Tottenham’s academy director, Simon Davies, has explained that the transition from academy to first-team is now easier for Hotspur Way youngsters since all of the club’s clubs play the same style of football.
Over the last five or six years, no youth player has progressed to become a first-team regular at Tottenham, with Oliver Skipp being the last to do so.
However, there is currently a lot of optimism inside the club regarding the current crop of players in the Under-21s and Under-18s squads, with many regarded as potential first-team talents.
Davies added that everyone at the club, including Ange Postecoglou, wants to help some the club’s greatest young academy players take the next step.
He said on the Off The Shelf podcast, “You can’t underestimate the impact [getting a player into the first team] has.” It affects everyone, including the fans, other [academy] players, and our recruiters.
“They go out and do their job, and they have something to say, ‘Look, there’s a path.'”
As I have stated, I communicate with [Postecoglou] on a regular basis, and the manager believes in this.
“My duty is to ensure that the players are good enough because, while I believe we have some coming through who will be of the level, it is still only potential at this time. I’ve seen a lot of potential in the past, and I was probably the one that didn’t make it.”
Tottenham plays Ange-ball from top to bottom.
Davies noted that the club has now introduced a pretty similar style of football across all age levels, which means that the young players are slightly more equipped to join Postecoglou’s side when they are ready.
He went on to say, “I believe it makes it simpler to grow a player if everything goes through. For example, at other clubs, unless Wenger and Ferguson remain as first-team managers for an extended period of time, we are all familiar with the statistics regarding first-team manager longevity.
“If you alter [the academy mindset] every time the manager changes, you’re going to touch 250-odd young footballers at a club. You’d be changing a coaching philosophy and methodology everything.
“So, in my humble view, it is important to have one style of play and stick to it because of the changes that can occur at the very top.
The second element is that if you have a manager like we do now, with our ideals of playing out of the back and pressing, we’re quite aggressive all the way through.
“Developing a player through to the first team is not easy; it will always be difficult because we want to be a Champions League team, but it is not impossible.”
It makes it a little easier if you all play the same way.”
Spurs Web Opinion
One of the issues that Tottenham had under Mourinho and Conte was that the academy teams played a completely different style than the first squad.
That meant that young players transitioning from the youth sides to the senior squad had to be moulded and shaped precisely by those managers, which they rightly did not have tolerance for.
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