You can’t say I didn’t warn you!

[Hound]

Players of Olise’s quality don’t come along every 3 years and we’d be selling for about 1.5m to a champ club now rather than 10m to a prem team with us being L1

[Snowflake Royal]

The Olise money kept the club alive. If we hadnt been in dire straights it would have paid for the upkeep of the academy for many years.

It's highly unlikely that future Olise's would choose RFC if it wasnt cat1.

if a £10m player comes through every 3 years or so, the academy is cost neutral. on top if that it provides squad players on lower wages than the club would have to pay than were they players signed through the transfer market.

It's also a finishing school for partly developed players. used properly and we would be signing 16 year olds from cat2s and developing them and selling them on for more. given the financial constraints of recent years we wont have been doing much academy recruitment either.

closing the academy or down grading it, given our small fanbase, would consign RFC to a similar size of club as any other club in england who cant get more than 12k at home on a bank holiday.

Olise wouldn’t join Reading in L1 Cat 1 academy or not. And he joined Reading probably more for the chance of progression into the first team to put him in the shop window than Academy.

The fact is we've been doing well off the Cat 1 Academy in L1 off the back of Championship level intakes. That's not going to continue.

[Linden Jones' Tash]

Players of Olise’s quality don’t come along every 3 years and we’d be selling for about 1.5m to a champ club now rather than 10m to a prem team with us being L1

Agreed - whilst it's lovely to have a Cat 1 Acadeny and brag about it, the money to run it will be at the expense of other things, such as the first team squad....

[Snowflake Royal]

Players of Olise’s quality don’t come along every 3 years and we’d be selling for about 1.5m to a champ club now rather than 10m to a prem team with us being L1

In the Championship they came along about 1 in 10 years, let alone L1, so completely agree.

Where's our next big money Academy sale?

Garcia? Struggling to make the bench, no one else is even close. Borgnis? Osho? Spencer? Not likely.

[WestYorksRoyal]

Our Academy and facilities would not look out of place at clubs like Brighton and Crystal Palace, and probably surpass some lower PL clubs like Bournemouth. The problem is they're massive white elephants for the club we are, and nobody has scaled them back to reflect a decade of stagnation.

It was always the big question mark whether new owners would keep them and build their entire strategy around climbing the pyramid again, or cut cloth to make us more sustainable in L1. Couhig seems to be suggesting he's going for the former. But with a top 6 playing staff budget and high overheads, it means there is not route to sustainability in L1.

Whereas if we were a Championship club, you could see the likes of Garcia and Savage generating the transfer revenue we need to make the model worthwhile. As it is in L1, they'd be another Azeez at best - useful money but barely touches the sides of operating losses. The crunch point with Savage will be this summer; either convince him that he can realise his ambitions here and extend his contract, or sell while he still has 12 months left. Plus he's not even an academy product anyway, so perhaps irrelevant to this debate (though Bearwood would have made a good impression and our reputation for developing youngsters would have helped too).

[Stranded]

Our Academy and facilities would not look out of place at clubs like Brighton and Crystal Palace, and probably surpass some lower PL clubs like Bournemouth. The problem is they're massive white elephants for the club we are, and nobody has scaled them back to reflect a decade of stagnation.

It was always the big question mark whether new owners would keep them and build their entire strategy around climbing the pyramid again, or cut cloth to make us more sustainable in L1. Couhig seems to be suggesting he's going for the former. But with a top 6 playing staff budget and high overheads, it means there is not route to sustainability in L1.

Whereas if we were a Championship club, you could see the likes of Garcia and Savage generating the transfer revenue we need to make the model worthwhile. As it is in L1, they'd be another Azeez at best - useful money but barely touches the sides of operating losses. The crunch point with Savage will be this summer; either convince him that he can realise his ambitions here and extend his contract, or sell while he still has 12 months left. Plus he's not even an academy product anyway, so perhaps irrelevant to this debate (though Bearwood would have made a good impression and our reputation for developing youngsters would have helped too).

They wouldn't look out of place at a Palace or a Bournemouth as neither have Cat 1 Academies.

[Orion1871]

Can you even apply for category 1 if you've lost it twice? I'm sure I read somewhere, maybe a poster on here, that if you do lose it twice you can't get it back again at least for a number of years. Although that might be if you're stripped of it twice instead of giving it up voluntarily.

If you don't have it then surely there is very little point in having a training ground like Bearwood if you are running an academy that isn't the same size or quality? You either have to have another team train there or sell it completely and move somewhere else.

If another team trains there then that team will likely have an agreement for a set number of years, which likely makes it difficult to just kick them out if you get into the Championship or PL and fancy having a category 1 academy again.

If you sell the training ground and buy land for a smaller one then you have to build that site, and if you want category 1 again you have to spend even more money to build the smaller site up, and that's if you find a site that has the possibility to be extended.

Even if I hallucinated the part about not being able to apply three times I still don't see how you get it back for at least a decade if we decided to downgrade.

[Hound]

I don’t think the training ground is necessarily totally linked to the academy. You could easily keep the training ground as it is without a Cat1

As a cat2 you’d still have all the Age group teams that use it now. Maybe some of the classrooms etc won’t be used but it’s not a huge part of the site overall

[Scutterbucketz]

It's overspending that destroys clubs. There's a reason we're the only L1 club with a Cat 1 Academy.

Having a Category 1 academy won't destroy us, but it doesn't limit us to the spending power of, at best, an average League One club.

Average income in L1 is under £10m, a Cat 1 Academy costs about £2.5m - £4m. It's about a third of our income and crippling long term.

The spending power of an average L1 club for transfers is maybe £250k, most transfers are frees.

There are Championship clubs who don’t think they can afford a Cat 1 Academy.

I’m no expert, but isn’t it more a case of; once it’s gone it’s not coming back? The largest expense is setting these things up. Any ongoing costs are hopefully subsidised by any talent produced, which has been to a very high standard in recent years.

[Hound]

All the necessary infrastructure except the staff will still be there

[South Coast Royal]

Our Academy and facilities would not look out of place at clubs like Brighton and Crystal Palace, and probably surpass some lower PL clubs like Bournemouth. The problem is they're massive white elephants for the club we are, and nobody has scaled them back to reflect a decade of stagnation.

It was always the big question mark whether new owners would keep them and build their entire strategy around climbing the pyramid again, or cut cloth to make us more sustainable in L1. Couhig seems to be suggesting he's going for the former. But with a top 6 playing staff budget and high overheads, it means there is not route to sustainability in L1.

Whereas if we were a Championship club, you could see the likes of Garcia and Savage generating the transfer revenue we need to make the model worthwhile. As it is in L1, they'd be another Azeez at best - useful money but barely touches the sides of operating losses. The crunch point with Savage will be this summer; either convince him that he can realise his ambitions here and extend his contract, or sell while he still has 12 months left. Plus he's not even an academy product anyway, so perhaps irrelevant to this debate (though Bearwood would have made a good impression and our reputation for developing youngsters would have helped too).

Just a bit of local input on Bournemouth.

The ground is of course small but plans are in place due to take place next Summer for development of the ground taking capacity up to over 20,000.
That investment will be nothing compared to the brand spanking new training ground and facilities that have been estimated at costing some £30 million-it is like a deluxe new housing estate and is a major step-up from using Canford School.

As for our category 1 who knows whether we got Olise because of that or just for being near his home city rather than Manchester.
Brentford have done very well with recruitment despite not having such a category as have Brighton and Palace has always done well bringing their own players through.

In Bournemouth's case they have had 2 rich owners in recent years fully prepared to invest and thereby keep the club in the Premier League.
They had a Russian with plenty of money and then a Yank who also owns other football clubs and is prepared to spend big whereas we had a Russian with no money, Thais interested more in property, a crooked Chinaman and now a Yank who talks well but we have to see if there is any substance.

If we had managed to get the right Russian and a very wealthy Yank, who knows, we might be like little Bournemouth now spending their 9th season out of the last 11 at the top level, looking likely to stay there and trading a number of players in the £40 -£70 million category and without category 1 for its youngsters.
Not that I am envious of course.

[Greatwesternline]

The Olise money kept the club alive. If we hadnt been in dire straights it would have paid for the upkeep of the academy for many years.

It's highly unlikely that future Olise's would choose RFC if it wasnt cat1.

if a £10m player comes through every 3 years or so, the academy is cost neutral. on top if that it provides squad players on lower wages than the club would have to pay than were they players signed through the transfer market.

It's also a finishing school for partly developed players. used properly and we would be signing 16 year olds from cat2s and developing them and selling them on for more. given the financial constraints of recent years we wont have been doing much academy recruitment either.

closing the academy or down grading it, given our small fanbase, would consign RFC to a similar size of club as any other club in england who cant get more than 12k at home on a bank holiday.

Olise wouldn’t join Reading in L1 Cat 1 academy or not. And he joined Reading probably more for the chance of progression into the first team to put him in the shop window than Academy.

The fact is we've been doing well off the Cat 1 Academy in L1 off the back of Championship level intakes. That's not going to continue.

That's fair enough. But the point of the Category system is that Cat 1 clubs can pick up players from the lower Cats with ease and the selling clubs can't stop them, and we should be doing this more, but clearly the player trading side of stuff has taken a back seat of late for obvious reasons.

If we were the lowest club in the football league with cat 1 we should be picking up the best cat 2 players that aren't wanted by bigger cat 1 clubs than us. There is a niche there to be exploited. But i'm not sure we are active enough at the moment to exploit this.

[Greatwesternline]

Players of Olise’s quality don’t come along every 3 years and we’d be selling for about 1.5m to a champ club now rather than 10m to a prem team with us being L1

In the Championship they came along about 1 in 10 years, let alone L1, so completely agree.

Where's our next big money Academy sale?

Garcia? Struggling to make the bench, no one else is even close. Borgnis? Osho? Spencer? Not likely.

Olise 21/22 £9m +£9m

Tshibola 16/17 £5m

Hector 15/16 £5m

Alex McCarthy 14/15 £3m

Shane Long 11/12 £5m

Those prices are from transfermarkt. There are players of huge quality that slipped through such as Gittens, too good to stay clearly, but for a while back then the Reading academy was paying for itself nicely. Agreed that in League 1 we aren't getting these prices, but players do sometimes come out of nowhere to an extent.

Omar Richards was largely non descript and a year later after a breakout season was signing for Bayern! It can happen.

[The Royal Forester]

Players of Olise’s quality don’t come along every 3 years and we’d be selling for about 1.5m to a champ club now rather than 10m to a prem team with us being L1

In the Championship they came along about 1 in 10 years, let alone L1, so completely agree.

Where's our next big money Academy sale?

Garcia? Struggling to make the bench, no one else is even close. Borgnis? Osho? Spencer? Not likely.

Olise 21/22 £9m +£9m

Tshibola 16/17 £5m

Hector 15/16 £5m

Alex McCarthy 14/15 £3m

Shane Long 11/12 £5m

Those prices are from transfermarkt. There are players of huge quality that slipped through such as Gittens, too good to stay clearly, but for a while back then the Reading academy was paying for itself nicely. Agreed that in League 1 we aren't getting these prices, but players do sometimes come out of nowhere to an extent.

Omar Richards was largely non descript and a year later after a breakout season was signing for Bayern! It can happen.

Of course there are players like Danny Loader who we could/should have sold when we had the chance, but the owner knew best, or so he thought! I am sure there are other youngsters we could have sold but didn't, only to, lose them for nothing later.

[Snowflake Royal]

Having a Category 1 academy won't destroy us, but it doesn't limit us to the spending power of, at best, an average League One club.

Average income in L1 is under £10m, a Cat 1 Academy costs about £2.5m - £4m. It's about a third of our income and crippling long term.

The spending power of an average L1 club for transfers is maybe £250k, most transfers are frees.

There are Championship clubs who don’t think they can afford a Cat 1 Academy.

I’m no expert, but isn’t it more a case of; once it’s gone it’s not coming back? The largest expense is setting these things up. Any ongoing costs are hopefully subsidised by any talent produced, which has been to a very high standard in recent years.

I don’t see why. We've already lost it and got it back once. Yeah, there might end up being a waiting list or something, but just preventing a club from setting one up? I'd like to see how that could be justified in any law/regulation.

It's not like our infrastructure magically vanishes or anyone is saying scrap it entirely.

[Snowflake Royal]

The Olise money kept the club alive. If we hadnt been in dire straights it would have paid for the upkeep of the academy for many years.

It's highly unlikely that future Olise's would choose RFC if it wasnt cat1.

if a £10m player comes through every 3 years or so, the academy is cost neutral. on top if that it provides squad players on lower wages than the club would have to pay than were they players signed through the transfer market.

It's also a finishing school for partly developed players. used properly and we would be signing 16 year olds from cat2s and developing them and selling them on for more. given the financial constraints of recent years we wont have been doing much academy recruitment either.

closing the academy or down grading it, given our small fanbase, would consign RFC to a similar size of club as any other club in england who cant get more than 12k at home on a bank holiday.

Olise wouldn’t join Reading in L1 Cat 1 academy or not. And he joined Reading probably more for the chance of progression into the first team to put him in the shop window than Academy.

The fact is we've been doing well off the Cat 1 Academy in L1 off the back of Championship level intakes. That's not going to continue.

That's fair enough. But the point of the Category system is that Cat 1 clubs can pick up players from the lower Cats with ease and the selling clubs can't stop them, and we should be doing this more, but clearly the player trading side of stuff has taken a back seat of late for obvious reasons.

If we were the lowest club in the football league with cat 1 we should be picking up the best cat 2 players that aren't wanted by bigger cat 1 clubs than us. There is a niche there to be exploited. But i'm not sure we are active enough at the moment to exploit this.

But other Cat 1 clubs are already doing that to us because we're L1, and if you're an exciting prospect in a Cat 2 Academy, areyou going to go to Reading, or a PL or Championship Academy?

[Snowflake Royal]

Players of Olise’s quality don’t come along every 3 years and we’d be selling for about 1.5m to a champ club now rather than 10m to a prem team with us being L1

In the Championship they came along about 1 in 10 years, let alone L1, so completely agree.

Where's our next big money Academy sale?

Garcia? Struggling to make the bench, no one else is even close. Borgnis? Osho? Spencer? Not likely.

Olise 21/22 £9m +£9m

Tshibola 16/17 £5m

Hector 15/16 £5m

Alex McCarthy 14/15 £3m

Shane Long 11/12 £5m

Those prices are from transfermarkt. There are players of huge quality that slipped through such as Gittens, too good to stay clearly, but for a while back then the Reading academy was paying for itself nicely. Agreed that in League 1 we aren't getting these prices, but players do sometimes come out of nowhere to an extent.

Omar Richards was largely non descript and a year later after a breakout season was signing for Bayern! It can happen.

There's some players of good value in there, but we're talking about Olise level, so that's him and Sigurdsson.

Olise was seasons ago now, where's the next one for multi-millions?

[WestYorksRoyal]

In the Championship they came along about 1 in 10 years, let alone L1, so completely agree.

Where's our next big money Academy sale?

Garcia? Struggling to make the bench, no one else is even close. Borgnis? Osho? Spencer? Not likely.

Olise 21/22 £9m +£9m

Tshibola 16/17 £5m

Hector 15/16 £5m

Alex McCarthy 14/15 £3m

Shane Long 11/12 £5m

Those prices are from transfermarkt. There are players of huge quality that slipped through such as Gittens, too good to stay clearly, but for a while back then the Reading academy was paying for itself nicely. Agreed that in League 1 we aren't getting these prices, but players do sometimes come out of nowhere to an extent.

Omar Richards was largely non descript and a year later after a breakout season was signing for Bayern! It can happen.

There's some players of good value in there, but we're talking about Olise level, so that's him and Sigurdsson.

Olise was seasons ago now, where's the next one for multi-millions?

Even Sigurdsson some way short of Olise. Peaked at Spurs and Everton, compared with being a key player for Munich and France. A good benchmark for him would be how much Birmingham made from Bellingham, whereas Sigurdsson compares more to a Watkins or Maddison.

So you'd probably say c. £20m - £25m initially for both, but then another c. £20m again for Olise from a better sell on clause.

[Royals and Racers]

Our Academy and facilities would not look out of place at clubs like Brighton and Crystal Palace, and probably surpass some lower PL clubs like Bournemouth. The problem is they're massive white elephants for the club we are, and nobody has scaled them back to reflect a decade of stagnation.

It was always the big question mark whether new owners would keep them and build their entire strategy around climbing the pyramid again, or cut cloth to make us more sustainable in L1. Couhig seems to be suggesting he's going for the former. But with a top 6 playing staff budget and high overheads, it means there is not route to sustainability in L1.

Whereas if we were a Championship club, you could see the likes of Garcia and Savage generating the transfer revenue we need to make the model worthwhile. As it is in L1, they'd be another Azeez at best - useful money but barely touches the sides of operating losses. The crunch point with Savage will be this summer; either convince him that he can realise his ambitions here and extend his contract, or sell while he still has 12 months left. Plus he's not even an academy product anyway, so perhaps irrelevant to this debate (though Bearwood would have made a good impression and our reputation for developing youngsters would have helped too).

They wouldn't look out of place at a Palace or a Bournemouth as neither have Cat 1 Academies.

Palace have been Cat 1 for several years !
Edit from season 2020/1

[Linden Jones' Tash]

According to the Internet, the top three sales from clubs in League 1 are:
£11M (Lookman)
£8M (Delph)
£3.5M (Barnett)

The idea that a League 1 club can regularly sell a player for £10M while in League 1 to subsidise a Cat 1 academy is very ambitious...