Quote Originally Posted by bridpie78 View Post
There is method in the madness of developing your own players, take a look at exeter and mansfield, both have been up there in league 2 for a few years now,mansfield have chucked money at the promotion problem while exeter have developed youngsters,exposed them to the first team and sold them on at a profit to bigger clubs, they are really a model of what most lower league clubs should aspire to be, sustainable and although they haven't had that promotion yet they are an entertaining team that is never in any danger of falling away into NL or going into debt/admin

getting a good side together to try to win the NL is all well and good but what about next season and the season after, we don't want to go back up just to return to the same old story of buying old timers who we hope still have some gas in their tanks and hoping for the best and ending up fighting relegation because we picked the wrong ones.

its about balance you don't just take on loads of youngsters and hope that for every 50 you get 1 future star, one of our big problem areas is scouting and recruiting.
I don’t disagree. The problem is and continues to be that we can’t attract good young players to us because they have Forest, Derby and Leicester on there door step.... Exeter have who?
It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg. We want good young players playing some first team games before being sold. The young players we have had are generally not good enough. So how do you attract talent? We have no real history of putting them in the first team. No history of developing players. The players we have we tend to inherit from other clubs.
Until we commit completely to developing players with a view to them playing first team football it’s a pointless and expensive exercise.