08-05-2019, 08:12 AM
West Bromwich Albion’s academy is in the midst of the biggest shake-up in its history. The radical changes, instituted by the sporting and technical director Luke Dowling, have not come without controversy and anger.
In mid-June, the long-serving academy manager Mark Harrison agreed to leave The Hawthorns to join Aston Villa. A week or so later, on June 20, came an email that signalled a major cultural shift for the academy that was founded by Aidy Boothroyd in 2003, had its foundations laid by Dan Ashworth and was developed by Harrison in his 13 years at the helm.
The memo to all staff, which has been seen by The Athletic, banned coaches and players from the under 23s and academy from using the main entrance at the Baggies’ Great Barr training ground. They were forbidden from using the main staff canteen and meeting rooms at the training ground, while young players were told they could no longer use the main car park. All were privileges the academy had previously shared with the first team. The decision to revoke them left some staff feeling, in the words of one, like “second-class citizens”.
What followed was an exodus of senior academy figures, which some colleagues have claimed was prompted by Dowling’s decision to distance the academy from the first-team staff. The club dispute the link, insisting the exits of under-18s manager Mike Scott, under-23s coach Jamie Smith, long-serving youth coach Jimmy Shan and academy goalkeeping coach Mark Naylor were a predictable reaction to the loss of Harrison and the natural end of a cycle. West Brom have stressed that Dowling’s changes are designed to create a culture of greater aspiration for the club’s scholars.
Shan chose to move on and seek senior coaching roles, Scott has a new job at Derby and Smith is Darren Moore’s new assistant at Doncaster. Aston Villa are keen on Naylor, with Albion insisting promotion and pay rises are clear incentives.
Yet the loss of almost the whole management team takes Dowling and Albion back to the drawing board in the sphere of youth development. It marks the end of an era for an academy that began life playing catchup against its West Midlands rivals but enjoyed a string of success stories, even if more than they would have liked were ultimately played out at other clubs.
Whether or not the offending memo, sent by assistant club secretary Vanessa Gomm but understood to have originated at board level, is partly responsible for the mass departures or is merely a coincidence, there is little doubt it shook the established order. It spelled out a “new policy for the use of the training ground” and instructed all employees that “all academy and U23 players and staff should now use the alternative entrance to the training ground located at the rear of the canteen”.
It continued that all meeting rooms and the main canteen would be for the “sole use of first-team players and first-team staff”, with an alternative dining room provided for the academy in a former press conference room. And it spelled out that academy players would now need to park in an overspill area outside the training ground’s main gates, while academy staff would be given main car park spaces on a first come first served basis.
Unhappy staff pointed out the new instructions created grey areas. Where, for instance, did Jonathan Leko and Kyle Edwards, under-23 players who had made first-team appearances, fit into the new hierarchy? How would Shan, an academy coach who ended last season in caretaker charge of the first-team in a Championship playoff semi-final, be affected?
These staff members claimed the separation of the first team and academy would endanger the family atmosphere and obscure the clear route to the senior ranks that has given Albion an edge over their bigger-spending rivals in the talent recruitment and retention stakes. They believe the changes triggered the decisions of senior staff to seek new challenges, while the club claim Harrison’s exit was the driving force for those resignations.
“All that infrastructure that Mark has created has almost single-handedly been dismantled in five weeks,” said one insider. “It wasn’t broken so I’m not sure why it needed fixing.”
Another added that staff felt the changes were designed to “put them in their place.”
Dowling, though, believed something was broken, or at least that things could be made to work better. He was the first to take such drastic actions but not the first to suggest them. Tony Pulis, the former head coach, mooted the idea of segregating the training ground before first-team struggles took priority and the proposal was shelved.
Around the same time, some senior players voiced concerns about the ready access younger players were afforded to first-team luxuries. While many were happy to share their knowledge and experience, others believed such a comfortable co-existence created an impression that teenagers had ‘made it’ long before on-field results said the same. They pointed to Saido Berahino, the supremely talented ‘enfant terrible’ who became both one of the academy’s biggest successes and one of its biggest frustrations, as a prime case in point.
“If anybody thinks that Sam Field, Nathan Ferguson, Rekeem Harper and players like that aren’t decent human beings, we would argue that all day long,” retorted an academy insider, referring to the most recent graduates to break into the first team. Ferguson, who became a YouTube sensation while in the under-12 team for his breakdancing ability, was man of the match on his first-team debut against Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
Berahino’s first-team breakthrough remains the most sustained and significant in the academy’s story – a fact which cuts to the core of a second debate over just how successful the project has been. No-one disputes Ashworth, Harrison and their staff achieved plenty, building a structure from the ground up and recruiting and nurturing a steady stream of impressive West Midlands-born talent, supplemented with prospects lured from other parts of the country.
Yet while champions of the academy believe it consistently punched above its weight, more skeptical staff members insist it did well but no more. They point to a shortage of sustained first-team impact as a glaring hole, with Berahino’s 63 league starts and 23 goals the outlying statistic. Izzy Brown and George Thorne made a handful of senior appearances, while Sam Field and Rekeem Harper are early into their quest to become established.
It is a fact that frustrates academy employees too, but staff also point out that Albion games are just part of the story. A string of youngsters, from the Liverpool-bound Jerome Sinclair and Yan Dhanda to Brown, now of Chelsea, and Louie Barry and Morgan Rogers, who have joined Barcelona and Manchester City this summer. Rogers moved to the Etihad Stadium for £4.2 million, which added to good fees received from Derby County for Thorne and Leeds for Tyler Roberts, plus more modest sums for Kemar Roofe and Luke Daniels among others.
And defenders of the academy say productivity statistics place Albion in the top five of England’s 14 category-one academies, given it works on the smallest budget, and they claim that, while Barry was determined to join Barca, Rogers could have been persuaded to stay and commanded a much bigger fee in the future.
“The one thing that people have praised over the last couple of years is the academy,” one employee said. “We are producing really good players. If they’re not getting into the first team then that’s another argument. There is something not quite right at the club.
“Years ago the club wasn’t ready for that level of players because the club weren’t in that place. We’ve got better now but we do still get the odd one that leaves. If the big clubs have a player that they think will play in their first team they will come and get them. The only way you can stop them is to get them in and around the first team quickly.”
In the coming weeks a new leadership team will emerge to take over an academy with a crop of under 23s for whom outgoing staff have high hopes. Strikers Jamie Soule and Nick Clayton-Phillips, attacking midfielders Finn Azaz and Rahaam Tulloch and defenders Tom Solanke and Ferguson are all said to be potential first-team players.
It will be up to Dowling and his chosen lieutenants to take over their development and that of the younger players coming through. For the first time in its history, an academy that has prided itself on continuity is changing direction. An exciting blank canvas or a worrying void? Time will tell.
Written by Steve Madeley
In mid-June, the long-serving academy manager Mark Harrison agreed to leave The Hawthorns to join Aston Villa. A week or so later, on June 20, came an email that signalled a major cultural shift for the academy that was founded by Aidy Boothroyd in 2003, had its foundations laid by Dan Ashworth and was developed by Harrison in his 13 years at the helm.
The memo to all staff, which has been seen by The Athletic, banned coaches and players from the under 23s and academy from using the main entrance at the Baggies’ Great Barr training ground. They were forbidden from using the main staff canteen and meeting rooms at the training ground, while young players were told they could no longer use the main car park. All were privileges the academy had previously shared with the first team. The decision to revoke them left some staff feeling, in the words of one, like “second-class citizens”.
What followed was an exodus of senior academy figures, which some colleagues have claimed was prompted by Dowling’s decision to distance the academy from the first-team staff. The club dispute the link, insisting the exits of under-18s manager Mike Scott, under-23s coach Jamie Smith, long-serving youth coach Jimmy Shan and academy goalkeeping coach Mark Naylor were a predictable reaction to the loss of Harrison and the natural end of a cycle. West Brom have stressed that Dowling’s changes are designed to create a culture of greater aspiration for the club’s scholars.
Shan chose to move on and seek senior coaching roles, Scott has a new job at Derby and Smith is Darren Moore’s new assistant at Doncaster. Aston Villa are keen on Naylor, with Albion insisting promotion and pay rises are clear incentives.
Yet the loss of almost the whole management team takes Dowling and Albion back to the drawing board in the sphere of youth development. It marks the end of an era for an academy that began life playing catchup against its West Midlands rivals but enjoyed a string of success stories, even if more than they would have liked were ultimately played out at other clubs.
Whether or not the offending memo, sent by assistant club secretary Vanessa Gomm but understood to have originated at board level, is partly responsible for the mass departures or is merely a coincidence, there is little doubt it shook the established order. It spelled out a “new policy for the use of the training ground” and instructed all employees that “all academy and U23 players and staff should now use the alternative entrance to the training ground located at the rear of the canteen”.
It continued that all meeting rooms and the main canteen would be for the “sole use of first-team players and first-team staff”, with an alternative dining room provided for the academy in a former press conference room. And it spelled out that academy players would now need to park in an overspill area outside the training ground’s main gates, while academy staff would be given main car park spaces on a first come first served basis.
Unhappy staff pointed out the new instructions created grey areas. Where, for instance, did Jonathan Leko and Kyle Edwards, under-23 players who had made first-team appearances, fit into the new hierarchy? How would Shan, an academy coach who ended last season in caretaker charge of the first-team in a Championship playoff semi-final, be affected?
These staff members claimed the separation of the first team and academy would endanger the family atmosphere and obscure the clear route to the senior ranks that has given Albion an edge over their bigger-spending rivals in the talent recruitment and retention stakes. They believe the changes triggered the decisions of senior staff to seek new challenges, while the club claim Harrison’s exit was the driving force for those resignations.
“All that infrastructure that Mark has created has almost single-handedly been dismantled in five weeks,” said one insider. “It wasn’t broken so I’m not sure why it needed fixing.”
Another added that staff felt the changes were designed to “put them in their place.”
Dowling, though, believed something was broken, or at least that things could be made to work better. He was the first to take such drastic actions but not the first to suggest them. Tony Pulis, the former head coach, mooted the idea of segregating the training ground before first-team struggles took priority and the proposal was shelved.
Around the same time, some senior players voiced concerns about the ready access younger players were afforded to first-team luxuries. While many were happy to share their knowledge and experience, others believed such a comfortable co-existence created an impression that teenagers had ‘made it’ long before on-field results said the same. They pointed to Saido Berahino, the supremely talented ‘enfant terrible’ who became both one of the academy’s biggest successes and one of its biggest frustrations, as a prime case in point.
“If anybody thinks that Sam Field, Nathan Ferguson, Rekeem Harper and players like that aren’t decent human beings, we would argue that all day long,” retorted an academy insider, referring to the most recent graduates to break into the first team. Ferguson, who became a YouTube sensation while in the under-12 team for his breakdancing ability, was man of the match on his first-team debut against Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
Berahino’s first-team breakthrough remains the most sustained and significant in the academy’s story – a fact which cuts to the core of a second debate over just how successful the project has been. No-one disputes Ashworth, Harrison and their staff achieved plenty, building a structure from the ground up and recruiting and nurturing a steady stream of impressive West Midlands-born talent, supplemented with prospects lured from other parts of the country.
Yet while champions of the academy believe it consistently punched above its weight, more skeptical staff members insist it did well but no more. They point to a shortage of sustained first-team impact as a glaring hole, with Berahino’s 63 league starts and 23 goals the outlying statistic. Izzy Brown and George Thorne made a handful of senior appearances, while Sam Field and Rekeem Harper are early into their quest to become established.
It is a fact that frustrates academy employees too, but staff also point out that Albion games are just part of the story. A string of youngsters, from the Liverpool-bound Jerome Sinclair and Yan Dhanda to Brown, now of Chelsea, and Louie Barry and Morgan Rogers, who have joined Barcelona and Manchester City this summer. Rogers moved to the Etihad Stadium for £4.2 million, which added to good fees received from Derby County for Thorne and Leeds for Tyler Roberts, plus more modest sums for Kemar Roofe and Luke Daniels among others.
And defenders of the academy say productivity statistics place Albion in the top five of England’s 14 category-one academies, given it works on the smallest budget, and they claim that, while Barry was determined to join Barca, Rogers could have been persuaded to stay and commanded a much bigger fee in the future.
“The one thing that people have praised over the last couple of years is the academy,” one employee said. “We are producing really good players. If they’re not getting into the first team then that’s another argument. There is something not quite right at the club.
“Years ago the club wasn’t ready for that level of players because the club weren’t in that place. We’ve got better now but we do still get the odd one that leaves. If the big clubs have a player that they think will play in their first team they will come and get them. The only way you can stop them is to get them in and around the first team quickly.”
In the coming weeks a new leadership team will emerge to take over an academy with a crop of under 23s for whom outgoing staff have high hopes. Strikers Jamie Soule and Nick Clayton-Phillips, attacking midfielders Finn Azaz and Rahaam Tulloch and defenders Tom Solanke and Ferguson are all said to be potential first-team players.
It will be up to Dowling and his chosen lieutenants to take over their development and that of the younger players coming through. For the first time in its history, an academy that has prided itself on continuity is changing direction. An exciting blank canvas or a worrying void? Time will tell.
Written by Steve Madeley
