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How can clubs like QPR develop talent when their best youngsters can be signed for just £3,000?
SAM WALLACE
CHIEF FOOTBALL WRITER Sam Wallace 8 APRIL 2017
There is a footballer at Queens Park Rangers who has attracted the attention of Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur and now further afield to the two big Manchester clubs, and by the end of the season the chances are that he will bid farewell to Loftus Road for pastures new.
Despite the considerable efforts by various clubs to secure his signature, you will not have read about him in the transfer news for one reason above all: he is nine years old.
Telegraph Sport is aware of his identity but given that we are not in the business of publishing the names of year four schoolkids in the football coverage that will remain undisclosed for the time being.
This is a boy whose name is well-known in football development circles for his outstanding promise can be signed from QPR’s academy this summer for a £3,000 compensation fee. Where his future takes him, only time will tell, but it also begs the question where it leaves QPR, and clubs like them, as they try to develop their own talent in the hyper-competitive new landscape of development football.
QPR have not always got it right in the last ten years but they now have a proper structure built by Les Ferdinand, their director of football, and former manager Chris Ramsey, now the academy director.
Under the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) the club’s academy is rated category two chiefly because it is split over two sites in the west London suburbs and it is starting to produce players again.
Darnell Furlong, son of former QPR striker Paul, has come through the ranks while Ryan Manning and Niko Hamalainen have been scouted in their late teens.
The club has a bountiful urban catchment area across the west and northwest of London which yielded Raheem Sterling, who left for Liverpool in 2012 without making a senior QPR appearance. Yet there has not been an academy player established in the first team since Richard Langley and Marcus Bean, more than 10 years ago.
QPR had a great tradition of developing players in the late 1970s and 1980s with many of the team that reached the 1982 FA Cup final having come through its youth programme. That era has had a shadow cast over it by serious allegations of sexual abuse against the youth development officer, the late Chris Gieler - a legacy the club has to deal with.
In the modern age, however, QPR are trying to compete again for the best young local players. The likelihood is that not all will stay forever but it would rather not lose them at just nine years old. “For QPR, our academy has to be our future,” Ferdinand said when we spoke this week. “It makes it very, very difficult if you’re losing them at nine years old.”
Ferdinand himself went to school in Shepherds Bush round the corner from Loftus Road but was missed by the system, coming through non-league at Southall and Hayes before developing into one of the greatest Premier League strikers of the 1990s. He played in goal until he was 15, which he confesses must have thrown a few scouts off the scent, but the chances of a teenager of his potential being overlooked in 2017 are nil.
“Our player is being pursued by not just one club but a few clubs,” he says. “Let’s get it right, the top clubs stockpile players. There are 85 per cent who don’t make it through the system. At QPR he has got more chance of playing in our first team.”
Then there is the financial side. Under Premier League rules no inducements can be paid to the families of children moving clubs but no-one is under any illusions that this is what gets deals done. Some clubs have paid up to £1,200 a month in what is euphemistically known as “welfare expenses” and given that the maximum EPPP compensation for an 11-year-old is £9,000, this kind of talent mine-sweeping makes financial sense for the wealthiest clubs.
Ferdinand has a proposal that might offer some protection to clubs like QPR. Every player signed from another academy is assessed at an agreed age when he has reached adulthood, and a value assigned to him – whether he is to be sold or not. Then a percentage of that value is paid to his club of origin. It may at least stop the trawling for talent if the buying club knows that a £3,000 compensation fee could end up eventually as a £3 million bill.
In the meantime Ferdinand has to go back to motivating his academy staff and around 30 scouts to go on finding and developing the best talent for QPR’s first team. “I want them to get out there and find the best players in our area. That is really difficult if someone is just going to come along and nick them. All the hard work you put in. Then years down the line the supporters want to know: how did we let him go?”
The big clubs have always signed the best talent, but there was a fair deal for the selling party. Ferdinand earned QPR £6 million when he moved to Newcastle United in 1995, which, aside from the Sterling sell-on fees, remains the highest amount paid for any player who began his career at the club.
It would be nice to think that a nine-year-old local lad could come through the QPR ranks and stir the blood of the Loftus Road faithful before perhaps spreading his wings and moving on. In other words, enjoying a similar career path to the one trod by Ferdinand, although the system is loaded against it happening again.
How can clubs like QPR develop talent when their best youngsters can be signed for just £3,000?
SAM WALLACE
CHIEF FOOTBALL WRITER Sam Wallace 8 APRIL 2017
There is a footballer at Queens Park Rangers who has attracted the attention of Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur and now further afield to the two big Manchester clubs, and by the end of the season the chances are that he will bid farewell to Loftus Road for pastures new.
Despite the considerable efforts by various clubs to secure his signature, you will not have read about him in the transfer news for one reason above all: he is nine years old.
Telegraph Sport is aware of his identity but given that we are not in the business of publishing the names of year four schoolkids in the football coverage that will remain undisclosed for the time being.
This is a boy whose name is well-known in football development circles for his outstanding promise can be signed from QPR’s academy this summer for a £3,000 compensation fee. Where his future takes him, only time will tell, but it also begs the question where it leaves QPR, and clubs like them, as they try to develop their own talent in the hyper-competitive new landscape of development football.
QPR have not always got it right in the last ten years but they now have a proper structure built by Les Ferdinand, their director of football, and former manager Chris Ramsey, now the academy director.
Under the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) the club’s academy is rated category two chiefly because it is split over two sites in the west London suburbs and it is starting to produce players again.
Darnell Furlong, son of former QPR striker Paul, has come through the ranks while Ryan Manning and Niko Hamalainen have been scouted in their late teens.
The club has a bountiful urban catchment area across the west and northwest of London which yielded Raheem Sterling, who left for Liverpool in 2012 without making a senior QPR appearance. Yet there has not been an academy player established in the first team since Richard Langley and Marcus Bean, more than 10 years ago.
QPR had a great tradition of developing players in the late 1970s and 1980s with many of the team that reached the 1982 FA Cup final having come through its youth programme. That era has had a shadow cast over it by serious allegations of sexual abuse against the youth development officer, the late Chris Gieler - a legacy the club has to deal with.
In the modern age, however, QPR are trying to compete again for the best young local players. The likelihood is that not all will stay forever but it would rather not lose them at just nine years old. “For QPR, our academy has to be our future,” Ferdinand said when we spoke this week. “It makes it very, very difficult if you’re losing them at nine years old.”
Ferdinand himself went to school in Shepherds Bush round the corner from Loftus Road but was missed by the system, coming through non-league at Southall and Hayes before developing into one of the greatest Premier League strikers of the 1990s. He played in goal until he was 15, which he confesses must have thrown a few scouts off the scent, but the chances of a teenager of his potential being overlooked in 2017 are nil.
“Our player is being pursued by not just one club but a few clubs,” he says. “Let’s get it right, the top clubs stockpile players. There are 85 per cent who don’t make it through the system. At QPR he has got more chance of playing in our first team.”
Then there is the financial side. Under Premier League rules no inducements can be paid to the families of children moving clubs but no-one is under any illusions that this is what gets deals done. Some clubs have paid up to £1,200 a month in what is euphemistically known as “welfare expenses” and given that the maximum EPPP compensation for an 11-year-old is £9,000, this kind of talent mine-sweeping makes financial sense for the wealthiest clubs.
Ferdinand has a proposal that might offer some protection to clubs like QPR. Every player signed from another academy is assessed at an agreed age when he has reached adulthood, and a value assigned to him – whether he is to be sold or not. Then a percentage of that value is paid to his club of origin. It may at least stop the trawling for talent if the buying club knows that a £3,000 compensation fee could end up eventually as a £3 million bill.
In the meantime Ferdinand has to go back to motivating his academy staff and around 30 scouts to go on finding and developing the best talent for QPR’s first team. “I want them to get out there and find the best players in our area. That is really difficult if someone is just going to come along and nick them. All the hard work you put in. Then years down the line the supporters want to know: how did we let him go?”
The big clubs have always signed the best talent, but there was a fair deal for the selling party. Ferdinand earned QPR £6 million when he moved to Newcastle United in 1995, which, aside from the Sterling sell-on fees, remains the highest amount paid for any player who began his career at the club.
It would be nice to think that a nine-year-old local lad could come through the QPR ranks and stir the blood of the Loftus Road faithful before perhaps spreading his wings and moving on. In other words, enjoying a similar career path to the one trod by Ferdinand, although the system is loaded against it happening again.
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