There's been plenty of talk over the last couple of seasons about how small/weak and young our squad is and our bench usually confirms this but if you look at all the numbers we are still quite bloated with players who will never be good enough.
Believe it or not we now have 43 players on the books who are too old to play for the u18's and when you consider we have several u18's regularly playing with the u21's, when are the older ones ever going to get game time to improve.
I know some of them are out on loan, Robinson, Suso and Adorjan being the only ones who are actually playing regularly and doing alright. Coady is having a mare at Sheffield Utd with Texeira and Ngoo being brought back early from their loan deals. Assaidi and Borini are occasional subs.
There has been a fair bit of upheaval at the Academy since Brendan came in with Pep leaving, Rodolfo being promoted and changes to both the u21's and u18's managers. It's all part of making the Academy more productive in the future and I don't have a problem with that at all but we never seem to be able to get really good loan deals for our players like other Clubs do.
I hope that somebody is working very hard in the background identifying quality Clubs for future loans because if we're relying on the Academy to produce real stars we have to find a better way of preparing them than we have.
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