Former Chelsea starlet Josh McEachran has just left Stamford Bridge to join Brentford.(Who are known as the Bees–hence the pun in the title. Yes, it’s a stretch. Buzz off.) You can find reports of it in many places, here’s The Guardian’s.
Chelsea is often vilified (for many things, but most relevantly here) for not producing first-team talent through their academy. The drumbeat is essentially nobody since John Terry has come through the training program at Cobham, Chelsea is just buying talent, not developing it.
It’s a misguided complaint.
It’s hard to be a first-team player at Chelsea (or Barça or Man City or PSG or any one of another half-dozen clubs). André Schürrle couldn’t hold down a first-team role at Chelsea. Nor could Felipe Luís or Loïc Rémy. These are players that start for top-ten ranked national teams, and would be starters for all but the very top tier of professional clubs.
McEachran joins Patrick Van Aanholt, Franco Di Santo, Romelu Lukaku, Ryan Bertrand, Jeffrey Bruma, Fabio Borini, and Gökhan Töre on the list of players developed significantly at Chelsea who left for a fee. There are 77 national team caps on that list (as well as 6 Great Britain Olympic team appearances between Bertrand and Jack Cork). Just under half of those are Lukaku’s, and while I certainly wish Romelu were still with Chelsea, even if you make him the exception, you get the idea.
And that’s not including players like Michael Mancienne or Gaël Kakuta or a dozen others who have secure, stable careers in the top half-dozen leagues in the world.
My point is that Chelsea does a fantastic job of generating young talent. So has Manchester United: Alexander Büttner (stop giggling), Danny Welbeck, Wilfried Zaha, and the somewhat unique cases of Paul Pogba and Ravel Morrison come to mind. But that’s a weaker list than Chelsea’s. City have produced, um, Abdul Razak and Jérémy Hélan? Vladimír Weiss?
My point, though–honestly–is not to defend Chelsea. It’s to try to point out the silliness in the argument. It’s like saying an MLB farm system is only valuable if it produces an non-stop string of MVP’s and Cy Young Award winners.
At the end of the day, top end academies are supposed to develop talent and sell most of it. If, once every few years, you produce a Nemanja Matić or Ruben Loftus-Cheek or (looking ahead) Patrick Bamford or Dominic Solanke who eat up some first-team minutes, that’s good. If, once a decade, you produce a talent that starts for the seniors, that’s fantastic.
This, by the way, is fodder for the Chelsea critics: no team has spent more on under-18 talent over the last five years; doing that is a risk, one that threatens to reduce the academy setup at Cobham’s ability to function as a profit center (you can fund a lot of youth staff for the transfer fees involved, even if they are meager compared to the prices paid for players aged 23 and over). £4.5M for Nathan, £1.7M for Cristián Cuevas, €5.1M for Wallace … that’s a lot of investment to recoup for players who will almost certainly not spend their careers at Chelsea, at least not for several more years. But, the case of Thorgan Hazard is instructive: close to £5M profit over two years. Yes, it cost a lot to train and support him, but nowhere near that much.
Back to Josh McEachran.
McEachran was hailed as a future great for so long, it feels like he should be heading toward retirement by now, despite the fact that he is still only 22. He’s got fantastic vision, excellent touch on the ball, but has always been slight and struggled with fitness. He’s still the same player that he was, and he’s likely to continue to represent England at the U23 level until he moves out of that age bracket. He’s likely to start in the Championship. Again, as a 22 year-old.
He is not good enough right now to play for a top five team in the EPL. So, what’s the right move here? How do you justify loaning a player out when they are 24 or 25? He needs to play, and more importantly, he wants to play: it’s all he’s done since he was a spindly little kid, and it’s what he’s been praised and rewarded and lauded for going on two decades.
The right thing to do–for him, for the club, for everyone involved–is to find a good home for his talents. If they blossom and he gets stronger and becomes part of the England national team conversation (like Cork has), well, that’s fantastic. And, like Matić, that could even find him back at Stamford Bridge. But that’s at least a couple years away, and Chelsea can’t afford to carry passengers on their active roster for that long. Nor could Real Madrid, nor could Bayern Munich.
The story that should be told is that he’s a successful football player and a success story for the youth systems that helped him along the way.