Season 2011-12 Fan Articles

Petit Francais ? The Montpellier Model

By Denis   Richardson  ::  22/05/2012   32 Comments (»Last) Money, money, money, money. Everything in recent times has always been about money (or lack of it) and the need to give David Moyes more money in order to improve the team. Without it we?re going nowhere fast, cannot complete, etc etc. Granted, more money would obviously make life easier but, with Montpelier just winning the French league, it got me thinking about Everton and why some basics just don?t seem to be taken care of (in my eyes anyway).

For those not familiar with it, Montpelier were promoted back to the top flight in France in 2009 (just 3 years ago). They have extremely low costs and spend very little on transfers. In fact, a lot of their side is made up of players that came through their youth system.

Looking for the Man City comparison, PSG in France have recently spent about ?100M on players and pay Ancellotti a reported ?13M(!) a year to manage them. PSG?s most expensive player (about ?35M) cost more than the entire Montpellier team put together!

The amounts Montpellier have paid in transfer fees recently make our money worries seem a bit ridiculous. How can a team like this manage to have such success, having spent practically nothing in relative terms while we?re always supposedly on the brink of administration, living from pay cheque to pay cheque?

I know that the English and French leagues are different, but from a relative perspective I still think you can compare them. You can add as well, all their players have to come from their area so they have a very limited pool of players to choose from, but this season they have had an awesome team.

It makes me wonder if Everton in general focuses enough on youth development. We will never be in a position to have a large transfer kitty every summer without selling top players so internal development is the only obvious answer (to me anyway).

I think we have far too few youngsters at the club knocking on the door of the first team, despite supposedly having a world class training facility. We release many youngsters every year with them not being good enough to stay. Admittedly you're not going to unearth a Rooney every year but I would have thought there would be a lot more coming through regularly ? law of averages etc. Why is this not the case?

Is our scouting at youth level crap? Is our coaching not the best? Or do we simply not place enough priority on this area?

This is not a short term thing either, there should be a conveyor belt at the club producing 1-2 players a year that are good enough or near good enough for the first team. However, (I think) we currently have Rodwell as the only established 1st teamer (when fit) to come up recently through the clubs youth system. (Duffy and Barkley will hopefully make it and I personally don?t count Anichebe.) That just seems a really low number to me to come through over the last 4-5 years, especially for a club that has had money troubles for at least 10 years now.

I don?t expect us to do a Montpellier, but I find myself scratching my head whenever I see that we have one of the smallest squads in the league, I don?t understand how this can be when we supposedly have a really good youth set up. Also why can a youth team ?keeper not be our 3rd choice if we?re poor with no money? Did we need to pay Hahnemann to do basically nothing for a year? Are we now going to sign another back-up keeper for another year?

Something is just not right here and I don?t know if this is simply lack of foresight and short termism on the clubs side. This is not a Moyes or Kenwright bashing piece, I just don?t understand why we have so few players coming through the youth set-up regularly.

I may be a bit naïve in some of the above generalizations but can anyone close to the training/youth development shed some light on this.

For those interested, the Montpellier story is summed up in the BBC link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/18156868

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