Quote: stpatricks "Spot on the signing of any young player for a 5 year contract eg Burrows, Maguire, Tomkins will impact on the break through of other young players. Its great to develop a team from your academy but as long as young players are not lost to the game I don't care were they are developed or were they end up playing.'"
This is a point that often gets missed when older players are signed. At Warrington Rhys Evans was just starting to emerge as a big prospect in the academy and we signed Brett Hodgson, some fans whinged about this saying if we are going to sign an Aussie, why sign one who is over 30, we should have signed a guy who was in his early 20s and could give us longer service....but if we'd done that it would have been very hard to keep Evans because he would have seen no light at the end of the tunnel.
Almost always fans will be negative when an older player is signed but sometimes the coaching staff will identify a potential prospect in the Academy who is a couple of years away from being a first teamer, and sign an older player for that position because the older player will just hold fort while you get the younger lad to bulk up and start to pick up some first team experience as a fringe player. Otherwise sometimes players come through at the wrong time and they want to leave because they don't want to be second string, this is how we got Briers from Saints and Hull got Briscoe from Wigan (Radlinski was still in his 20s when Briscoe came through and nobody knew then that his career would end fairly young).
Also in football I've often heard United's youth team being criticised because people said "they produced a load of players in 1992, but then there were only the odd one like Brown, O'Shea and Fletcher emerge in the next decade and a half"....yes....because all those guys from the team of 92 were in the team for the long term. The only way you can keep churning players out of the Academy into the first team is if the previous cohort were not good enough to stay long term.
