Soccer: City expand search for young players

Manchester City, who among European clubs have one of the better recent track records in developing local talent, are embarking on an Arsene Wenger-style model of bringing in young players from outside, amid concerns that the current crop of youngsters do not have what it takes to help fulfil the club's huge ambition.

City were FA Youth Cup winners last year and 2006 finalists but there is a belief at the club that after developing far too many players for Championship-level and lower, they must now look beyond Manchester.

With a new network of 12 overseas scouts installed, there appears to be a greater prospect of City pursuing talent abroad as they seek to build towards Champions League football.

The chief executive, Garry Cook, insisted that aspiring to the Wenger model did not necessarily mean spending big on young players. "There's often an opinion that we are abandoning [a youth system] ... because we're just going to keep buying players," Cook said.

"That's actually the antithesis of what we're trying to do. We needed to go through the first phase which was to build the first-team squad and then underneath that start to plan the next phases."

But the new model, which is expected to see Mark Hughes draw on overseas scouts in a way that Wenger at Arsenal, Manchester United's Sir Alex Ferguson and various Chelsea managers have all done, represent a significant cultural shift for a club built on local potential.

When the FA Youth Cup side assembled by former academy director Jim Cassell played Frank Arnesen's lavishly assembled Chelsea squad - including Jacob Mellis, signed for £40,000 ($90,000) rising to £2 million from Sheffield United, and Michael Woods, one of the two signings from Leeds for whom Chelsea paid £4 million - in last year's final, the joke was that while Chelsea's pre-match preparations had taken place in Sardinia, City's were in Failsworth. City won 1-0.

While Cassell delivered 26 players to the first team with minimal resources, six of whom had been coached since the age of nine at Platt Lane near the club's old Maine Road ground, only the Czech teenager Vladimir Weiss of the current crop looks a likely contender for the City first XI of the future.

City's dismal 1-0 defeat against Abu Dhabi last week did little to enhance the sense that there is an abundance of young stars.

Cook said that the Wenger model was the only way of shielding City from a transfer market where the club faced inflated demands.

"Financially, it's a better model than the one you get into negotiating a market price that has no pre-determining factors other than the supply and demand, which says, 'How badly do you want that player?' and then that will determine the price," Cook said.

"That's a model I don't subscribe to and I don't want to be beholden unto that model. I would rather control or manage our destiny over the long term.

"When you talk about this January, I don't think we are ready for all those plans yet but if we are making any additions it will be to strengthen the existing squad."

Weiss's development shows that City have been willing to look abroad in the past, although Cassell, now in a new role overseeing an Abu Dhabi international football academy, was always an advocate of local talent.

"We looked around locally because we didn't have a good deal of financial resources when we started," he said last year.

"If you look through history at who's come through - the West Ham academy with Joe Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard, who were local; Michael Owen at Liverpool; Wayne Rooney at Everton; the Manchester United group, [Paul] Scholes, [Gary and Phil] Neville - that's important."

Ched Evans expressed the frustration of some players at City when he left to seek first team football at Sheffield United.

"A few years ago it was about bringing through their youngsters and watching them develop," he said. "There are not going to be many teenagers coming through anymore."

- INDEPENDENT