Boss Paul Lambert believes the current crop of youngsters coming through at Town is “one of the most exciting groups of young players” he has seen and says they are the future of the club.
Lambert, who last week pledged to stay at Portman Road next season regardless of which division the Blues are in, believes the club has to take a different approach going forward, one which doesn’t involve a succession of loan players coming in every transfer window as has been the case for much of the last decade.
"It can’t keep doing what it’s done, it’s an impossibility, it has to have a structure right through the club,” he said.
"We’ve got to have an identity where everybody is clear on it, everybody knows what’s going to happen, the fans know what’s going to happen, you guys [the media] know what’s going to happen - this is the way Ipswich Town is going to go. The identity of [the way] we’re doing it.
"You can’t keep going out and loaning people all the time. It stops the pathway for young players coming through.
"With young players coming through you might not get instant results but you get the identity back at your club and [from there] keep growing and growing and growing and it’ll just take care of itself.
"But you cannot keep doing what you’re doing, you may as well throw money out in the street, it doesn’t work.”
Lambert has signed six players this window - including three on loan - but he reiterated that that’s purely to do with the circumstances the club currently finds itself in rather than his long-term thinking.
"The lads needed help,” he continued. "I think everybody recognised they needed that help, lads to come in and help them.
"As a core group, they’ve been absolutely brilliant, everybody has. But ideally you don’t want to go through that every single summer or January.
"It’s too much, far too much, it can’t happen. The turnaround here in the summer either way has to be big. But you have to get your own players in here, plus you have to have a pathway for the young ones to come through.
"As I’ve said before, this club has got some really good young players here, really good. And it’s gone under the radar. I could go through them all, Andre Dozzell, Flynn Downes, Teddy Bishop, Jack Lankester, you can go right through to the U18s, there are some really good kids there as well.
"You can go right through to the U16s and U15s but they need a pathway through and they need a manager that says, ‘OK, I’m going to give you a chance if you’re good enough’.”
Asked about Leicester youngster Callum Elder, 23, being in the team ahead of Myles Kenlock with some feeling the Blues would be better off long-term giving the 22-year-old academy product experience, he responded: "The club has to get back to get to its own. I said before that if Jonas Knudsen says he wants to go we have to go and get somebody to help Myles.
"If anything happens to Myles then there’s no real left-back at the club apart from Bailey Clements, who is only a kid. They're only kids.
"That’s the big burden of it, so we had to go and get somebody to help Myles. And Myles has done really fine, Myles is in the reckoning as well.
"He’s come through the ranks but he’s a young guy as well. You can’t give anybody experience, that has to come through experience, that has to come through making mistakes or playing well, that's no problem. There’s that fine line of the balancing act, I think.”
He says throwing youngsters into the current situation can potentially harm their development: "It’s unfair on them. As I said before, I got thrown in when I was 15 myself but I went into a team where everybody was a man really.
"I had great players round about me at that time in my upbringing. I went into a dressing room predominantly full of men.
"We’ve got young guys we’re trying to help, which is too many and we needed James Collins to come in, Collin Quaner to come in, Will Keane to come in, Alan Judge to come in, guys that had done it to give them that help.
"But the future for the club, the young players here, it’s one of the most exciting groups of young players I’ve seen. It could be unbelievable with them.”
He added: "This club’s got some really good young players and I think it’s gone under the radar, if I’m honest - Dozzell, Downes, Bishop, Lankester, they’re all really, really good young football players.
"The club's in a really good place with the young kids coming through, and even below that there’s a really good under belly there.
"I think it’s gone under the radar, I think people have bypassed it, there are some really good young players that given a little bit of time they’re going to make a helluva impact here for sure.”
He says the Championship can be a tough division to introduce youngsters: "To an extent it is. As I said before, this club has undersold itself with the young players its got, go back to the lads I’ve mentioned.
"Those lads are handling themselves at a high level under me. They’re getting into a way of playing under me, they know exactly the way I am as a person, the way we want to work.
"Next year they’ll be a lot stronger for it, miles stronger for it. They need a little bit of help but young players have to get thrown in at some point to see if they can sink or swim.
"Where they need me is probably to take the chance on them. That’s where they need a manager to say, ‘OK, it doesn’t matter how young you are, I think you’re good enough, I’ll throw you in’.
"I was fortunate I had a manager like that [Alex Smith at St Mirren] when I was growing up and that’s the way I’ve always done it. I can go back to any club I’ve been at, I’ve always given you players a chance.
"I needed somebody to do that for me and thankfully he did. If he’d never done it, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
Lambert repeated his intention of instilling his way of playing into academy teams: "They don’t play my way [at present]. We’ll try and implement it, sweep it right through and everybody has to go the same way as the first team.
"I think that’s important regardless of results. Results don’t matter at that age. Their own egotism doesn’t matter, it’s about getting players through to the first team.
"Everybody plays the same way so the transition from U15s to U16s [and upward], everybody knows so when they do hopefully eventually hit the first team they know exactly the movements that’s going to happen that we asked for, they know exactly what’s going on.
"We will have a coaches meeting really shortly to tell everybody how this club is going to play and everybody that comes to the football club has to play that way.
"I think that’s important for everybody and everybody’s clear rather than the identity of the player being all wrong and you’re identifying player to fit into that system.”