A few years ago, it was said that Southampton were the feeder club to Liverpool, not it seems than Manchester City are performing that role to Saints, although the circumstances are a little different !
As I have mentioned in a previous article, it used to be an insult to throw at a club that they were a selling club, but in the past few years that has changed drastically with Manchester City & Chelsea, two of the richest clubs in the Premier League strategically planning to become just that, a club that sells off most of it's players.
But the tactics here are far different than that of club's like Saints who found themselves having no choice in the matter to sell a raft of players to Liverpool, that was a case of player power with the likes of Adam Lallana, Virgil Van Dijk & Dejan Lovren pushing through transfers when under long contracts with veiled threats of refusing to play being rumoured in the media.
Now Chelsea & Manchester City have a different strategy and that is mopping up all the top youth talent they can, creaming off the odd one or two that do break into their first team and then selling off the rest.
As we have seen with Tino Livramento from Chelsea last summer, a player who was at best 3rd choice at Stamford Bridge, his talent was being stunted there and he had to get away to fulfil his potential and Chelsea benefitted financially, not just with a transfer fee but with sell on and buy back clauses.
This is the nature of football now, where the big clubs are happy to outsource the risk on whether players make it or not and if it costs them £30 million or so to buy them back then that is a drop in the ocean.
Manchester City have now bought into this strategy and for these two clubs, the academy team is not looked at as a source of stars for the first team, but as a valuable revenue stream.
A revenue scheme that is worth a fair bit of money and will not only pay for the academy set up itself and more, but also help fund incoming transfers of players ready for the first team.
Last summer for example Chelsea sold players who had come through their academy for a grand total of £90 million, we of course know of Tino Livramento & Dynel Simeu, but that only accounted for £6.5 million of the revenue, Tammy Abraham was perhaps the best known for £34 million, he had played a few games for Chelsea but spent the best part of the last five years on loan.
Who remembers Fikayo Tomori ? I have to confess I don't, he left last summer aged 23 having played just 17 Premier League games for Chelsea and spent time at Brighton, Hull & Derby on loan, followed by AC Milan whom he joined for £24 million last summer.
Tomori got an England cap in November 2019 despite not being into double figures in first team games,
All this highlights that Chelsea and now Manchester City are hoovering up players at youth level and then selling them on, last summer Chelsea spent £100 million on incoming transfers, all of it on Romalu Lukaku, they covered £90 million of that from the sale of players from the academy who were nowhere near a first team place.
Now Manchester City are in on the act and it seems we are going to be their best customer, we have already given them £12 million for Gavin Bazumu, seem set to follow that with £14 million for Romeo Lavia and are now linked with a move for teenage right back Issa Kabore, not to mention the rumours about Liam Delap.
Kabore could be an interesting signing because firstly he is in the middle of a two year loan with Troyes and has done well in his first season in France, so are City going to recall him to sell him, secondly if Saints were to sign him he would be the 4th right back on the books, the media say he would be coming as cover for Tino Livramento who will be out for the new year, but we already have cover in that position with Kyle Walker Peters and also Yan Valery.
Could we be altering our strategy slightly to try and follow Chelsea & City's example and make selling players a major part of our strategy.
Some would we have been doing that for years and they would be right, but in the main we have sold players because they have become massive and although we have wanted to keep them here, the pressure from the players and their agents to go has been impossible to overcome.
We have seen this beginning with the signing of Matteuz Lis, a player it seems that we have no intention of playing in our first team at the moment, we have got him for nothing and if we loan him out successfully then he could go on to become a first team player or we could sell him at a profit.
But we seem to be heading for a situation where we are gambling on promising players at the likes of Chelsea & Manchester City for relatively small fees and looking to develop and sell them on for bigger ones.
There is nothing wrong with this, effectively it's what we do now just at a younger age with the youth system.
So yes we might well become Manchester City's feeder club, but we are looking to replicate that ourselves a little further down the chain, so if the strategy is working for Chelsea and Manchester City then why should it not work for us.
Some might have spit on the ground and snarl when jokingly it was said that we were Liverpool's feeder club, but I maintain that without the sale of players in 2014-16 we could not have had the success we had in the 3 years after that.
The issue is never about selling players, it is always about how you reinvest the money, our woes stem from buying the likes of Lemina & Carrillo and wasting money.
Hopefully with the change in the club in the past few years and now with the backing of new owners, we will be a lot more focused in our transfer strategy, we took our foot off the ball for a couple of years back in 2017-19, now hopefully we are back on track.
Being a selling club is now no longer an insult but a respected strategy, we are part of that food chain, the trick is to get the best youngsters from Manchester City and then sell them on, we should know what we are doing, after all it could be said that we invented this very system back in the days of Ted Bates in the 1960's.