It is certainly true that over the last ten years Liverpool FC have only developed a handful of players who have gone on to play in England’s top flight, but there has been a question over whether this was due to the lack of decent grass roots football in Merseyside or purely down to the lack of real development at the Reds Academy at Kirkby.
The answers have come in a study created by Cambridge-based website TrueKnowledge.com. In it they assessed the 1,383 English born players who have played in the Premier League since its inception in 1992 and tried to determine which areas of England were most adept at producing professional top tier footballers. To make the study as fair as possible, the study was split into counties and rigid boundaries of cities. With London split into boroughs too so its 7 million population could not skew the result as to where most English Premier League players had been born, it was revealed that Liverpool came out on top with 62 players. Birmingham came second on 55 with Manchester coming a distant third with 44.
The result is even more astonishing when the rigid boundary used to assess the data exempts Steven Gerrard (Knowsley), Jamie Carragher (Sefton), Leighton Baines and Leon Osman who were born in neighbouring Merseyside boroughs. Robbie Fowler, Tony Hibbert, Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney and Newcastle United midfielder Kevin Nolan were all included in the 62 player list though, but it shows that the city of Liverpool is more than capable of producing the required quality to make it in the Premier League. In fact Liverpool comes out third in the list when assessed by the percentage of the population. 6.59 players per 100,000 became Premier League footballers from the Liverpool population, while the only two better were North Yorkshire (7.69) and County Durham (8.70).
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From this point of view then, it can be assumed that over the past ten years, Liverpool’s Academy has just not been good enough to make the best of the wealth of talent that has come out of Liverpool since the inception of the Premier League in 1992. It seems as if the grass roots in the city has done its fair share but the Academy has failed to pick up on the best talent in Liverpool and lost out on players who could have played for the Reds.
Hopefully the restructuring of the Academy at Kirkby over the last couple of years will see this issue being addressed. With the departure of John McMahon as reserve team coach however it looks as if however the restructuring of the club below senior level is still ongoing. In a statement at the weekend announcing McMahon’s departure and the temporary appointment of Academy Technical Manager Pep Segura as reserve team manager, the club said:
“The Club have conducted a thorough review of all operations based at our Academy as part of our overall strategy to constantly improve our youth and professional player performance. We have a clear vision of the way ahead and a number of changes will now be put in place to help us to build on the considerable progress already made. Pep Segura will step in as Reserve team manager on a temporary basis for the remainder of this term only, before a revised structure is put in place this summer.”
Despite both Dalglish praising the work of Rafa Benitez restructuring the Academy and FSG already working closely with the Spanish coaches at Kirkby, the new owners seem to believe that more restructuring is required. FSG have stated from the outset that developing youth players is a priority for the long term economic viability of the club and it seems as if they are moving along at pace to make the changes needed to make their ambitions become a reality. It will hopefully mean the Reds will now be able to tap into the wealth of talent in Liverpool more effectively than they have done for the last ten years, and hopefully the future looks bright for the youth of Liverpool Football Club.
Read more of David’s articles at Live4Liverpool, but first check out Liverpool’s next big thing…
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