Pacheco
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Good luck Patches ... His career didn't turno out even close to how many of us would have liked it, but he tried his best and has become one of the family.
YNWA Danny.
YNWA Danny.
Good luck to the lad.
For someone so young he always came across really well & was very professional.
He certainly never got done for smacking his bird in page moss.
He certainly never got done for smacking his bird in page moss.
He was staggeringly ugly in his own way though.
Strange player, but good luck to him. YNWA.
Premier League dream soon fades for forgotten generation of footballers
Published at 12:01AM, September 7 2013
Dani Pacheco left Liverpool this week. They always knew the day would come. They knew, from the moment they enticed him from Barcelona’s youth academy six years ago that he would go home one day. They just probably did not imagine that, when he left, it would be to join AD Alcorcón.
All deft touches and clever tricks, Pacheco was regarded as one of Spain’s most exciting prospects when he was persuaded to leave La Masia, Barcelona’s youth academy, as a 16-year-old. He won the Golden Boot award as top goalscorer at the European Under-19 Championship finals in 2010, playing alongside Thiago Alcântara, Sergio Canales and Iker Muniaín. And in six seasons at Liverpool, he played just 44 minutes of Barclays Premier League football. Even when he went on loan to Rayo Vallecano last season, he did not start a game.
We are talking about Pacheco, but we could just as easily be talking about any one of dozens upon dozens of youngsters who were sold the idea of a Premier League academy as the ultimate finishing school. Four or five years ago, the youth and reserve line-ups at the leading English clubs read like a Who’s Who of European football’s most promising youngsters. Looking back now, their squad lists read more like a “who on earth was he?”
In a reserve-team match against Manchester United in October 2009, Liverpool’s 16-man squad included 11 overseas players: Dean Bouzanis, Daniel Ayala, Chris Mavinga, Nikola Saric, Victor Palsson, Alex Kacaniklic, Vincent Weijl, Martin Hansen, Nikolaj Kohlert, Jordi Brouwer and Emmanuel Mendy. Only Ayala made a first-team appearance for the club. Where are they now? Respectively at Aris, Norwich City, Rubin Kazan, HB Koge, NEC Nijmegen, Fulham, Cambuur, Nordsjaelland, Silkeborg, HBS Craeyenhout and if you can find any details of Mendy’s whereabouts since he left Dynamo Tbilisi, you have done better than me.
In a week when Greg Dyke, the FA chairman, issued a stark warning about the future of English football if more is not done to develop and nurture home-grown talent, the experiences of Pacheco, Saric, Brouwer et al seem pertinent. Consider not only that some of them arrived with big reputations and left, in Pacheco’s case six years later, for relative obscurity.
Consider also that every time an overseas youngster joins a Premier League club at 16, a local player is pushed farther out.
The clubs argue that it is worth it and that it is necessary — particularly if their rivals are doing it. They will cite the examples of Cesc Fàbregas and Gerard Piqué, sold back to Barcelona for big profits by Arsenal and United respectively, as evidence of how successful it can be. The reality, though, is that for every one who makes it, dozens fail and leave England with their development stunted and only their bank balance enriched. Saric’s father called his experience at Liverpool “three years of pure hell”.
There has to be a word here for Federico Macheda. He was a seven-day wonder as a 17-year-old at United, scoring winning goals against Aston Villa and Sunderland that proved critical in their 2009 Premier League title triumph. For a time, he seemed likely to be a Fàbregas-type exception to the rule. Nearly six years after his arrival from Lazio, having been regarded as an outstanding talent at youth level, he has stagnated to the point where his best offer this summer was a loan move to Doncaster Rovers, which fell through in any case.
The Premier League says it is a “myth” that its clubs’ academies are full of foreign talent. Only 5 per cent of those aged 9 to 15 are non-British and only 7 per cent in the 16-18 age group. The question here is whether 7 per cent represents 7 per cent too many, given that the policy of importing talent at academy level seems to bring so few benefits, whether for the clubs, the foreign youngsters or, indeed, the home-grown players who find their prospects farther diminished when competing with under-18 internationals from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and even Brazil and Argentina.
At Liverpool, where the stockpiling of foreign youngsters was even more extreme than at Chelsea, the past few years have brought a rethink.
There are still overseas players in the Merseyside club’s academy, but the main investment — financial and otherwise — is in English talent such as Andre Wisdom, Raheem Sterling, Jordan Ibe, Seyi Ojo and Jerome Sinclair. All were signed from other clubs, rather than being “home-grown” in the traditional sense, but at least now, finally, Liverpool seem to be creating a clearer pathway for young players.
It feels similar at Arsenal. They have enjoyed success with Fàbregas and, to a lesser extent, Wojciech Szczesny, but far more typical is the case of Fran Mérida, another former Barcelona prodigy who, after a spell at Atlético Madrid, is trying to revive his career at Atlético Paranaense, in Brazil, alongside Pedro Botelho, another Arsenal alumnus.
Then there is Amaury Bischoff, who, after a handful of appearances at Arsenal, at 26 plays for the mighty Preussen Münster in the third tier of German football.
This practice of importing foreign talent at academy level has been a spectacular failure. For every Fàbregas — or even every Jeffrey Bruma, who made no impact at Chelsea but is now at PSV Eindhoven — dozens have ended up with their dreams shattered and their career prospects damaged. And if the foreign youngsters have suffered, it is quite clear that the influx has also had an adverse effect on home-grown players.
Every youngster who pursues a career in football knows there is a risk of disappointment, but we are talking about something different here: players who, having been promising enough to represent leading countries at youth level, are taken out of their own environment — in some cases bringing families with them, in many cases not — and then experience their prospects withering at clubs where, even if the coaching is of a high standard, there are so many barriers blocking their path even to the fringes of the first team.
If Dyke wants to look into ways to promote and protect English talent, a bar — or at very least a limit — on imports of overseas youngsters should be considered. Not just for the sake of the home-grown players, but for the sake of the foreign youngsters who buy into a vision of a future that English football really does not seem able to deliver.
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Walk alone: Pacheco played 44 minutes of Premier League football in six seasons at AnfieldChristopher Drost/Action Images
Published at 12:01AM, September 7 2013
Dani Pacheco left Liverpool this week. They always knew the day would come. They knew, from the moment they enticed him from Barcelona’s youth academy six years ago that he would go home one day. They just probably did not imagine that, when he left, it would be to join AD Alcorcón.
All deft touches and clever tricks, Pacheco was regarded as one of Spain’s most exciting prospects when he was persuaded to leave La Masia, Barcelona’s youth academy, as a 16-year-old. He won the Golden Boot award as top goalscorer at the European Under-19 Championship finals in 2010, playing alongside Thiago Alcântara, Sergio Canales and Iker Muniaín. And in six seasons at Liverpool, he played just 44 minutes of Barclays Premier League football. Even when he went on loan to Rayo Vallecano last season, he did not start a game.
We are talking about Pacheco, but we could just as easily be talking about any one of dozens upon dozens of youngsters who were sold the idea of a Premier League academy as the ultimate finishing school. Four or five years ago, the youth and reserve line-ups at the leading English clubs read like a Who’s Who of European football’s most promising youngsters. Looking back now, their squad lists read more like a “who on earth was he?”
In a reserve-team match against Manchester United in October 2009, Liverpool’s 16-man squad included 11 overseas players: Dean Bouzanis, Daniel Ayala, Chris Mavinga, Nikola Saric, Victor Palsson, Alex Kacaniklic, Vincent Weijl, Martin Hansen, Nikolaj Kohlert, Jordi Brouwer and Emmanuel Mendy. Only Ayala made a first-team appearance for the club. Where are they now? Respectively at Aris, Norwich City, Rubin Kazan, HB Koge, NEC Nijmegen, Fulham, Cambuur, Nordsjaelland, Silkeborg, HBS Craeyenhout and if you can find any details of Mendy’s whereabouts since he left Dynamo Tbilisi, you have done better than me.
In a week when Greg Dyke, the FA chairman, issued a stark warning about the future of English football if more is not done to develop and nurture home-grown talent, the experiences of Pacheco, Saric, Brouwer et al seem pertinent. Consider not only that some of them arrived with big reputations and left, in Pacheco’s case six years later, for relative obscurity.
Consider also that every time an overseas youngster joins a Premier League club at 16, a local player is pushed farther out.
The clubs argue that it is worth it and that it is necessary — particularly if their rivals are doing it. They will cite the examples of Cesc Fàbregas and Gerard Piqué, sold back to Barcelona for big profits by Arsenal and United respectively, as evidence of how successful it can be. The reality, though, is that for every one who makes it, dozens fail and leave England with their development stunted and only their bank balance enriched. Saric’s father called his experience at Liverpool “three years of pure hell”.
There has to be a word here for Federico Macheda. He was a seven-day wonder as a 17-year-old at United, scoring winning goals against Aston Villa and Sunderland that proved critical in their 2009 Premier League title triumph. For a time, he seemed likely to be a Fàbregas-type exception to the rule. Nearly six years after his arrival from Lazio, having been regarded as an outstanding talent at youth level, he has stagnated to the point where his best offer this summer was a loan move to Doncaster Rovers, which fell through in any case.
The Premier League says it is a “myth” that its clubs’ academies are full of foreign talent. Only 5 per cent of those aged 9 to 15 are non-British and only 7 per cent in the 16-18 age group. The question here is whether 7 per cent represents 7 per cent too many, given that the policy of importing talent at academy level seems to bring so few benefits, whether for the clubs, the foreign youngsters or, indeed, the home-grown players who find their prospects farther diminished when competing with under-18 internationals from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and even Brazil and Argentina.
At Liverpool, where the stockpiling of foreign youngsters was even more extreme than at Chelsea, the past few years have brought a rethink.
There are still overseas players in the Merseyside club’s academy, but the main investment — financial and otherwise — is in English talent such as Andre Wisdom, Raheem Sterling, Jordan Ibe, Seyi Ojo and Jerome Sinclair. All were signed from other clubs, rather than being “home-grown” in the traditional sense, but at least now, finally, Liverpool seem to be creating a clearer pathway for young players.
It feels similar at Arsenal. They have enjoyed success with Fàbregas and, to a lesser extent, Wojciech Szczesny, but far more typical is the case of Fran Mérida, another former Barcelona prodigy who, after a spell at Atlético Madrid, is trying to revive his career at Atlético Paranaense, in Brazil, alongside Pedro Botelho, another Arsenal alumnus.
Then there is Amaury Bischoff, who, after a handful of appearances at Arsenal, at 26 plays for the mighty Preussen Münster in the third tier of German football.
This practice of importing foreign talent at academy level has been a spectacular failure. For every Fàbregas — or even every Jeffrey Bruma, who made no impact at Chelsea but is now at PSV Eindhoven — dozens have ended up with their dreams shattered and their career prospects damaged. And if the foreign youngsters have suffered, it is quite clear that the influx has also had an adverse effect on home-grown players.
Every youngster who pursues a career in football knows there is a risk of disappointment, but we are talking about something different here: players who, having been promising enough to represent leading countries at youth level, are taken out of their own environment — in some cases bringing families with them, in many cases not — and then experience their prospects withering at clubs where, even if the coaching is of a high standard, there are so many barriers blocking their path even to the fringes of the first team.
If Dyke wants to look into ways to promote and protect English talent, a bar — or at very least a limit — on imports of overseas youngsters should be considered. Not just for the sake of the home-grown players, but for the sake of the foreign youngsters who buy into a vision of a future that English football really does not seem able to deliver.
That article is a load of bollox.
Dreams shattered my arse, the players weren't good enough.
Dreams shattered my arse, the players weren't good enough.
Oh and good luck Dani. YNWA.
It's not a complete load of bollocks.
Over the course of a few years we flooded the reserves with players and had way more than we could realistically hope to play regularly and develop.
How many school boys have dreams of playing for the club they support or their country? The number is very very high. I wager everyone on SCM has had that dream.
How realistic is it to achieve that dream? Pretty difficult considering that talent required.
The club 'flooding' the reserves gives a greater opportunity for the boys to realise that dream. It's then up their talent and hard work to get to the next stage of selection. Dreams will get shattered at some point. To say it's the system is bollocks.
I'm sorry, but that just comes across as very ignorant.
There is no point latching onto the "dreams shattered" comment because that's not the crux of the argument. The whole point of having academies or centres of excellence is to give young players with talent the best environment in which to succeed. If you think having a massive squad where players don't get to play regularly (which is a problem even if the squad is small) isn't an issue because the cream rises to crop regardless then, well, there isn't really much to talk about. We may as well just forget about training, coaches or whatever else and stick 100 kids on a field with a ball every week and at the end of the year get rid of a few. Sound good?
Your pen-ultimate sentence is a load of tosh. No where did I say training and coaches weren't needed for the squad. The article is aimed at bringing in young talented foreign players to join the academy or centre of excellence. It also says this stops local talent from having a chance. It then says it's failing them and shattering their dream. The article says Liverpool are stockpiling young foreign talent but it doesn't say to the extend where it's too much for the academy to properly train and develop them. In fact it gives examples where the training and development has worked.
Fundamentally, some will not be good enough even after the training and development and won't make the first team, it doesn't mean it's the academies that are shattering their dreams.
Quite, I think clubs have to take some responsibility. Of course, players need the right mentality, but it's up to clubs to coax their best out of them and adjust their approach accordingly. We seemed to have a hap-hazard approach of just throwing a load of kids together, hoping that one or two of them blossomed, to the degree that it seemed the more we signed, the more chance we'd have. Instead of just concentrating on their development. I think we've done alot of good too, but players like Pacheco have certainly suffered along the way.
As
[article=http://microlfc.com/2013/03/27/meeting-the-architects-of-liverpools-future/]This is exactly what McParland told Sachin Nakrani of the Guardian last year: “If there are two players worth looking at, one is English and one is foreign, and they’re at exactly the same level, we’d always take the English player. If one is English and one is Scouse, and they’re at exactly the same level, we would 100% always take the Scouse one, because our club’s identity has always been about having local kids coming through and we’re desperate to carry that on.”[/article]
Rafa did a grand enough job of the setup, we were spoiled for years though with kids coming off the production line, it's just the way it is. We're starting to reap the rewards now though. I don't think he got it all right, he over-invested on youth, but he laid the foundations for a good youth policy, younger reserve sides and a blueprint throughout the whole setup.
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