I have seedlings of confidence. There are ingredients of excellence in the club. They just need to be brought together in a recipe that will deliver success. Our problem to this point has been the lack of a coherent plan and, thus, all our different efforts have failed to come together in a palatable way. But we have a good youth coaching and analytics for a start.
On youth coaching, we have able to bring through a fair number of talented youth in recent years, some still with us and others scattered around Europe like Bennacer, Gnabry, The Jeff, etc. The crop coming through like ESR, Willock, Saka, etc excite me. So we can create players. The biggest issue has been integrating them. Hopefully, the Ljunberg switch helps smoothe this transition.
On stats, our StatDNA platform and our data scientists and engineers are highly regarded in the industry. The problem is data people operating in the absence of a coherent strategy are useless. You need to be solving quite specific issues. With Edu coming in to develop a longterm strategy where we can hopefully define how we want to play, then we can have much clearer perspectives on how to hunt for players and use the platform to identify players who both fit our needs and are cheaper.
It's a pity Sven came and went but I suspect he came at the wrong time in the midst of turmoil. If we have stability in the structure, clarity in the strategy, then I think we will see a much better yield from both our youth system and StatDNA because we will know what we want from each.
