Stephen Kenny thinks we might have seen the last of ‘the great players’.
Former Republic of Ireland manager Stephen Kenny is alarmed by the lack of contact hours Irish teenagers are having with coaches in the Irish academy system.
The onus has been put on Ireland to develop its own teenagers since Brexit ruled that players cannot move to British clubs until they are eighteen years of age.
The issue is that part-time training with League of Ireland academy teams is no substitute for the professional training afforded by even the smallest clubs in the English Football League.
Years of government underfunding, partially explained by scandals around John Delaney (and to a lesser extent, Jonathan Hill), has left the Irish game with just ten full time academy coaches and talented teens are not having their skills developed properly as a consequence.
Some players like 16-year-old Mason Melia avoid the issue by training with the St Patrick’s Athletic first team but not everyone can make the leap – and even if they do, they still miss out in other ways.
Largely because senior football training tends to be more game-focused than technique-oriented academy sessions.
“We don’t have full-time academies,” said Kenny after leading St Pat’s to a 3-1 Conference League qualifier win over Vaduz on Thursday night.
“We don’t have the infrastructure to develop players. It’s chronically underfunded, nowhere near the level of training hours.
“Why is that? I am in the FAI a lot, probably what’s happened is the opposite, we have cut back in the funding for the international underage teams, absolutely cut back massively.
“They have a bigger role to play than they ever had, the camps should be longer as the players are at home but we have cut back funding as the money isn’t there.
“All the international teams are really, really stretched. They don’t have the contact hours now that they had previously, in that period when we brought all those players through but they have been cut back, year on year, the financial constraints.
“Not having full-time academies, the only thing that can help it is if a player is training with a first team, playing at first team level.”
Kenny finished his point by suggesting that all the ingredients he mentioned will result in Ireland failing to produce any great players in the future.
A combination of schoolboy club and English academy training moulded the likes of Roy Keane, Robbie Keane and Damien Duff but future generations will have no such luxury.
“It’s hard, you wonder with the great players…. will we ever recreate that?” wondered Kenny.
“If they don’t get the opportunity to go to academies at sixteen, is that going to be a thing of the past – all those great Irish players who came through?
“There is good intentions to have full-time academies and Marc Canham’s development plan and so forth but I don’t know if anyone is really taking it seriously, the level of funding it needs
“I mean at Government level, not FAI level.”
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