As far as I'm aware James Penrice is still their number 1 target.

redford_must_score wrote:

Furthermore I don't think we should sell him to Celtic IF there's a bid from elsewhere.
Ferry has turned down a club he doesn't want, we can turn down a club we don't want. Assuming a bid does come in from elsewhere.

Say an English club bids towards the end of the window and let's just say Celtic have matched that bid. That would put us in the driving seat not the player and here's why.

Say the player says he WANTS to go to Celtic. We say no, we won't sell you to Celtic. Ferry stamps his feet and says aye ok you'll have a very unhappy player in your dressing room. We say, you won't be in the dressing room, you won't be anywhere near it, you won't play. And we can afford to pay you not to play.
But we will sell you to that English Championship club that has bid for you.

Ferry is livid, talks this through with his agent, they go into a huddle 🥳 the agent realises his clients value is going to plummet and he's not getting a commission so he strongly advises Ferry to head south. For the sake of his career, naturally because that's what agents do 😎

It’s not 1990 anymore, football doesn’t work that way in 2026 and certainly not at a club the size of Dundee United. Players have as much power as the clubs, if not more. If Ferry makes his mind up that he wants to go to Celtic, there’s not gonna be a whole lot we can do to change that. He could quite easily turn down every offer he gets from elsewhere and just sit out his contract till next year, and then we get nothing and he ends up at Celtic anyway.

We just need to hope that a few teams come in with offers in the next couple weeks to drive up the price. The worst thing that could happen is Celtic doing their usual and offering us 900k on deadline day for him.

Last edited by JerryDungle (Yesterday 12:46 pm)

Sassetti is off

For f*** all?

Conway11 wrote:

Sassetti is off

 
Bin the academy.

RogerTheAlien wrote:

Conway11 wrote:

Sassetti is off

 
Bin the academy.

 
Agreed

redford_must_score wrote:

Conway11 wrote:

RogerTheAlien wrote:

 
Bin the academy.

 
Agreed

 
Which other Top 6 clubs have binned their academies?
We're all losing talent to clubs down south.

 
Why would they?

Aberdeen brought through Ramsay, Barron, McKenna

Hibs brought through Doig, Porteous

Hearts brought through Aaron Hickey

Massive returns on all of them.

We’re spending money on an academy that’s losing its best prospects anyway

Sassetti leaving is just the latest example.

If the elite English clubs can cherry-pick your best youngsters before they sign a professional contract, then what’s the business case for continuing to pour money into the current model?

It’s irrelevant what other top six clubs are doing, if it doesn’t work for us - bin it.

Tek wrote:

Conway11 wrote:

If the elite English clubs can cherry-pick your best youngsters before they sign a professional contract, then what’s the business case for continuing to pour money into the current model?

It’s irrelevant what other top six clubs are doing, if it doesn’t work for us - bin it.

On the money.

The 600-700k a year could be far better spent.

Incidentally, United could still pick up young players. I'm not against us running Utd Youth teams in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow like we used to.

But the Academy model doesn't work for us now. Time for a big re-think and some brave decision making.

Jim McLean himself said bin our Academy model a few years back. He seen what was coming.
 

 
It’s not just United though, every team in Scotland is facing the same issue due to Brexit. Celtic just lost two of their best young players to Liverpool and Fulham.

The SFA need to get a grip of the situation, and try to put rules in place to stop this from happening as often as it is, because sure as fuck, they’ll shit themselves and wish they’d done something earlier when half the teams in the country shut down their academies because of this. The SFA still have a degree of influence on FIFA due to being one of the pillars of IFAB, surely this is something they should be discussing with them.

Would be interesting to see how much money we've made from players that came through the academy compared to player sales for boys we signed from elsewhere.

It's been a frustrating few years as we've probably not had the impact we would have liked from academy players. Fotheringham and Thomson in the Championship season were the last new 'regular starters' but both tailed off when we were promoted.

The club obviously has high hopes for a few of them. Stirton, Harding and Constable are at the stage now where if we don't see them as regular squad players come next season then folks will have them in the 'never going to make it' bracket. Important to remember how young these guys are though. All 3 of them are teenagers still, and in the positions they play (Harding especially) you might not see them at their best until they are early 20s or even older.

I guess it's for the club to weigh up if it's worth persisting with them, or letting them go for free to a lower level then sign a more experienced (likely foreign) player to take their place.

I think if we get rid of the academy, then every time another local club brings through a real gem and either has success on the pitch or makes a big chunk of money from them, the conversation will change back to 'we should be competing to bring these players through' so I think it's a no-win situation. My vote would be to keep persisting with it, though. Agree with the above posts though that something needs to be done about it at a higher level.

On the face of it the Academy concept is a good idea. I like that our clubs are encouraged to run quality youth set ups that should be the pinnacle of youth football.  I'm also fairly supportive of the opposite of the McLean era which tied youngsters down to 8 year contracts and paid them peanuts regardless of whether they were any good.  Rightly or wrongly those days are gone.  The players have control of their own destiny and that must be correct.

Where I think the current system fails is the compensation packages available when these teams come and swoop the cream of our talent.  Personally I think the compensation should be the total cost of running the academy for that year (and that should be ring-fenced for the Academy for the following year).  So if Sassetti is off to better things, great.  We would know that he is subsidising everyone else's Academy training too.  If that annual cost is £750k - £1M that in itself isn't big bucks for the big teams, but it might make them think twice about stripping clubs of assets that they don't improve themselves and therefore more kids would be left where they are which would be better for those that are not stars of the future.

I think that is a fairly easy change to make and would give everyone visibility of what is required to move on, allows the Academy Club not to be out of pocket, but still allows players who are actual proper stars of the future to get to where they belong.

Last edited by Finn Seemann (Today 10:11 am)