One of the great recurring themes of British Football happened the other day. Once every couple of years one of the Managers of the “Big Six” clubs sticks his head above the parapet and says something about wanting to have their reserve sides in the football leagues.

The most recent exponent of this idea was Andre Villas Boas who said we should follow the model in Spain and have reserve teams playing in their equivalent of the championship: “What happens in Barcelona is a good model in terms of competitions. They promote talent,” he said.

He went further in explaining himself. “The reserve team, for all the hard work, is not competitive. It serves the first team, but it doesn't serve the progression of talent coming through.

"The youth development system in England is not right. If you’re 'B' team plays in the Championship, where they are fourth or sixth and threatening, playing good football, you'd call them up.

 
"It could be a great benefit because you don't have to work with a 26-man squad, but a 19-man squad and just recall the best young guys with constant activity.”

Not surprisingly this preposterous idea was given short shrift by the football league themselves. Their Chief Executive Andy Williamson was aghast: “The suggestion is frankly offensive," he said

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"Our clubs are constituted as sovereign entities which represent their town or city with pride, rather than being a subsidiary of another club in another part of the country.”

"These are senior professional football matches that matter - they are not just platforms for developing other clubs' players.”

The issue here is that there are rights and wrongs on both sides. Of course Williamson is right, these clubs with hundreds of years of history and fans who live and breathe the team and this is not something that can be overridden on the whim of a Manager who has no concept of the English game (and unless results improve will probably be gone at the season’s end!)

But where you do have to agree with AVB is on his comment that the Youth Development in this country was not right. It does have to be said that there is not a lot of quality coming through – certainly not in the abundance that it used to be.

 
Of course it could be argued that this is a direct result of the big clubs themselves, stock-piling all the best young English talent and buying expensive foreign players meaning that those expensively assembled young players never get a chance anyway so that their career stalls.

But whatever the reasons it is abundantly clear that something needs to be done, because there is not the quality in this country that there is in other places.

There is little doubt too, that reserve football isn’t a great breeding ground for players any more, but if reserve football isn’t doing it, and AVB’s idea is both nonsense and a non starter, then what can be done?

Arsene Wenger – who has produced more than his fair share of good young players down the years – had some interesting ideas on the subject. He first rejected the idea of his Chelsea counterpart, saying: "The supporters of Barnet do not want their club not to be promoted because the reserve team of Arsenal is in front of them."

He then continued: "It is very difficult to mix the interests of the smaller clubs with the interests of the big clubs who could have a second team, and could be competitive in the smaller leagues."

The Gunners Boss is one of the many Premier League Managers who loan the best of their young players out to Football League (and in some cases Premier League) clubs to help them gain experience, and this, he says, has served him well. "We give our players out on loan to the lower leagues. If they manage to convince people they can play in there, they come back,” was how he put it.

Indeed Wenger believes that the forthcoming change in the Academy System (as ratified by the PL) would help any way. This will create an under-21 league, pitting the best youngsters against each other. According to the Frenchman its “an interesting idea,” and I am inclined to agree.

Not perfect perhaps, but infinitely better than Chelsea reserves playing in the championship.