Kevin Nagle makes Huddersfield Town ‘those players can be ours’ vow as key application made

 

The new regime in charge of the Terriers have immediately set about the process of re-expanding the academy to cover a broader range of age groups and bring in new talent

Terriers owner Kevin Nagle hopes the club can get back to developing its own players from a young age with the re-expansion of their academy to cover a broader range of age groups, with plans already under way to upgrade from their current category 4 status.

Huddersfield Town intentionally downgraded their academy in 2017, effectively eliminating all youth provision below under-17s level, in an intentional ploy to more fully focus on acquiring and developing players from other academies.

The club have enjoyed success with that B team system, with that academy policy turning out current first-team players Brahima Diarra, Kian Harratt, Pat Jones Rarmani Edmonds-Green and Ben Jackson, while the club completed sales for two more graduates, Etienne Camara and Nicholas Bilokapic, earlier this summer.

Nagle now wants to club to build on that by reintroducing younger age groups to the academy and looking to keep talented local youngsters away from rival clubs.

Read more: Huddersfield Town’s missing pieces and promising signs in five conclusions on loss to Leicester

Speaking exclusively on our Town podcast Ooh To Be A Terrier last week, Nagle said: “We are filing week with the EFL to expand our academy. As I said at the press conference last month, we’re going to invest in that and I feel that’s another dimension to make the club much stronger.

“The here and now to here now is ‘let’s go out and let’s buy players, or let’s see if we can access players elsewhere’. [But] having your own complement, brings you a lot of firepower because even if you don’t use those players, and you wish to sell them to someone else, whether that’s to the Premier League or a competitive league…we can’t do that right now. It’s not really much of an option.

“I think eventually, the phase that we’re coming into, we’re expanding age [groups] so that we can include more and we can be a little bit [more] mid-term looking. I’ll give an example: at Sacramento, my club in the United States, we’re signing a 13 year old, he’s going to be the youngest player in our league, and we really have a feeling that player is not that far away from playing. You don’t discover those very often, but we saw that through our academy.