The Academy is probably Premier League level. The squad is Championship level. The majority of the rest of the outfit in general (excepting the occasional genuine professional in our midst) is amateurish at best, and the owners would get told to fuck off by the Dog & Duck reserves.

After his comments about the fans not understanding how things work...I wonder if he's realising we're exactly the ones who knew how things worked here and he could have saved himself some trouble if he'd asked us.

But the thing you keep overlooking is we didn't reinvest the money from him. Sold a player for 8 mill, didn't reinvest it, not even in the summer as your other post says we were promised. Not to mention Graham was only a loan at the time, we weren't guaranteed to be able to sign him permanently, someone else could have come in. Plus he was 5 years older than Rhodes. It wasn't a good window.

We paid a fair bit for Markanday, he doesn't count as a homegrowner. I was talking about academy players. I think Duru can make it aye. His opportunities seem to have dried up lately though which is a shame.

The best prospects in the Academy at present seem to be Harvey Higgins (I suspect he's going to get poached too early), Igor Tyjon (also a risk of that), Duru, Litherland, and Atcheson (on loan at a bizarrely low level given the praise I've heard for him). I suspect that's a good enough crop tbf, but that the best two prospects there are going to be gone too soon and we might get one or two squad players from the rest.

Graham I'll grant, but Watt was shit. I don't remember who we signed in January in League One, but we had high relative spending power in that division and the owners at that time were at least semi-serious about getting us out of that division. They've never shown they're serious about getting us out of this one, which is a lot more expensive to do.

Doesn't seem like any vindication of our playing style or Carsley...I couldn't be arsed to watch but I saw the stats...weren't we fucking awful in the first half and didn't manage a shot on target? Sounds like we were failing to break down a poor side until they got someone sent off. That's a stretch, and not just because we don't have an U19s side. However you slice it, England are one of the better teams in world football and couldn't get through Ireland until they had 10 men. I think it's fair to say the youth side of an average Championship outfit would get pummelled by them. Heck, one of their players who has only recently broken into their team was hands down our senior team's best player last season.

Our former loanee Taylor Harwood-Bellis scoring on his England debut. Always liked him when he was here.

I mean, ok, but I can't see how he possibly makes it if this is the level he's playing at aged 20. I suppose absolute best case scenario would be he gets a League Two loan next (unlikely), plays unexpectedly well, gets a chance in the first team squad the season after and performs unexpectedly well then too, earning a new deal. But I don't see it...that's three steps that all seem unlikely to me if the best he can do at 20 is get a NLN loan. Guess we'll see, but if I were a bookie I'd offer very high odds on him even making a senior league appearance here. And there's no shame in that, it's not easy to become a Championship player in your early 20s, very few can do it. If he puts in the work and has potential, maybe he gets up to this league by his late 20s.

Why's Palmer not in the squad btw? Injured?

If by your own admission, you don't think we've had a good January window for 10 years, does it not seem a forlorn hope that we would have one now? Especially in light of the funding issues. I understand wanting to have an optimistic outlook mate, but with zero evidence to suggest that will happen, optimism stops being the right word. Surely, logically, you know this isn't going to happen? Whether we need it or not.

Just some thoughts on the notion the club seem to have, of funding the club with mostly academy player sales. I may be forgetting someone, but in the last 5 sesasons (going back to summer 2019 rather than November 2019 obviously) we have sold the following youth players: Raya (3 million, seems to have risen to something like 6-8 million since we were fortunate enough he went on to be sold for 30 mill) Wharton (21 million ish, may be a bit more to gain in future) Phillips (think this one was 2.5 mill rising to 5 mill based on clauses?) Finneran (probably get 500k compo?) So assuming all clauses met, but ignoring sell-ons because we can't know that will happen or what we'll get and it won't happen within a 5 season span, that's in the region of 32-34.5 mill from academy players. So a little under 7 million per season. We also spend about 1.5 million a season I think it is, on running the academy, but we'll ignore that since we get the benefit of squad players on mostly lower wages. The club leaks about 20 million a season, so that's still 13 million a season to try to find from somewhere. If India can't/won't fund that, then it's unsustainable. However, the picture gets worse when we also consider that more than half of that money came from one player, Adam Wharton, a generational talent. Not only are we not guaranteed by any stretch to be able to produce a player like that every 5 years, but we were extremely fortunate that he happened to be a Blackburn Rovers fan, and one that actually gave a monkeys about playing for us and was happy to sign contracts giving us protection. Most top talents are liable to go the way of Finneran or Phillips, and give us minimal protection if clubs are sniffing whilst they're 16-18, which they're increasingly doing since we've shown we can produce real talents, and since the young player farming method has become widespread with all Prem clubs not just the big boys. Swap that Wharton fee for another Phillips fee, if the next amazing prospect isn't a committed fan, and that 5 year average turns into less than 3 million a year to contribute towards our 20 million in annual losses.

So? That doesn't seem to achieve any more than selling people does these days. No matter how many wages we get off the books or how much we raise in player sales, we're always told we don't have enough money and need to get more wages off the books and raise money from player sales.

Do you expect anything good to happen in this one?

Did it work?