Academy Fixtures and Friendlies

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As the season draws ever nearer we finally get some clarity on what we can expect at Academy level for Chelsea this season. But before we get to that lets cover the match action that took place this week. Last Saturday the U21’s were in match action at Northampton town, in a tough match that was well fought by both sides Chelsea came out on top eventually, Alex Kiwomya coming off the bench to bag a brace. It was a good win for the boys who will look to build on this with 3 remaining friendlies before their season starts.

The U18’s were also in friendly action in Malaysia against a Malaysian select 11. After a tough opening game against the Leo all stars they managed to pick up their level and come away with a 4 – 2 win. Walter Figuera weighed in with 2 goals and George Cole and Isak Ssewankambo got a goal apiece. Ade Viveash was pleased with how his U18’s handled themselves on and off the pitch and they can take a lot of positives away with them. They will now return back to England to continue their pre season.

The groups and fixtures for the U16’s, U18’s and U21’s have finally been announced and we can see how the new set up will impact the development of young players in England. Much has been made of the impact of the EPPP (Elite Player Performance Plan) and now we can see the fruits of those changes. All 3 age groups will follow the same paths, all clubs who applied for category 1 status have been put into the same level although not all of those have been granted category 1 status. Those clubs have now been split into 3 further groups:

National Group One

Arsenal, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Everton, Norwich City, Reading, West Bromwich Albion, West Ham United

National Group Two

Aston Villa, Manchester United, Newcastle United, Southampton, Stoke City, Sunderland, Tottenham Hotspur, Watford

National Group Three

Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Fulham, Liverpool, Manchester City, Middlesbrough, Wolverhampton Wanderers

Chelsea will play each team in their group home and away. These fixtures will take us to December and have already been announced and can be seen in the Youth and Reserves section on the forums. So initially there will be 12 games for us to compete in. From that stage the top 3 teams from groups 1 and 2 and the top 2 teams from group 3 will qualify for the “Elite Group” the remaining teams will go into “group tier one” or “group tier two”. We will then play each team in our new group home and away creating another 14 fixtures for us to play. The top 3 teams from the “Elite group” will then move into knockout semi finals to be joined by the winners of a playoff against the winners of development tier one and two. And finally the semi finalist winners will play each other in a final. So there is potentially 28 fixtures for us to play at the 3 academy levels and this is obviously a massive improvement on what we have been seeing particularly at reserve team level.

Whilst the number of fixtures played by the teams is of great importance the other aim of the new EPPP was to generate more competition. Now we can see how that is hoped to be accomplished. Chelsea being the type of club that we are will strive to finish in the top 2 of our group to be able to play in the second stage “Elite Group” where will have the best fixtures to test ourselves in the second half of the season. This means that the academy managers will lean far more on winning the game than what they have in the past. That will generate competition in the team because the managers will want to pick the players who will give the best chance of winning, thus creating competition for places which is another stimulant for generating the environment to push young players to better themselves.

Another one of the important factors is for teams to play at a stadium and in front of crowds. Chelsea will be playing the majority of their fixtures at Griffin Park and a few games will be played at Stamford Bridge. Despite this seemingly being the “rules” a number of clubs have decided to play their games at their training complexes behind closed doors which goes totally against the spirit of the EPPP. Hopefully in future years this is something that will be enforced more strongly.

So there we have it, that is what we have in store at academy level this season and it is an exciting prospect to finally see some real change happening to aid the development of these talented young players. Will the competition be taken as seriously as everyone hopes? Time will tell, but one thing is for sure that it is certainly a big improvement on what we have seen so far.

This week the U21’s are once again in friendly action, this time they are at St Albans and will hope to build on what they did last week. The U18’s meanwhile will have a home game against Millwall on Monday before they travel up to Manchester United to play a number of games against Arsenal, Tottenham, Aston Villa and Man United all of these games will take place this week, so once again it is another busy week in the academy.

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