English football - Looney Toon' transfer market and how to fix it

This could probably be in another forum section, but it feels like I'm talking to myself in there, so I'm posting it here.


I read this : BBC

and I'm just wondering if there's an easy solution to fixing everything going with English football. I think there's a solution that will be beneficial for English club football and the national side. I spotted an interesting comment on FB and I concur.

You can make it mandatory that any team in the English league system must have at any given moment X players from their own academy on the pitch. Obviously this will not happen over night, but you can set the ruling and add one player each season up until the year there's X players as a requirement.
While doing this you could enable all academy players to be protected by the motherclub until 18 years of age. This would solve clubs with CL sniping young talents for zilch other clubs have spent eons on developing. An example here would be Arsenal just picking up Daniel Crawley.

It would arguably also imrove the lower league quality as the players can't just be stacked in EPL clubs to be loaned out.

I've always found football to be about grassroot football, players having a connection with the club they play for etc. I refuse to give up on the idea that this can return.

Good points Joppe,

It a shambles at the moment with the "money clubs" basically taking the P*** and just poaching all the best young talent as and when they see fit. Car's to Daddy and Mummy, crazy financial rewards etc etc... it's akin to bribery really. This creates their starlets for the future whilst draining talent and precious resources from everyone else and leaving them bereft of decent new talent and thus of course ultimately the status quo of the top few clubs is maintained and it's impossible for anyone to catch them up.

The fact that the FA or Fifa have not put in place regulations to prevent this speaks volumes for what they are about!

The only concern i have Joppe is if those regulations were in place the FAT CAT clubs would merely start poaching them at a younger age when they would effectively have catacombed them in until they reached 18.

No doubt they would soon find a way to discard the ones who didn't make the grade of course!

Well the English FA could simply include a ruling that says all players are protected by the mother club until 18 years of age. Obviously this could for a percentage of players limit their development as they can't work out with better players, but I think that's very very few players. Even at 18 years old a player has plenty of years left to develop. And the bonus here is that if the player chooses to leave at 18 years of age, the mother club will be well compensated. Not this tribunal shite where you get pennies

I don't know if there is some kind of trickle-down economics going on between the leagues but if there's not, there should be.

To use a completely arbitrary figure, each league should give 20% of their income to the league below it and 10% to the league below that. The money used to develop academy football. Add in a bit of protection against greedy poaching of children from the massive clubs and that's a decent start

Two things will stop such things from happening:
1. Corrupt scumbags at the very top of the game who will want to maintain the status quo.
2. Fucking lawyers who want to make their filthy lucre on the back of "restriction of trade" bollocks.