Chelsea Go To The Cobblers

....................to sign an eleven year old player who has been at the Northampton Town Centre of Excellence for the past three seasons.

Michael Gyasi has earned the club an undisclosed (but you can bet it is substantial) fee by signing for the Premiership club where he will join their Academy, and the comments of the club chairman David Cardoza reflected hugely on the work of Gulls Head of Youth Geoff Harrop who only moved to Plainmoor from the Midlands club in the summer.

Such moves are far from unique. Last season Arsenal tempted Cheltenham Town to realise their investment so far in a fifteen year old who joined The Gunners Academy and only the other week I was made aware of a 15 year old QPR CoE player who was in the process of moving to Liverpool's Academy.

In both cases sums of half a million pounds were mentioned as part of the ongoing add ons to these deals and as such this represents a massive justification for the time and money put in by Cheltenham, QPR and now Northampton ; and puts added importance to the work Torquay United are putting into re-establishing the youth system of the club that probably inevitably lags way behind the standards of much longer established set ups at other clubs they come into contact with at Development and CoE level right now.

In the past, The Gulls reaped massive amounts of money for lads such as Garry Monk, Michael Williamson (Southampton) and Matt Gregg who went to Crystal Palace ~ players who hardly kicked a First team ball in anger for us; and going further back you can add the names of Lee Sharpe and Peter Wakeham in that category.

The Cobblers chairman said: "Over the past few years we have seen a few players come through our youth system and either progress to our first team or move on to Premiership clubs. We are developing a proud tradition of being a superb Centre of Excellence and the calibre of player we are producing is of the highest standard.................we always want to see our own players come through into our First Team, but when this opportunity comes for a young player still six or seven years away from making that breakthrough, you have to step back and consider it".