Closing the distance – physically and professionally – between the academy and the first-team will be one of Frank Lampard’s early goals at Chelsea. Integrating this new approach with the club’s transfer policy will be an even larger job for Petr Cech.
As Travis wrote about yesterday, incoming manager Frank Lampard plans to blur the lines between Chelsea’s academy and the first team: they will train together more often, share the canteen and gym and have more dialogue between the respective coaching staffs. These are changes Lampard can implement relatively easily, and in Jody Morris he has the perfect point man to oversee the integration.
However, the point is not just to share space and build-up some general sense of cohesion. The overarching ambition is to establish a long-term pathway between the academy and the first team, so players can wear Blue as a teenager at Aldershot into their 20s at Stamford Bridge.
One of the vacuities (and there were many) of Maurizio Sarri’s most fervid disciples was their caricature of the ideal academy-to-first-team pipeline. After the requisite accusations of alcoholism and domestic abuse, they imputed the average Chelsea-not-Sarri fan would rather lose with a team of Cobham-trained players than win with the likes of Eden Hazard, David Luiz and all the others who came to the club mid-career.
More so than usual, they have this truly backwards.
Chelsea do, in fact, produce some of the best young players in England, hence the frustration to see so many of them elsewhere.
Proper use of the academy does not centre on those truly exceptional players like Callum Hudson-Odoi or Ruben Loftus-Cheek. As players like those emerge every few years, the club will start reshaping the squad to accommodate these truly exceptional young men so they can be in the regular squad by the early 20s. But most of the players who come out of the academy to play for Chelsea will do so on a temporary basis before moving on.
Chelsea will always need to hit the transfer market to build a squad able to compete for four trophies a season. No academy can supply that many top calibre players, and no one expects it. The ideal use for Cobham is to reduce the perceived need for the club to enter the transfer market for the mediocre makeweights who come and go between the first team and the loan army, who make Chelsea an object of mockery for fans and opponents alike.
For example, let’s say in two years the top of Chelsea’s midfield depth chart is Mateo Kovacic, N’Golo Kante, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Mason Mount and Tiemoue Bakayoko. The Blues want a bit more support. They do not need someone capable of playing 35 games a season, just someone who can give an extra option for substitution or rotation, and a fall-back in case of injury.
If the academy is properly aligned with the transfer policy, the Blues can use 2-3 academy players instead of hitting the transfer market to buy the 2022 version of Danny Drinkwater. Or Gonzalo Higuain. Or Loic Remy, Falcao or Felipe Luis.
Academy players can make up a mini-platoon to cover the depth – not the starting spots – in the squad, giving the club more time for either the right player to come on the market or for a homegrown player to develop into the starting role, either in-house or on loan. Instead of buying one, they can use several they already have.
Using academy players like this will satisfy the finance types at Chelsea as much as the footballers.
Chelsea will spend less money and get more value for the money they spend by not rushing into poor decisions. The covering platoons of academy players will buy Chelsea time so they don’t need to buy overpriced mid-career players. The first team experience they will gain in these roles will raise their transfer values and prospects for loans. One of these players could out-perform expectations to such an extent that he obviates the need for any incoming transfers, and within a few years the Blues have another starter developed in-house for “free” – some more of that surprise and optimism I wrote about on Monday.
Integrating the academy with the transfer policy is the sort of project that would define Petr Cech’s new role as performance and technical adviser. It would be a large step above anything the club have had before.
Even when Michael Emenalo was technical director and had a plan for player development, those plans usually ended with a few loans, an assessment and a buy-back clause. There was never any real thought of letting academy players supplant the mid-grade transfers – always just the hope that a few “unicorn” youth players could rise into the first team, while the rest helped the club cover Financial Fair Player requirements.
Players can take a lot of different paths out of the academy. The more players who pass through the first team, the better everyone will be, even if the first team is just a stop on their career progression.
Better they pick up a handful of appearances at Stamford Bridge than some random loan, and better Chelsea use one of their youth to fill the gaps than some random purchase they picked up on deadline day for an inflated fee.