West Ham’s acclaimed ‘Academy of Football’ is well known for churning out young and promising talents year on year, with the elite of those going on to bigger and better things. The likes of Rio Ferdinand, Michael Carrick and Joe Cole have all graduated through the West Ham youth system to go on to become established England internationals whilst achieving domestic and continental glory.
However, in the last half decade or so the Academy has gone through a little bit of a downturn, at least from the outside looking in it appears that way. A changing in the guard from Tony Carr to Terry Westley inevitably led to sweeping changes at Chadwell Heath, but has it affected the Academy itself? I spoke with Journalist & West Ham Academy reporter Tommy Wathen about the current state of affairs.
Sam Allardyce recently came out and talked about how difficult it is for some of the Academy prospects to break into the first team set up. Why do you think this is?
In my opinion, the gap between the first team and the Academy at a lot of English football clubs has grown over the past few years. Academy teams are full of young prospects that have a chance to progress through the system, but the demand for finishing in a high position in the Premier League every season for example is too much pressure for the first team manager. It’s all well and good saying that it would be nice to see a youth player given a chance in the first team, but it’s the manager that will have to ultimately take the blame if that risk doesn’t pay off.
West Ham have some good players in their Academy at the moment, but I feel that Sam has a plan to help West Ham finish as high up the table as possible and the youth players at the club unfortunately are not part of that plan.
What’s changed at Chadwell Heath since Terry Westley replaced Tony Carr as the man overseeing development with the West Ham youth ranks?
Not much from my point of view. Tony Carr’s management of the Academy is second to none in this country when you look at the players he has produced over the years. Tony still has an involvement now at the club but Terry has been brought in the manage the way the Academy works and work out a plan for producing future first team players.
I’ve interviewed Terry a few times and he is very adamant that playing the Academy boys at a higher age group is the way that the club will produce first team stars. We’ve seen players like Reece Burke and Reece Oxford around the first team this season, but even looking at the amount of U18 and U16 players that are regularly playing for Steve Potts’ Development Squad or even younger featuring for the U18’s.
Terry is a very knowledgeable man and knows how to produce good footballers. I feel that the Academy is in good hands and hopefully we will see more players pushing up even higher over the next few years.
A number of Academy prospects have been released in the last few months, or set to be released at the end of the season. What’s do you think the reasoning behind this is?
Not all footballers are going to be the next Mark Noble or James Tomkins and stay with the Hammers for the majority of their career. Football is forever changing and some players feel like they need to leave the club to start a new path for their career.
For them, football is a job and if they don’t feel that West Ham can give them what they want then they are well within their right to go and seek something elsewhere.
Westley was at Birmingham at the same time as Gold, Sullivan and Brady. Do you fear that our youth system will go the way of Birmingham’s back when Westley was there and be abolished?
Not at all. Like I said, I’ve interviewed Terry a couple of times and he is very knowledgeable about how to develop future talent for the first team. The club is working hard with the necessary people at the club to make sure that the players in our youth academy have the best chance of progressing into first team football.
West Ham’s Development Squad has been quite poor this season. You’ve been able to see a lot of their fixtures, what do you see when you watch the EDS, and do you think it’s a coaching or personnel problem?
I’m guessing this question is suggesting that it’s been a poor season based purely on the results that they’ve achieved this season. Although winning the U21 league would be nice, Academy football is not about winning games and winning tournaments. West Ham have had possibly the youngest team, not just at U21 but throughout their Academy structure, in each of the leagues they enter.
If you look closely at the players that have featured for the Hammers U21 this season, you’d notice that a large group of them are still U18 or U16 players that have been pushed up. You’ve got Reece Oxford, Josh Pask, Jordan Brown, Djair Parfitt-Williams, Sam Howes, Kyle Knoyle, Reece Burke, Vashon Neufville, Matt Carter and many more that have all stepped up a level and performed very well against much older players.
When you push players up, you are risking losing matches but at the end of the day, you are creating an environment that matches a first team match. Everything that the Academy coaches do with the players is aimed at that one goal of helping them develop into future first team footballers, not winning Reserve cups and tournaments.
Have the sweeping changes to the way the Academy is run since Westley’s appointment been the reason for the decline in youth production?
As I mentioned earlier, there hasn’t been a decline of youth production at West Ham. It’s just maybe seems like that because they are not progressing into our first team.
It’s not just happening at West Ham though and other clubs are in the same situation. The Premier League is the biggest, best, richest league in the world. Only so many players can play in each game and they have to be the best players in the world to get in the teams.
Who do you think are some of West Ham’s brightest young prospects coming through right now, and do they have what it takes to break into the first team in the coming years?
It’s hard to pick a few out as I genuinely believe that there are a number of decent youth players in our system at the moment. I really do urge fans to head to the games and watch the players more often as it’s the only way to get a real picture of what’s happening at the Academy.
All U18 games that are usually at Little Heath are always open to the public with both free admission and free parking, whilst Development Squad games maybe a couple of quid now and again but the football is entertaining and worth watching.
Known for churning out a number of established England regulars, looking at the current crop of youngsters, is another generation of talent like those we saw in the late 1990s-early 2000’s on the horizon?
It’s hard to say because I’m not a youth coach and not exactly got that eye for who will make it through the system and who won’t.
There is plenty of talent in the Academy at the moment, but whether they make it or not is up to the management teams at the club.
If you had to pick one player at the academy that you think will develop into a future England international, who do you think it is and why?
We’ve got a number of players already representing England at a variety of ages. Sam Howes, Vashon Neufville, Jahmal Hector-Ingram, Anthony Scully, Reece Burke, Reece Oxford, Kyle Knoyle. If anyone has a chance to continue through the system internationally, I suppose it would be them.
Check out more from Tommy Wathen on his website.
