Mansfield Town's injured Kyle Howkins
The good old Football League Trophy; a competition that has stood in good stead now for more than 30 years since its formation back in the 1983-84 season. Alas, it has had its ups and downs ever since it was created, and now, I believe, has reached the lowest of its lows. How can serious professional football clubs be expected to take, as the FA will tell you, ‘a serious competition’ seriously if all the long standing participants are now faced with the embarrassment of having to compete with kids?
Firstly, don’t get me wrong, it would be a perfect and rosy world if these said kids - the under-21 Premier League sides - were to be given first team action at their respective clubs, but this, is where here in lays the main problem. Premier League clubs aren’t playing their young footballers enough in the main division, and the FA, I assume, are trying to find new ways to develop these youngsters by burdening the teams in the lower divisions by forcing them to face these development sides. It’s a cyclical nature, and if you don’t mind, the Premier League is one of the contributing factors as to why the national side has been so dire.
I recall an article from the summer in The Sunday Times where David Moyes wrote about the current flawed youth system here in England. The reason why it sticks so well in my mind is because he makes such commendable and valid argumentation. A particular paragraph from Moyes’ piece pinpoints my sentiment exactly: "Academies take in too many players. Every age group has a team, even a squad, and you end up with boys being recruited really just to make up the numbers. Clubs can throw out a big net out and take in 16 players every year. I think it should be a maximum of eight. That way you would allow more talent to filter into the lower leagues. At Rochdale or Bury or Tranmere boys have a better chance of getting their debut early, and 40 or 50 games under their belt. For many, that opportunity may prove better."
What got me thinking about the Moyes rhetoric was that he so crucially identifies where the problem begins – and just like the cause of a lot of big problems, it appears to be at the start. Talent is being wasted because the nurturing process at the younger ages is being mishandled; this, in turn, is affecting the transition for a lot of footballers at the youngest of ages into the later stages of development. After all, as Moyes indicates, how can parents be expected to ferry their kids to football practice 3 to 4 nights a week and then to football matches on Saturday afternoons for the return to be, after years and years of commitment, zilch?
Football is a life choice for these families, not just a hobby. When you enter the arena at a young age, a serious framework should always be considered and put in place. Again, as Moyes would say ‘boys being recruited really just to make up the numbers’ should never be the case, it is simply unethical.
And this is where we swing back into the EFL Trophy debacle; another miscalculated decision where the FA – with regard to youth development - are attempting to right their wrongs.
If we could clearly see where the right pathway would be to altering the way in which we use young footballers in a cup then surely the English League Cup (Capital One) has already become an embodiment of this? Well, it is clear to see in the earlier rounds that this is normally and has been the common practice. Arsenal, through the more recent years, has been renowned for playing their younger players in these fixtures. Wayne Rooney scored his first professional goals for Everton in the League Cup against Wrexham at 16 years of age back in 2002, David Beckham’s first-team debut on 23 September 1992, as a substitute for Andrei Kanchelskis, came in a League Cup match against Brighton, and more recently Liverpool and Spurs showed good faith by selecting a combined 13 youngsters for their 4th round tie back in October. If that isn’t a shining example of development, by bedding them in briefly with first teamers, then I don’t know what is.
Due to the urgency needed by the FA to foster better development of youth players from the more superior clubs, they have deemed it appropriate for the EFL Checktrade Trophy to be used as a model for the development of the superior Premier League and Championship academy sides. Who is feeling the brunt of this distasteful decision? The staff, the players and the fans of each lower league side that, forcefully, participates in the tournament. Attendances are lower, the broadcasters have taken less of an interest this year, and inevitably, the standard of football has severed.
How can it be justice to fine Luton Town £15,000 for failing to field a full strength side in their group stage matches when they undoubtedly feel like there is nothing to play for and that they’d rather just preserve first teamers for important league matches? How can it be justice that Coventry City fans feel that they are obligated to appear at the Ricoh Arena on a cold Tuesday night for a tie against a Brighton under-21 side? It is no surprise that attendances across the competition have typically been around the 1000-2000 mark, I.e A lowest-recorded attendance at Oxford United's Kassam Stadium of 1,383 included a home contingent of just one more fan than the U's took to Rotherham for their FA Cup third round tie on Saturday.
It is an embarrassing reality for a lot of these hard working lower league clubs that they must face youth teams from sides of the higher end of the Football League spectrum just to compensate for the FA’s inadequate development strategies. Someone at the FA needs to pull their finger out and get a grip of the globalisation that has already taken practice in the Premier League.
Using the EFL Trophy as a tool to curb the wastage that’s happening in English football is not the answer. More regulations on the amount of youth players that Premier League clubs should be forced to use in squad registration would be the fastest solution, but the question remains, do the fans and the FA want this? Again, the quality of football would suffer in the interim, but the benefits to the national side would prove dividends come the long term.
The Football League trophy was once a competition that offered lower league sides an opportunity to play at Wembley, an opportunity for a club to play an old rival for the sake of bragging rights on a professional and local level – which, of course, adds supporter interest. An opportunity to give a few first teamers/recovering injured players a run out who weren’t in the richest vein of form and or fitness. Now it has become a farcical competition and restructuring must begin immediately so that faith in the tournament can be restored.