Independent Leyton Orient Forum

Why are we not producing any young strikers through our youth team? Who was the last one ? We seem to have some midfielders and defensive players for the future, but goal scorers ?

That’s a very good question . If only we had one coming through the ranks at the moment .

The wider question, why has the academy only produced one player for the first team since 2017? Your Happe, Sotiriou etc were from the Edwards days but since then it's been NL South standard players all ending up released and even Obiero is apparently ex-Spurs (never knew that until Donley mentioned it in his interview)

Daniel Nkrumah. We got a fee for him too.

It’s not a position specific issue. The production line has dried up completely.

There’s two factors at play here. One is the quality of coaching. It would appear we have not replaced Edwards. The other is the calibre of kid we would have attracted in NL and L2.

1 you would be amazed how many smaller clubs loose there young prospects to prem clubs. 6/7/8 upwards. A lot of lower league clubs make money out of that, ours included.
2 this club cannot compete with prem clubs like Spuds,Arsenal,Chelsea and West Ham plus others. Those clubs have 60/70 plus scouts full and part time plus extremely good coaches and facilities that we just cannot match. However the odd ones do fall through the net Laurie Cunningham and recently Galbraith for example

Hoover Attack wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2024 6:10 pm It’s not a position specific issue. The production line has dried up completely.

There’s two factors at play here. One is the quality of coaching. It would appear we have not replaced Edwards. The other is the calibre of kid we would have attracted in NL and L2.

Fair point actually. Anyone coming through at 18/19 now would have been, what? 12/13 while we were in non league? Probably weren't picking up the same quality of kids that we did while we were an established L1 side and Alzate, Adeboyajo, Sotiriou, Kyprianou, Happe et al were playing at various youth levels.

We had that year , when we went non league m where we had a brilliant youth team , who all left . It’s really important though because we could save so much money bringing our own players through, rather than misfits from other clubs . Also surely the attraction for kids is that they stand a great chance of first team football, which so rarely happens , if ever at premier league

It's often cyclical with youth teams. We've had periods were we'd get a glut of youngsters breaking through to the first team and then some barren years. I'm sure relegation from the Football League did some long term damage which will take a while to repair. There's lots of youngsters who I was sure would make it in the first team but it never happened for one reason or another (McElholm,Forbes, Winston,Papadopolous,Ogie,Matt Young etc). I

gshaw wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2024 4:43 pm The wider question, why has the academy only produced one player for the first team since 2017? Your Happe, Sotiriou etc were from the Edwards days but since then it's been NL South standard players all ending up released and even Obiero is apparently ex-Spurs (never knew that until Donley mentioned it in his interview)

Obeiro joined at a very young age so produced by the Academy. Welsh came on Tuesday. Pegrum too

Ogie too another Academy boy and Dan N

Perkins…

I 10-17 Orient player has a good youth game against a bigger team and they want him, they'll just grab him