Building a Championship from Within

Sports have changed in so many ways over the 140 or so years that professional sports have existed. Back in those, players were bought and sold for sacks of food, but in the present, every year in world soccer the transfer fee record has a chance to be broken, which was broken this past summer by Manchester United (England) signing the French midfielder Paul Pogba from Juventes (Italy) for £89m roughly $115.5m. Source: Sky Sports. 

While the big money clubs spend every penny possible to get the best players to create the best possible team. Low budget clubs have to keep up with the big boys by using extensive scouting to find potential good players on economic deals. Since all there transfer deals are usually big gambles for the club, the best hope for the club is that one player every year breaks through and is worth more than what they had paid for. A great example of this would be the transfer of Robin Van Persie to Arsenal (England) from Feyenoord (Netherlands) for £2.75m ($4.17m). It's fair to say he was more than worth that fee scoring 96 goals in 194 games during his 8 year tenure with the club. Source: The Telegraph. But on the other hand when too many transfers are not successful and a club spend too much money it could lead to the club's worst nightmare, relegation.

Getting relegated from the top division to the second tier, or even second to third, third to fourth, etc: isn't necessarily the end of the world for a club. Usually after getting demoted from a higher division, other teams that remained in the higher division or newly promoted teams will go after that demoted team's best players to create some extra revenue for the club. Then there are some options what a club can do with that revenue.

Option one would trying invest that money into a few players that could be an immediate impact but in the long term by the time the club reaches the top division again those players may not good enough or young enough to compete at the top level. That's the crazy thing about sports and being a paid athlete, their careers truly start around age 20 but by the time they're 35 years old they may not be physically good enough, they could lose their speed or their strength to keep up with the new young guns.

The second option for a demoted team with money would be to invest into their own academy. For those who don't what an academy is in world soccer let me briefly describe it. The academy is the soccer version of minor league baseball or the developmental league in basketball. It is a lower level team usually made up players from age 18-22, similar to collegiate athletics but the major difference between an academy and all the other examples I listed is that clubs may sign players at any age. Usually the kids are separated into different age groups for competition, but no matter what nationality or age any young kid could sign for any club, Lionel Messi arguably the greatest player of all time but never played professionally in his home country of Argentina because at the age of 13 years old the Spanish giant Barcelona FC signed Messi to their academy. Back to the positives of investing into an academy. It is by far cheaper to build an academy because of kid’s low wages, regularly getting pay raises as they get older and move closer to the professional squad. Also there is no transfer fee to pay to another club because the young kid isn't owned by any club yet. But there is less guarantee that these academy player will be successful pros.

At the end of it all both options have their positives and negatives. No matter the size of the club big, medium, small every club has an academy for the future plans and every club will purchase players for the present. When you're a small club and those cheap potential good players end up working out to be good and your academy produces enough good players then your small club can have a magical season like Leicester City had last season defying their 5000-1 odds to win the English Premier League.