Newcastle United Abandon Model Of Signing Foreign Youngsters

Remember when the North East was a football hotbed? Remember when all you had to do to summon potential first team players was to go to the alleyways and playing fields of Walker and Byker and watch ten minutes of football? Okay, so it was never that romanticised, but that was the stereotype of the region that once produced talents as impressive as Beardsley, Gascoigne, Shearer and Waddle (yes, Wearside had its moments too) and it is massively removed from the perception of the region now. Youth players from the North East tend to be the most roundly cheered - they are seen as a point of pride more than anyone signed from other clubs or who was born abroad, simply because their development says something about us as a region. We want Geordies to play and to succeed because of that forgotten dream in every Newcastle fan that they could have played for their team if they'd been good enough. The idea that their way would be barred by too many foreigners or imported domestic talent would be devastating to that dream. Perhaps this is why Newcastle United are now looking closer to home for youth signings? Perhaps they want to feed the dreamers in us, knowing we want another Gazza, or Carrick, or even another Andy Carroll. According to journalist Michael Walker - author of "Up There" - and PinPoint Recruitment secretary Ian Coates (a key figure in youth competitions in the country), Newcastle have now changed their policy to focus entirely on emerging local talents, by rejecting the old approach of signing foreign kids on scholarships:

€œNewcastle United€™s recruitment policy has changed as of this year. They will not recruit any player under the age of 21 from overseas on a scholarship. The majority of their players are going to come from within a two-hour radius of Newcastle. They€™re going back to the old days. €œThis is coming from the top. They believe there are technically gifted players within the North East. Steve Nickson is head of their recruitment nationally up to 21, he is adamant about that, as is Lee Charnley, the new managing director.€

Obviously looking at the track record of some of those foreign recruits - Samuel Adjei, Fabio Zamblera, Wesley Ngo Baheng, and even the more "established" figures of Haris Vuckic and Mehdi Abeid - you can perhaps see why there is frustration. But why is nobody assessing why the local and English talents aren't emerging in their places? There seems some inherent suggestion in the new approach that it is the nature of the players, and not the youth set-up at the club that is to blame for the lack of emerging players - which is clearly garbage. Newcastle have overseen the emergence of precisely the same number of top level players in the past ten years from foreign countries as they have from Newcastle: one. Tim Krul and Andy Carroll are the only youth successes at Newcastle that are anything to write about. There are others who have made the first team of course - Rolando Aarons being the next big thing, but he came from Bristol, not Byker - but they haven't made it big, or become as sellable as Mike Ashley hopes his youth players can blossom into, so suggesting that the problem is the nationality of the players seems like blaming the Titanic crash on the PH of the water. What really matters is that Newcastle simply do not have the right coaches at the club to actually develop youth talent into something sustainable and saleable: they have roundly failed for ten years to turn raw talent - no matter where it came from - into first-team options, and it is that set-up that needs rethinking rather than the recruitment catchment areas.