanger_Dreaming illustrated something to me that I thought was both relevant and interesting and, perhaps more importantly (I jest) lent itself to some lovely graphs.

Whereas for Blackpool, Tanger Dreaming used 330-ish players, I knew there was information for a lot of Huddersfield Town players around the web, so I'd be able to get a slightly more robust - and long term - look at the effect of the problems raised.

Huddersfield Town will play 51 games this season. It's the first time in a few we've known before Christmas how many that will be, and is 10 fewer than last season, and 4 fewer than the season before - obviously, it may increase to 53 if they end up in the playoffs, but we have some interesting numbers to work with here.

I was disappointed to see Town go out of the cup on Saturday, but more disappointed with the way it came about. My mind, instantly, wondered whether or not we had any reason to think that 'concentrating on the league' would be a viable option, and end up successfully. I've done a post previous to this about whether or not there's any trends in the JPT winners, and that concluded that it was a pretty random process there, but did not affect league form one way or the other.

Luckily, I had the data almost to hand and have worked out what history teaches us. I've taken the end of season top three at the end of the last 24 seasons (the years inclusive of playoffs) which was an arbitrary figure - I did consider starting at the first year of the Full Members' Cup, but settled on the playoff years being more arbitrary and compared league records at the end of the season to league records on FA Cup First Round day.

Following my publication yesterday, a few errors were brought to my attention (feel free, always, to contact me on Twitter @Marco4J if you find something incorrect/misleading/want something explaining) and having listened to the - excellent, I have to say @WAGUpodcast - there's a few other things I want to add on.

Firstly, I added Celtic onto my chart of the most productive youth systems outside the Premiership. They deserve that spot, having produced 12 players for the 92 (as well as 2 for their own first team vs. Aberdeen 23/10/11 and, I would assume, countless others through the Scottish Leagues) but my paragraph about 'big' producers of players from outside the English system was unincluded in the article.

Last week saw 46 Football League clubs agree to sign the Elite Player Performance Plan, to reshuffle and regulate the academy system within England. Huddersfield Town voted against this proposal, which means I would naturally think it was a bad idea; I would not be alone in this judging by what the media is saying. I have been trying to get hold of a full copy of the EPPP to make my own conclusions, but nothing has been forthcoming as yet, but I wanted to work something out that I'd been wondering about for a wee while.

The top level of academy clubs (upon whom all the focus in the media has been) will have to provide live-in accommodation for a proportion of their students, and a whole host of other facilities that have been estimated to render running costs at £2.3 million per year. Now, there's a number of clubs whose academies will presumably reach these criteria already (Arsenal, the two Manchester juggernauts, Chelsea spring to mind) but I'm sure there's a few other clubs who maybe don't and would have to improve a little to make that grade (Southampton, perhaps, or West Ham). This all remains to be seen, and I will be very interested in the initial lists of academy division. My assumption is that Huddersfield Town would probably be in the second or third level of academies, but finding detail about those areas of the EPPP is proving difficult indeed.

This is all leading somewhere. My idea of a club having an academy is that each one should be producing, first and foremost, players who are good enough to represent the club it represents, with the possibility of selling them on for profit should there be demand from teams higher up the league. To my mind, the most successful academies that spring to mind are (working down the leagues) Manchester Utd, Arsenal, Southampton, West Ham Utd, Middlesbrough, Leeds Utd, Charlton, Huddersfield (though a pox on the arrangement of those last two), and Crewe. I'm sure there's some I've missed out, but they're the ones I'm going with.