How do you run a Football League club successfully in a medium-sized town where your average gate is around the 5,000 mark? On Saturday the Crewe Alexandra team which beat Walsall 2-0 to confirm a mid-table finish in League 1 was made up entirely of youth players.
How do you run a Football League club successfully in a medium-sized town where your average gate is around the 5,000 mark? On Saturday the Crewe Alexandra team which beat Walsall 2-0 to confirm a mid-table finish in League 1 was made up entirely of youth players.
For many years Crewe were a bottom of the basement club. Then 30 years ago Dario Gradi turned up with his vision of building a team from the bottom up. In terms of the four categories of youth academy under the Football Association’s Elite Player Performance Plan, Crewe have been placed in category two, alongside Newcastle United.
For some years Crewe acted as a kind of de facto nursery club for Liverpool with the Premiership club loaning out some of their players to gain experience at Crewe. Formal nursery arrangements have been banned since the inter-war period, but could they be a realistic means of sustaining lower league clubs? Or would the loss of autonomy be seen as too great?
As far as the FA’s academy plan is concerned, two academies at lower league clubs have been forced to close through insufficient funds, Wycombe Wanderers and Yeovil Town. This is particularly serious in the case of a relatively geographically isolated club like Yeovil with one youngster having to make 100-mile round trip to his new club three days a week.