With the minimum of fuss, Liverpool’s director of football Damien Comolli has introduced a new emphasis at Anfield, backed by the instincts of manager Kenny Dalglish.
The pair would like to arrive at a situation where it is possible to feed young players into the first team structure, and ultimately construct a brighter future for the club, based around that youthful talent.
It is a policy promoted since they arrived on Merseyside by Liverpool’s new owners, and one with a simple premise: find the right talent, and it offers the ability to compete with wealthier clubs on a more level playing field.
Already, they have got Martin Kelly, Jay Spearing, Jon Flanagan and Jack Robinson into the squad on a regular basis, if not yet into the first team permanently.
Comolli has a good track record in this area. At Spurs, he was involved in the signing of the likes of Gareth Bale and Luca Modric, who have both progressed to become world class talents, and players like Benoit Assou-Ekotto, who is one of the brighter prospects in the Premier League.
Those first two were hardly unknown at the time, and hardly plucked from obscurity, given they cost Tottenham around £20million between them. When you consider, though the sums the club have been offered for both players within the past six months, they are worth at least three to four times that figure right now.
It is the way forward for any aspiring title challengers, and indeed almost essential, given the likes of Manchester United are not exactly tardy in that direction. Cristiano Ronaldo anyone?
Ideally, players need to be found for the sort of money Assou-Ekotto cost (£3.5milion), or less, and developed to become top class performers. Find enough of them, and it allows you to outperform the money you spend, and rise above the level financial constraints normally dictate.
In recent years, Everton are perhaps the most proficient in this area. There is an almost rigid statistical correlation between money spent and Premier League position finished, with only the Blues bucking that trend.
They are only average spenders in the top flight, but above average performers, and that is because their manager David Moyes spent little or nothing on players like Tim Cahill, Joleon Lescott, Leighton Baines, Phil Jagielka, Mikel Arteta, Seamus Coleman and Jack Rodwell and of course Wayne Rooney.
That said though, the fact it is only Everton who have bucked that trend in recent years shows it is not actually very easy to identify cheap talent, and develop it sufficiently to create champions.
Liverpool are perhaps the most strident example of that painful fact. Since Steven Gerrard emerged more than a decade ago, they haven’t produced a player through their youth system who has become a regular fixture in the first team. In 14 years, that is some statistic.
What is more painful though, is the money wasted in the pursuit of the players who will allow the club to reach the summit of English football once more.
Many words have been exhausted on the transfer record of Rafael Benitez, and it is strange it was so often used as such a massive stick to beat him with, given he paid what turned out to be impressively sensible sums for the likes of Fernando Torres, Xabi Alonso, Pepe Reina, Peter Crouch, Alvaro Arbeloa, Dirk Kuyt, Martin Skrtel and Craig Bellamy.
Yet when it came to finding young players to develop, Liverpool certainly under-performed during his time, though in fairness, it is surely the scouts who take most responsibility in this specialist area.
The unearthing of young talent is an imprecise science, as we have already discovered, yet during the Spaniard’s era, he signed around 50 players who were initially destined for the junior sides.
Of those, only Lucas Leiva has been an enduring success at Anfield, and he actually cost £5million and went straight into the first team squad, even if he did take a while to break through.
Names like Ronald Huth, Francisco Duran, Jordy Breuwer, Vincent Weijl, Hakan Duyan, Nikola Saric, Victor Palsson, Andras Simon, Alex Kacaniklic, and Vitor Flora are just a few of the many, many young players who came and went during the past few years, without barely registering on the Anfield landscape.
So what Comolli is now pursuing is not entirely new at Anfield, and not entirely without risk either, because if Benitez had a weakness, then it was surely the “terrifying number of talentless teenagers”, as one esteemed critic put it, who used the revolving door at the club during his time.
Small fees add up, in those numbers, and you need several to come off to justify the outlay.
Comolli has already brought in several youth team players, such as Yalany Baio, Tom King, Marc Pelosi, Yusuf Mersin and Kristoffer Peterson, as well as expensive young talent like Andy Carroll, Jordan Henderson and Sebastian Coates.
If any of those players turn out to be the equivalent of Gareth Bale or Luca Modric, never mind Cristiano Ronaldo, then he will have done his job and Liverpool will be better able to compete with United, City and Chelsea. If not, and the numbers get up to Benitez’s obsessive-compulsive levels without success, then the owners will have to radically re-evaluate the future.
