I go by what Parish said and the fanfare during the opening, the gist of which was for the Academy to provide home grown players instead of spending large transfer fees and thus enriching other clubs, and creating a revenue stream of our own.
Laudable and sensible enough, how realistic this will prove to be only time can tell.

Edited by southnorwoodhill (02 Nov 2023 2.21pm)

All good points.

Also, can't remember the statistic, but a massive proportion of PL players came within a small radius of SE London. We're right in the middle of that talent pool and as a stable PL club (surely the plan) would be foolish not to tap into it.

It's an investment hoping to pay long term dividends. I can probably easily rattle off a number of signings we've made in the past decade who have jointly cost more than the academy yet have probably made less of a contribution to the first team than I serve by shouting from the stands all these years.

I am a massive pessimist and inclined to scorn people when they rave about x, y and z as though we have ready made Zidane, Pele or Maradona's to walk into the team but it seems a wise business move that certainly holds the potential to bear fruit.

Now Zaha's got a bit of green grass ahead of him here... and finds Ambrose... not a bad effort!!!!

The figure quoted in 2016 was that 14% of Premier League players came from South London. Our catchment area has a good chance of producing players and with the way transfer fees are increasing that has to be a good thing.

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A slide of cake with our injury record? It's madness I tell you.

The academy is not just about growing players from tots to pros, it is also a place where we can develop young players that we pick up from lower leagues at home or abroad and then see if we can either move them into the first team or sell them for a profit. We already got a six-figure fee for O'Brien, who we only paid 25k for. Killian Phillips will likely earn us at least a five-figure fee if he doesn't make it with us, while JRS would likely earn us at least a couple of million as it stands. That's ignoring the likes of AWB and Mitchell who actually did step up. The more successful our academy the more chance we have of attracting the top youth players. Personally I'm quite excited about what it might produce in a few years time.

I've always thought that if your first team becomes good enough to generate enough income to pay for a Cat A academy to attract the better kids, then it's probably very difficult for even the better youth players to get in that team. If, on the other hand, your team is poor enough that the better youth team players have a good chance to get in it, then you probably can't afford a Cat A academy and won't have the better kids at your club!

Either way, it doesn't matter if you call it an academy or just a plain old youth team, the fact is that almost nobody manages to sustain the production of more than one first-team squad player a year, on average, at best.

I appreciate that South London is a bigger catchment area than most (probably in the world) and that it produces an awful lot of players. It makes sense to try and tap that, but I doubt anyone thinks we will one day be producing a home-grown XI.

All the money we have spent is not to produce three or four players a year for the first team, or to produce a new Zaha every year, or even a lottery win like AWB. The point is to produce a squad player for the first team. A Mitchell.

The sad fact is that all that money and effort is necessary just to have a chance to produce that one squad player, and not fall behind everyone else and lose decent kids to other clubs.

Like the new stand, it's all about huge expenditure just to stay still, or even to reduce the amount of slipping backwards that we do.

For me, a good summer of recruitment would involve one good, experienced free transfer, one expensive high-profile 'marquee' signing, one bargain, and one youth team graduate. Most summers won't be like that, but it is necessary to have all four taps running all the time, just to give us the best options.