Quote sally cinnamon="sally cinnamon"I think arguing too much about who was produced by where is missing the bigger picture. It's having access to quality players from your youth system. If you sign a player aged 18 from another team's youth system and he goes on to be a great player you get the benefit, they don't. It's like when people get stressed about whether a player was born in Warrington or Wigan or if he was born in Newton-le-Willows does this count as home grown or not. Arsenal picked up Cesc Fabregas from Barcelona as a 15 year old and they got the benefit of him for a while so anyone meeting the Fabregas criteria counts as home grown.
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I think this area is very important though as it's indicative of our ability of top talent identification at an early age (wherever they live), ability to compete with rival clubs for said top talent to recruit them and then the ability to develop them into top class players. We are not good at this, no point in ignoring the fact, we need to address it.
