Times are changing. With FFP now kicking in and in some ways dictating our transfer activity...these kids might be a big part of our future.

I do hope so...but until then..meh!

Big shout to the boys in blue once again its down to Chelsea to show some pride in european competions! Fantastic acheivment!!!

Fantastic news, gonna have to check the highlights out later

Brilliant for the young lads - Champions of Europe; couldn't be better

Well done the lads, wonder if Jose knew about Brown being critical for this game, and that's why he didn't play him at the weekend?  Seems strange that Jose did say he wasn't a striker (which he isn't, technically) and then the lad scores two goals 

Dominated most of the game and at this level that was what impressed me the most. Big future for some of these lads.

Hope they bring the trophy to the Bridge and do a victory lap.

Well done to the lads! What an accomplishment, they've certainly earned it.

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Hope they bring the trophy to the Bridge and do a victory lap.

Excellent idea !! Before the Man Utd game ..

This is a great achievement for our youngsters, they are the best young players in Europe. If some of these don't make it here then we are going very wrong somewhere.

Totally agree. Brown is a weird one. He doesn't have the touch or technique of the players you mentioned but he's got a good motor, he does what's asked of him and he's quite productive. 

 

Not sure he has that x-factor needed here though.

My Grand Father tells me he reminds him of a young Bobby Tambling.

On Monday, Chelsea won the UEFA Youth League, beating Shakhtar Donetsk in the final 3-2. The competition is sort of like a junior varsity Champions League: the 32 clubs who participate in the group stage of big boys' competition send out essentially an under-19 team composed, this season, of players who were born on or after Jan. 1, 1996.

 

Chelsea do extremely well in youth competitions. The UEFA Youth League has been running for two years and before that, for two seasons you had the NextGen series, which was essentially the same thing albeit entry was by invitation. In the three seasons Chelsea competed in the two competitions, they won once, lost in the final (to Aston Villa in 2012-13) in another and advanced to the quarterfinals in the third.

 

If you throw in the club's domestic youth results, the picture becomes even rosier. Chelsea have reached the final of the English FA Youth Cup in five of the past seven years, winning it on three occasions. They're in the final again this year: on Saturday, they travel to Manchester City for the first of two legs. (Eligibility in the FA Youth Cup is similar, but not identical, to the UEFA Youth League: the cut-off date is Sept. 1, 1995.)

 

Applause all around, then. When Roman Abramovich bought the club and started pouring hundreds of millions into it, he also pledged to invest heavily in youth development. He did, and these are the results; exceptional, by any measure.

 

But here's the thing, and it strikes right to the core of what youth development means, or should mean: very few recent Chelsea academy graduates have actually contributed anything to the first team.

 

Go back to the 2007-08 FA Youth Cup final team, who lost over two legs to a Manchester City side led by Daniel Sturridge, and you'll recognize some familiar names: Patrick van Aanholt, Jeffrey Bruma, Gael Kakuta and Miroslav Stoch. Between them, that group, who are all around 24 years of age now, ended up making exactly two league starts for Chelsea.

 

But they're not bad players. Bruma is a starter at PSV Eindhoven and has been capped eight times for the Netherlands, while Stoch has 49 caps for Slovakia and played at the World Cup in 2010. He spent a few years at Fenerbahce and is now at Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates.

 

Meanwhile, Van Aanholt has been a starter for much of the season at Sunderland and also has two Dutch caps, while Kakuta, hailed as some kind of prodigy at the age of 16, is still a Chelsea player: he's on loan at Rayo Vallecano and has finally established himself as a top-flight starter.

 

It's just that not one of them has gone to the next level. Neither have more recent alums. Fabio Borini was capped for Italy (once) and had a couple of decent campaigns -- a year at Roma; another at Sunderland -- but he's seeing very few minutes now at Liverpool.

 

Jacopo Sala, now 23, is a squad player at Verona in Serie A. Josh McEachran, who is 22, has started four games on loan at the Blues' feeder club Vitesse. Lucas Piazon, 21, is in and out of the team at Eintracht Frankfurt. Nathaniel Chalobah, 20, couldn't get a start for Burnley on loan this season and is now at Reading in the Championship.

 

These guys could, of course, still develop; Piazon, McEachran and Chalobah are still on Chelsea's books, as is Kakuta. So too is striker Patrick Bamford who, at 21, has notched 19 goals for promotion-chasing Middlesbrough in the Championship and helped knock Man City out of the FA Cup this season.

 

But collectively, these players speak to a broader truth about youth development. If you're a big club and your goal is to develop guys who will one day be starters, it's an extremely inexact science. You can get the best scouts, coaches and facilities but to break through at the highest level you need outliers: footballing freaks of nature. Sometimes it's just down to sheer luck and probability.

 

It's not just Chelsea, by the way. Ajax and Inter contested the first NextGen final, in 2011-12. Of the 26 players who appeared in that game -- all of whom are now around 22 years old -- the only names a casual fan might recognise are Joel Veltman, Viktor Fischer, Davy Klaassen, Marko Livaja, Samuele Longo and Lorenzo Crisetig. Of those, only Ajax's Klaassen and Veltman are bona fide starters at the club that groomed them.

 

What this suggests is that while popular lore is all about clubs "developing" their own players to turn out for the first team, in practice it's very rare. The CIES Football Observatory keeps track of such matters, and you can see a ranking here. 

 

It's important to note though that their criteria is based around players who spent three seasons at a club between the ages of 15 and 21. That means that if he stays at Old Trafford until he's 21, a guy like Luke Shaw would count as a Manchester United player (as well as, presumably, a Southampton guy.)

 

This despite the fact that Shaw already had a full season of Premier League football under his belt when he arrived and cost around £27 million ($40m). Equally, Cesc Fabregas, who was at Barcelona between the ages of 10 and 16, gets counted for Arsenal, where he only spent a season in the youth side before establishing himself in the first team. The same goes for Barca defender Gerard Pique: for the purposes of this survey, he's a Manchester United product despite leaving the Camp Nou in 2004 and returning in 2008.

 

That throws another wrench into the process. We have this romantic notion of youth-team coaches scouting 10-year-olds, teaching them the game and turning them into stars. We buy into the magic but, in fact, it doesn't quite work that way.

 

Big clubs cherry-pick the very best players at 16 or 17, often exploiting loopholes to do so. Having a great academy often is simply a function of having the right connections to the right agents, a bit of money to splash and being able to sign the best 17- and 18-year-olds around.

 

There are exceptions, of course. Lyon are competing for the French title this year and their squad features no fewer than nine players, including stars such as Maxime Gonalons, Nabil Fekir, Antony Lopes, Alexandre Lacazette and Corentin Tolisso, who joined the club before they turned 15. All these guys are local and many arrived before their 12th birthday. However, Lyon are the outlier here.

 

This raises the question of what the purpose of youth academies and development is and whether it's money well spent. Depending where you are, it can cost the equivalent of £3-10m ($5-15m) per season to have a "proper" setup. In 10 years, that's a lot of money.

 

The more successful clubs mitigate the cost by selling players on. Chelsea have done quite well in that department -- they got £4m ($7m) for Stoch, for example -- but even then it's an inexact science. In most cases, when a big club sells a young player to a smaller club, the fee tends to be smaller.

 

The bottom line is that obtaining success at youth level is often a function of money and size, as it is at senior level. It's also by no means a guarantee that it will lead to a stream of homegrown players populating the senior team.

 

http://www.espnfc.com/blog/marcottis-musings/62/post/2400058/chelseas-uefa-youth-league-triumph-brings-development-debate-into-focus-writes-gabriele-marcotti

Well done the Youths

 

Or the 'wee team' as we would call them in Scotland

I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere, but this happened last night http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/penalty-blunder-sees-chelsea-beat-7426063.

 

The Valencia player's penalty was ruled to have hit the post despite hitting the stanchion just inside the goal. They've submitted a formal complaint to UEFA apparently, but at the moment we've qualified to the quarter finals. Would be great to win it two years in two.

 

Good to see Terry there as he often is.

Terrible decision to not give the goal, but I don't think there is much they can do now.

I reckon Ajax are gonna win today.

Ajax' biggest talents: De Ligt (only 16 y/o), Nouri, V/d Beek (already an occasional first team player) & Cerny.

Edited March 15, 201610 yr by YannickCFC

Very tight first half. Could go either way this one.

Chelsea U19 are through to the semis where they will face Anderlecht U19. Another tough game Anderlecht's youth is great.

Ajax talents have disappointed me today, normally they're class. Only the last 15 minutes they showed what they're capable of.

Chelsea's defence was very strong today. Midfield and attack were decent.

Watched a bit of the first-half and it was a very tight game so that's a brilliant result. Hopefully they can go all the way.

I'm crowing about this success to my Ajax supporting colleagues as we speak :-)

Well done lads, now win it again!

Watched the first half. A cracking strike from Kyle Scott. Semi-final on 15 April and the Final on 18 April. 

U19's qualify for another UEFA Youth League final by winning 3-0 v Anderlecht 

Congratulations to the boys

Saw the goals on twitter and they were excellent, some superb football. All bar one player is available to play for England too.

So that's the second final this year for the U18/U19 team and they still have a good chance in the league too. The U21 team is not having a great season though.

PSG U19 qualify for the final after a 3-1 win v Real Madrid U19... should be a tougher test for our boys than Shakhtar last year. Demoncy looks different class.

 

Final is Monday 4pm (BT Sport Europe)

Edited April 15, 201610 yr by the special one