There are lots from many teams' academies about. The thing is, you can't

fund an ever growing academy, so at a certain stage especially when it comes to the time of needing to offer a professional contract, you feel you haven't seen enough of a player to warrant it, and so you can either take the financial gamble of offering a contract to a player just in case he pushes on, or let him go and hope that another team can press the right button your team hasn't found. Or in the case of the younger ones, sometimes you see other bright prospects and decide it is a better option to let them go in order to free up spots for new prospects to come in.

Some of those players will drift away from football. HOWEVER, in my opinion we should be proud that so many of our old prospects are still in the game because it means our academy has given them the foundation in terms of work ethic and understanding of what they need to do to make the grade, that they've managed to do this after leaving.

And of course sometimes we will get frustrated when they do really well elsewhere but actually as I said that's a great testament to our youth programme.

A case in point is Carlton Morris. We clearly rated him highly for some reason as we kept him around for so long despite injuries and not showing his promise when given the rare chance, and also didn't exactly set the world alight during his loan spells either. At some point I guess somebody has decided it's not happening fast enough and so let him go, and he's done superbly ever since. So well done to the lad, but we really did keep him long past when we might usually given the lack of production. We gave him the chance and it didn't happen until after he left. Toffolo similar story and I hope it turns out that way for Louis Thompson soon too!

And of course those like Mehmeti who were't local but brought into the academy show how our scouts at youth level have done a good job. Unfortunately nobody has a crystal ball. For every Max Aarons there's a Ravel Morrison.

Posted By: Legacy Fan, Feb 5, 12:00:33