Originally Posted by
MikeSB
When I last looked, a while back, I was looking at the PL selection of players in the first team and very few eg about 5% were ever selected for the first team from their academies and why clubs spend 70million on buying players from abroad. Of course as most English National players have been through the academy then they wiil try and argue their skills are due to that but there will be always players coming through, even here at Crewe that are far better than most in the squad eg Nick Powell but even he could not make it in the PL..He has just been sacked by Stoke.
The question then becomes, how many academy players nationally ever get to play in their first teams and in the National Leagues? That would answer a lot of questions.