How to Prepare Amortization Schedule in Excel: 10 Steps

How to Prepare Amortization Schedule in Excel: 10 Steps

This tutorial first appeared on www.wikinow.com

A look at the “Mourinho doesn’t like academy players” myth.

I recently read this article on Goal.com written by Srinivasan Mohan where he opined that “Mourinho's Chelsea return doesn't augur well for academy players”. This is in tandem with a widely-accepted claim that the self-styled Special One (or is it Happy One?) does not encourage his clubs’ academy players to make the transition to first teams, unlike big managers like Sir Alex (now retired), Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola. People who throw around these suppositions hardly bother to find out why, if at all such insinuations are actually valid. Well, here I try to look at the peculiar situations of Jose Mourinho’s last three big jobs with a view to finding out why academy players didn’t form the fulcrum of his teams.

There is no doubt that Jose Mourinho hardly promoted any youth team player at Chelsea during his first stint, but that’s simply because there wasn’t any top talent available in the youth team to be promoted. He was hired by Roman Abramovich to bring trophies to Stamford Bridge and given a war-chest to achieve that. He was not put in charge of the Academy, and the failure thereof cannot be put squarely on him. Since he left Chelsea, how many academy players have been promoted to the first team? One – Ryan Betrand, and even he cannot start for many Championship sides. Unlike what most people think, quality academies like Barcelona’s famed La Masia require huge level of funding, something most club owners don’t want to do. Okay, what of Inter? Well, as far as I know, the best young player in Inter was Mario Balotelli and he was used a lot by Mourinho despite his glaring behavioral flaws. David Santon played a lot of games too. At Real Madrid, he is credited to have used the academy players more than any Madrid manager in recent history. I remember both Nacho and Morata starting the 2-1 el-clasico win in April 2013. Of course he still made some strange decisions concerning the academy players, like not playing perhaps the academy’s best player, Jese Rodriguez.

Sir Alex Ferguson won the 1999 historic treble with a team which fulcrum was from the Manchester United Academy. In his tribute to Sir Alex Ferguson, United legend Gary Neville wrote that,: “both he (Sir Alex) and his assistants would work every single minute God sent with every single footballer at that club. It was not just youth team games he would come to watch. When we were 14-years-old he would even come down to watch us train as schoolboys on a Thursday night”. But in the years leading to his retirement, he had to dig more into the transfer market for quality. What changed? He simply didn’t have as much time with the youth teams as he used to due to the demands of the modern game.

Even Arsene Wenger, the "father" of academy players, has not been promoting players like he used to due to increased pressure by fans for quick success. In a typical Arsenal starting line-up these days, only Szczęsny, Gibbs and Wilshere are graduates of the club’s academies. The rest were sourced from other clubs.  

The reason why Pep Guardiola was successful bringing young players through at Barcelona was largely because he was the coach at Barcelona B and he had spent a year with the team, winning promotion, so he knew them. When he stepped up to the first team, he had no trouble bringing in his trusted lieutenants from the youth team set-up. Of course it still required a high level of confidence and bravery to replace the big stars with such budding talents as Sergio Busquets and Pedro, but the fact that he had spent quality time watching them play week-in, week-out made his decision easier to made. Contrast that with Tito Vilanova, his assistant for those four utterly successful years on the Camp Nou hotseat. Tito won the La Liga with Barcelona in his first year, but compared with Pep Guardiola he hardly used the young players. Isaac Cuenca and Gerard Deulofeu have gone on loan, Thiago Alcantara is on his way to Bayern Munich or Manchester United and no new youngster has really been promoted. In contrast, another young player Neymar was signed from Brazil for a reported €50-70 million from Santos. It is not like Tito doesn’t like Barca’s new La Masia players, it’s simply because he doesn’t really know them, at least in the way Pep did.

And how about Pep? He’s now the coach of Bayern Munich, and no, he’s not about to start scouring Bayern’s youth team for talents. He’s been busy buying the best young legs in Europe. Similarly, he has not abandoned his policy of using players from youth teams, but they have to be players he knows which is clearly not the case at Bayern Munich.

That is the situation Jose Mourinho has had to face at his clubs. Those clubs were in need of someone with some quick fixes and the chief of them all was Real Madrid. It’s the biggest club in the world, and managers are usually advised to be on the look-out for their next job the very day they’re appointed. This has been the problem with the club in the past decade, and Mourinho was able to bring some Castilla players through the first team simply because he had a whooping three years to work. As stated earlier, more players from the Real Madrid youth teams made their first team debuts under Mourinho than under any manager in recent times. Maybe he could have done more at his previous clubs, but again it was not his fault that those clubs didn’t have quality talents coming through the youth ranks.

The issue is only going to get worse because for most big clubs, and despite the threat of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rule, the priority is always to acquire ready-made stars that will guarantee immediate success and also bring in much-needed commercial gains. However, it does seem, at least to me, that most of the criticism leveled at Jose Mourinho has been very unfair and imbalanced.

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