Tottenham’s academy director Simon Davies has explained that the transition from the academy to the first-team is now easier for players in Hotspur Way since all teams across the club play the same style of football.
Over the last five or six years, we have not seen any academy product going on to become a first-team regular at Tottenham, with Oliver Skipp being the last one to successfully make that transition.
However, there is now a lot of excitement at the club about the current crop of youngsters in the Under-21s and Under-18s set-up, with many seen as potential first-team prospects.
Davies explained that everyone at the club, including Ange Postecoglou, wants to help some of the best young academy players make that final step.
He told the Off The Shelf podcast: “You can’t underestimate the impact [getting a player into the first team] has. It impacts everything, the fans, the fellow [academy] players, our recruiters.
“They go out and try to do their job and they’ve got something to say ‘look there’s a pathway’. I talk to [Postecoglou] regularly like I say and the manager believes in it.
“My task is to make sure that the players are good enough because, I do believe we have some coming through who will be of the level, but still it’s just potential at the moment. I’ve seen a lot of potential in the past, and I was probably that potential that didn’t make it.”
Tottenham play Ange-ball from top to bottom
Davies pointed out that the club have now implemented a very similar style of football across all age groups, which means that the youngsters are slightly better prepared to step into Postecoglou’s squad when they are ready.
He continued: “In my opinion, it makes it easier to develop a player if everything goes all the way through. For example, at other clubs, unless Wenger and Ferguson stay for a long time as a first-team manager, we all know the stats for the lifespan of a first-team manager.
“If you were to change [the academy ethos] every time the manager changes you’re going to affect 250-odd young footballers at a club, you would be changing a coaching philosophy and methodology every time.
“So in my humble opinion, it’s best to have one way of playing and keep to it because of the changes that can happen at the very top. The second part to that really is if you’ve got a manager like we have now with the way our principles are about playing out from the back and the way we press, we’re very aggressive, that’s all the way through.
“If we’re going to develop a player through to the first team, it’s not easy, it’s always going to be difficult because we’re aiming to be a Champions League team, but it’s not impossible. It makes it slightly easier if you’re all playing the same way.”
Spurs Web Opinion
One of the problems that Tottenham had under Mourinho and Conte was the fact that the academy sides played a completely different style to the first team.
That meant that youngsters coming from the youth sides into the senior squad had to be moulded and shaped quite specifically by those managers, which they understandably did not have patience for.