Youth Players

Just remembered we have sent a bunch of young lads out to a couple clubs and wanted to see how they have been doing.

We sent 3 out to Broxburn and 1 to Newtongrange star. Looked on their websites and no mention at all of them.

Seen that Conor Quinn and Darren Smith are slumming it down at Pumpherston juniors. Can't find the rest of them but take it things haven't gone to plan. Was hoping we were going to have another hidden gem but doesn't look promising.

Nah, youth teams looked a bit pants for a while sadly. Think it all kind of fell apart during the Massone saga and that was the last decent batch of young players we brought through. I have a mate (who occasionally posts on here), his brother played for our youth team under Massone and by the sound of things it was a load of total fuck. I think Danny Mullen has potential to be an alright player but not sure if I'd count him as one of our youth players. I've heard Auriemma (sp?) looks a really decent player, but that was from a burd who knows nothing about football.

Matthew Knox is only 15 and pretty highly rated, just spent a week on trial at Liverpool and has played for Scotland at U17 level. Looks quite promising.

That said, Coll Donaldson went on trial with Manchester United and now can't get a game for an awful Dundee United team.

A lot have came and went since Bollan got sacked for, ironically and supposedly, ignoring the players available from the youth teams. Since his sacking, only Mullen, Jamieson and Donaldson have went on to make some success in our first team, the others like Scougall, the Jacobs and McNulty were established first team regulars by the time Bollan got chucked.

Saying that, it seems a few have left to join the likes of St Johnstone and Ross County among others e.g. Kyle Lander, Darren Moffat, Scott Taylor. Is it a supposed lack of talent or faith and trust in recent years (apparently, McGlynn had zero interest) or just down to the need to spend money on more experienced players to keep our head above water in this league? It was mentioned at the public meeting with Burchill and Gordon Ford that it costs £100,000 each year for the LYF and probably more to have a reserve team.

Pleasing to see though that Burchill is more willing to give game time to Ryan Currie than to Georgiev, must be a sign that he'll release him in January.

The players we've produced through our youth set up has been staggering, a real shame we've never really got what we should have from the sale of those players. We seem to be on the verge of going out the game whenever a gem of a player comes through, and get very little from selling them on, as the owner is after a quick buck to line his pockets before we go into admin.

It's a long term financial commitment producing youth team players, prob would need between 3 to 5 years coming through the youth teams, depending what age they were when we picked them up, another 2 or 3 years in and around the first team, and then if they're good enough to be sold on another 3 to 5 years before we're likely to get a sell on fee.
The latter part is when we'd have made the big money but we've not got that far yet so can see why we can't afford to keep it up.