The EPPP - progression or destruction?

Are there new rules for developing youth players in England the right option?

On Thursday the 23rd of October 2011, the 72 Football League clubs voted in favour of the 
‘Elite Player Performance Plan’ (EPPP), a radical new overhaul of the current national youth system.

The EPPP is a plan drawn up by both the FA and the Premier League with the aim of developing more top level players for the English Premier League and the England national team. The EPPP aims to produce a world class academy system that rivals that of FC Barcelona. 


The view of the creators of the plan is that the Premier League is bursting at the seams with foreign players because foreign sides are coaching them to a higher standard than our outdated system allows. They believe that this plan will enable sides to work with more top players and thus develop these players together in a world class coaching environment.

A Premier League spokesman said of the EPP: “The new plan is a great example of English football working together to raise standards across the board.”

Changes to the Academy system


The changes included in the plan involve the scrapping of the current tribunal system, which previously determined the fee a club would have to pay another for a youth player who is out of contract when no agreement between the two could be reached, and the implementation of a ‘tier’ rating for each club’s youth system, ranging from tier 1 to tier 4. This proposal will supposedly radically modernise youth development in England.


However, is this plan really going to achieve it’s aim or are there issues needed to address regarding this radical change up of the academy system.

Under the new rules, clubs who qualify for class one status will be able to select youngsters from a pool of nationwide talent and those already contracted to another club will be able to leave for minimal compensation. A category 1 academy will have the freedom to select any player playing from a tier 2-4 academy; all that will be required is for the club to contact the other club and inform they are coming to see the player. This will prevent clubs from holding onto their players, in the current rules these clubs will receive a nominal fee if a player is "taken". However, the new rules involve reduced compensation, which does not seem fair in return for a top player.

Regarding the new tier formulation, clubs’ youth systems are now ranked according to how much staff they employ and how much they spend on their youth development. To be rated as tier 1, the club’s academy must have an annual budget exceeding £2.3m, at least 18 full-time employees, excellent training facilities as well as school places. 


What a tier 1 ranking gets you is the pick of pretty much all youth players in the country, considering the 90-minute rule has now been abolished. Contact time with youth players will also be increased with tier 1 academies. 


At the other end of the scale will be the tier 4 academies, acting as a ‘safety net’ and only allowed to pick up previously failed youth players at the age of 16. Tier 3 academies will have no contact with youth players until the age of 12. 


As it stands, the only academies in the country who will be rated as tier 1 when the EPPP is implemented at the start of the 2012-13 season are Southampton’s, Chelsea’s, and Manchester City’s, but you can expect Manchester United’s, Arsenal’s, and Liverpool’s to have reached this ‘prestigious’ status by that time. 


The writers of the plan believe if the same players go to one of the top category 1 academies, then they will excel their development. A category 1 academy will be have a minimum of 18 coaches, who will coach for four times as long as other academies and benefit from world class facilities only the best clubs can afford. Thus it should give the top youth players more opportunity to develop and become top senior players. If those in a stronger financial position can provide better facilities and more coaches for the players than other teams, then surely that’s where the youngsters should be trained?

Trevor Brooking, director of football at the Football Association, has been an advocate of the plan. The template is Barcelona's La Masia academy and the theory is laudable. It is the reality of statutory compensation that concerns clubs down the food chain.

New rules

Critics of the plan believe that the Football League has been blackmailed by the Premier League into accepting these radical new proposals which will allow the richest clubs to cherry-pick the best young talent for a fraction of their worth. The new deal will see every club receive an increase in their funding for a guaranteed four-year period, with the amount determined by their academy status.

Instead of the tribunal system, there will now be a fixed tariff in place to determine the fee a club must pay for a youth player. It is £3,000 per year for a player aged between 9 and 11’s development, with the fee from 12 to 16 ranging between £12,500 and £40,000, dependent on a club’s youth system tier category. This is a long way off the £5 million Leeds received for Tom Taiwo and Michael Woods from Chelsea.

And this is the big difference and major effect that the new rules will have.

Football League Academies are such a lucrative business that many clubs have become reliant on the sale of their young starlets, or indeed the compensation awarded, to post profits at the end of each year. The removal of these cash incentives many say will cause a lot of problems for Football League clubs, forcing some to close down their academies completely.

Why would the Football League sides agree to this proposal? It is because The Premier League were threatening to withhold £5 million funding for youth schemes in the Football League. Under the new EPPP it is estimated that between 30-40 youth systems in the Football League will now be scrapped, such is the pure worthlessness of having such systems with this scheme in place.  

Many of the EPPP's components are good, development of top players in arguably better environments and with better coaching. Yet I don't know how anyone can defend poaching without adequate compensation as a positive step forward. With the aims and intentions of the EPPP it appears very positive and worthy of acclaim, however after closer inspection, the EPPP is potentially ripping the heart out of the game, they had to extort the Football League clubs to make this ridiculous plan pass.

Do we judge our players too early in this country?

Not enough account is taken of boys' 'peaks and troughs', of differing rates of physical and emotional development and differing maturation levels. The problem is that clubs feel the need to produce too much, too young to show their academy is working. Instead of being patient and developing players into adults. Now, if a player is not good enough at 15 than he is not going to make it, this is ridiculous.

We scout players at six and seven believing that we can judge their potential. In fact we may actually be doing a disservice to these young players, making them play so much football at a young age.  It has been found that different sports actually enhance a players mobility and too much of one sport will develop uni-lateral movements. A player who moves into adolescence then lacks the required movements needed for top level football.

When players are scouted between 10-14 it is the bigger players, those who have matured earlier who are given the opportunities to progress through the system. It may not be they are the best player, often they are not. But they are the most physical and this allows them to bully the rest. However, when they get older they are caught up and these “top players” become average, so if these are the ones going to the category 1 academies then they may not be the ones that are good enough to be a professional.

As good as coaching can be, if scouts are bringing in players solely on physical reasons and choosing those who have matured earlier, then we may be missing players with the intelligenceand technical development needed. We all know about late developers, yet the Academy system in this country neglects these players. Too much credence on size is another reason why we don’t develop enough quality players. It does not seem to appear that these plans have taken in to account for the differences in player maturation levels and how important lower league academies really can be. 

What will happen is that less, not more players will be produced. A player may develop at 18 years old and so would not have been seen by the watchful eyes of scouts, think Chris Smalling. Yet, if these academies decide that they cannot afford to maintain their academies because of the new rules then players like Smalling, who develop later, may be a thing of the past.

Are the top academies currently producing a string of brilliant players?

There is little firm evidence to indicate that the quality of coaching at bigger clubs is demonstrably better than that provided by the likes of Crystal Palace, Watford or Southampton. 

The big teams don’t develop their all own players, they will often bring them in from sides local to them when they are 14-16. This is a natural part of elite development, yet by reducing compensation to pittance, why would these “lower” clubs decide to develop players if they lose them at 14 for nothing. 

Is an academy that currently has two home-grown players (Chelsea) in its first team squad really ‘better’ than an academy that currently has 11 home-grown players (Crystal Palace) in its first team squad and in fact produces more graduates who go on to play Premier League football? 


The EPPP has in part been arranged so that apparent ‘better’ academies can have the best young players in the country. But this ranking system is flawed, and is accordant to the finance of academies rather than the effectiveness of producing players.  

These plans strike at simply being about the big teams hoovering up all the top talent in the country. Does movement to a big club create success? Look at John Bostock;  he was doing well with Palace before Spurs came in to poach him away. He has not played for Spurs in the league as of yet and has spent most of the time on loan to lower league sides. Would it not have been better for his development to stay where he was? Perhaps. 

No more development?

There is a real danger that many Football League clubs will struggle to retain young players capable of league football into their late teens under the new rules, especially when threatened with limited compensation. It is this compensation which many teams depend on.

This will bring to an end Premier League clubs paying large fees for the best young talent in the Football League. Chelsea this week reportedly shelled out an initial £1.5m to MK Dons for 14-year-old Oluwaseyi Ojo. Under the new system they would be able to buy him for less than £150,000. Palace received for Bostock, £700,000 compensation for him though, however with the new rules they would receive no more than £100,000. Is this fair or sustainable?

The fear must be that EPPP will cause many Football League clubs to rethink their youth setups. Given the scant rewards now on offer for finding the gem who would previously have made an academy worthwhile, change would be understandable.

Without the carrot of a big pay-out, surely there will be a growing tendency for clubs to ditch their academies altogether and pad out their squads with players rejected by the elite at an older age. 

With these new plans every Football League club has just given up the opportunity to produce top young players. Without fair compensation they are snatched away by the big boys.

If the smaller academies close the lower league teams will then have to pay the big Premiership clubs for players that didn't make the Premiership grade. Instead of money flowing down the pyramid it will flow up. 


Burnley have already closed their centre of excellence due to the new rules, claiming that it is just not viable to keep it going.  The money of running it could be better spent on the senior team as £1 million a year could go a long way. With low compensation, it does not justify the running costs.

However, if the Lower League academies did shut down, then we could be in serious problems of not producing players. Players like Tom Cleverley and Joe Hart came from Bradford City and Shrewsbury respectively before going to the top Manchester sides. Jack Wilshere was at Luton before Arsenal and Walcott, Bale and Chamberlain all were developed at Southampton. 


With these clubs they received the relevant compensation for these players when they were a young age, though this would not this be the case now. Imagine what this reduced revenue would do to these sides. Would these sides feel happy to lose their players for the small fees offered? It is just not sustainable for a lower league club. And so where would these players be? Playing for their Sunday sides? Is this going to produce world class players. 

The necessity of being category 1

There are three sides in the Championship who have developed more players through their academy than Chelsea and Man City in recent years.

Watford, Crystal Palace and Southampton are clubs who have paid attention to their academies and have aimed to fill their squad with products of their respective youth teams.

They do not produce young players solely, or even mainly, so they can sell them on to the biggest clubs in the country. They want academy products to remain with them and become integral to their first team.

Academy products like Nathaniel Clyne, Sean Scannell, Jonathan Williams and Wilfried Zaha have helped Palace to so far confound expectations outside of Selhurst Park, if not those of all Eagles fans. Imagine if John Bostock and Victor Moses had stayed at the club too? 

Watford and Southampton appeared to welcome the introduction of EPPP, saying that many of its less controversial elements have already been put in place by them for years. Both sides are applying for Category 1 status, thus reducing the danger of EPPP impinging on transfer fees they would currently receive for young talent. Yet, are these clubs "big" enough for EPPP, even though they have a history of developing talent? Surely it is the academies which genuinely develop players that need to be invested in more.

Nick Cox, Head of Youth at Watford believes that “The challenge for us is to keep on doing what we do. Parents who want their son to have a good education, first-class coaching sessions and to reach their full potential, will choose to stay with us at Watford. We have an environment where kids want to be and where they can enjoy themselves. They have an affinity to the club and feel part of the family, and I would suggest that many of our kids do not want to leave this Football Club. Moving forward we need to get to the point where that doesn’t change.”

This is honourable and one hopes that players developed at a club will feel an affinity to it and not be tempted to move clubs. Especially if it requires more travel time. Watford, Palace and Southampton have something a lot of top teams don’t, proven success. They have succeeded in developing players for senior football. 


The new rules may have a serious impact on the future development of players from these academies. Can you see them getting category 1? I hope but doubt it. It will go to the top teams, the ones with the money, the ones who have no need to genuinely develop young talent because they have the means to buy in talent. What will happen to these young, English, “top players”. Will they just be disregarded? Or will they just be loaned out to lower teams?

If these category 1 academies are going to be viewed as development centres for top players then perhaps it may improve the standard of English players. More quality coaching, facilties and contact time will certainly help improve the talent. Is it not scandalous though that the big teams will take players for barely nothing and then stand to make much more from potential transfer fees when they are older. This is the wrong way round surely?


 It should be the smaller clubs who stand to benefit more, not the big clubs. A rule must be in place that the club who loses a young player receives a % of a potential transfer fee in the future. There must be assurances and compensation for losing their top players, if not then these development centres will not be continued. 

What is the future going to contain?

I believe there are key changes needed for developing more players of high quality in this country. Whereas the intentions of EPPP are admirable, there are many issues which appear to have not been considered to be of importance. 


The EPPP is not a guarantee of success, in fact it has some serious ramifications to its implementation, There is a serious case that many lower league sides will seek to close and abandon youth development because it does not offer the necessary compensation to be affordable. 


There are many teams who would prefer to keep their best young players and implement them in their senior side, this way reducing costs on transfers. Yet receiving millions for your prospect is not a bad deal and could help a lot to develop more and improve the club. However, the new rules prevent this scenario and make it very difficult for clubs to justify their use of centres or academies. This could have serious long term consequences on the development of more players for the future and may have the opposite effect that the EPPP aims to achieve.


What I believe is important is educating and developing expert coaches throughout all levels., If we improved the standard of coaching at the grassroots level than we would have much larger pool of technically good players. These would then move up from development levels to elite levels and thus not requiring only the richest academies to develop our players.

Replicating what Barcelona have done will prove extremely difficult, and I predict, impossible. They have a culture which is different to ours and a style which does not resemble us either. We  are much more suited to the German model of youth development and this involved a combined effort of clubs and governing bodies. 

The Premier League itself is adamant that EPPP is a fair system and the reforms are necessary. But they could cause a long-term problem that will transform the landscape of youth development in the Football League, these are massive changes in the game, and call me a cynic, but I don’t see the value in these plans. More people should be questioning these plans and making sure we don't push England back another decade. 


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