It is certainly true that over the last ten years Liverpool FC have only developed a handful of players who have gone on to play in England’s top flight, but there has been a question over whether this was due to the lack of decent grass roots football in Merseyside or purely down to the lack of real development at the Reds Academy at Kirkby.
The answers have come in a study created by Cambridge-based website TrueKnowledge.com. In it they assessed the 1,383 English born players who have played in the Premier League since its inception in 1992 and tried to determine which areas of England were most adept at producing professional top tier footballers. To make the study as fair as possible, the study was split into counties and rigid boundaries of cities. With London split into boroughs too so its 7 million population could not skew the result as to where most English Premier League players had been born, it was revealed that Liverpool came out on top with 62 players. Birmingham came second on 55 with Manchester coming a distant third with 44.
The result is even more astonishing when the rigid boundary used to assess the data exempts Steven Gerrard (Knowsley), Jamie Carragher (Sefton), Leighton Baines and Leon Osman who were born in neighbouring Merseyside boroughs. Robbie Fowler, Tony Hibbert, Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney and Newcastle United midfielder Kevin Nolan were all included in the 62 player list though, but it shows that the city of Liverpool is more than capable of producing the required quality to make it in the Premier League. In fact Liverpool comes out third in the list when assessed by the percentage of the population. 6.59 players per 100,000 became Premier League footballers from the Liverpool population, while the only two better were North Yorkshire (7.69) and County Durham (8.70).
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While it was disappointing to lose to United yesterday, it is clear that some adjustments need to be made to the youth program. Unfortunately the Premier League is an extremely physical and robust league. There was a huge difference between several of the United players compared to even to Coady in terms of muscle mass. This needs to be addressed urgently. It would be an absolute travesty if the incredibly beautiful football that these young players constantly produce is negated by the absence of the necessary physicality needed in the Premiership. Even if players like Suso and Sterling cannot be made taller they can be got to put on more muscle mass. Dalglish’s poor excuse for not using some of these in the firstteam is paperthin when one sees the likes of 5foot 4 inches Aaron Lennon and 5foot 8 inches Jack Wiltshire. Suso and Sterling have more talent now at 16 than Cole,Maxi,Spearing and Kuyt will ever have.
nonsense, half of our youth are useless, your kidding yourself, they are barely championship standard.
people need to wake up and realise kenny dalglish knows more about these kids than any one of us if they were good enough for a game they would get a chance, being able to kick a ball well or being quick or being able to dribble doesnt even come close to meaning what it takes to become a quality footballer, half of the kids dont have the right attitude to become a winner, then others are only trying to become footballers for money.
as i said, skill only counts for a small part of the game, some of you are so blind, heres an example, sami hyppia, not exactly good on the ball, but he had an amazing football brain which is what 95% of kids are lacking.
Hyppia only lacked lightening pace. He was brilliant on the ball, he was NOT a hoof merchant.
Neil, on a scale of 1 to 10 how impressed are you with Cole,Maxi,Spearing and Kuyt? Dalglish has no history of bringing through youth players and will continue to offer excuses not to do so.
They took the Americans in hostage beasuce America took the Shah in exile, instead of allowing the Iranians to sue him. Their demand was: 1) give the Shah back to the people (instead the Americans only threw him out of America, and he ended up in Egypt); 2)apology from the American government for interfering in the country for so long; 3) a promise not to interfer in the country in the future. You can guess what the American government did.