Dean Wright, who was appointed Town’s academy manager in the summer, says a move to category one is “on the table if it’s the right thing for the club” but is not the subject of serious discussion at present.
Town currently run a category two academy having missed out on category one by 0.3 per cent in an audit in 2014 when the current system was instigated, while the Blues were seriously looking into the prospect again just prior to the pandemic.
Wright is fully aware of the advantages of cat one, having previously worked at Norwich City, and says it’s something which will come under consideration at Town.
"I think there are thoughts and it’s on the table if it’s the right thing for the club and we determine that it’s important to us in the path that we want to go on,” he told TWTD.
"Having worked in cat one for a number of years, I know the benefits of it, in particular the games programme. There is a difference between the games programme at cat one to what it is at cat two.
"And that would be something that would be important to us in terms of the overall aim of producing players that can play in our first team. The level of game that we play every week is really important.
"We will have an audit at some point this year for category two that we have to go through. Once we move through that, then I think the discussions open up on what’s next.
"I think it just links that everything that the club are doing now, ‘How can we be the best that we can be?’. If being cat one is part of being the best that we can be, then let’s go for it and do it.
"If it’s not and we think we can do what we need to do as a cat two, then we’ll do that and be the best cat two that we can be.
"But it’s certainly on the table, it’s not something that we’ve discussed seriously in terms of, ‘Right, we’re going to do it on this date’, but it’s there on the table.
"It wasn’t a deal-breaker for me, ‘I’m only going to come here if we go cat one’. Not at all because there are benefits to cat two as well, being a strong cat two.
"We’re in a good area in terms of the types of games that we can get anyway, so our schoolboys play really good fixtures, the Sunday schoolboys programme is strong in terms of the level of opposition we play.
"It’s probably when you get to 18 and 21 that then the level is a little bit different and that’s something that in the short term we need to address. We can’t sit and just wait and see what happens next year because we’ve got a group of players that then miss out.
"We’re working hard at the moment to fill in any gaps that we have in the programme, can we fill it with cat one teams? The 18s have had a few of those types of fixture this year, with the 21s it’s a little bit more difficult to get those games
"But we are trying and we’ve got some coming up against strong opposition and we’ll keep doing that because that’s the important bit for me, that the level of game is what our players need and the challenge is there to make sure they get to where we all want them to get to.”
Wright says that in addition to the games programme, funding is the other big change from category two to category one.
Category two is understood to cost around £2 million a year, including a grant from the Premier League, and cat one requires significant cash on top of that.
"The big one is the level of investment that the club is obliged to put in,” he continued. "Dependent on the level that your club invests at cat two, you’re probably talking double, without knowing the exact figures, I think it’s double as a generic bog standard cat one. But listen, you’ve got some clubs that are cat ones that are on another planet, so they’re in a category of their own.
"There’s staffing, there are more mandatory positions, facilities, you’ve got to have a certain level of facilities. I think the whole thing is just a step above.
"The other bit is it’s harder to lose players, it’s easier for a cat one to take a player from a cat two, it’s not as easy to take a cat one to a cat one, so that’s another benefit of trying to keep our players rather than losing them to category one clubs.
"There are a load of benefits to that but then there are is always a flip-side to that, having more staff, having more pressure on the facility, more investment required from the club, there’s a lot of other stuff. It has to be a balanced case and a balanced argument so the benefits outweigh the cons of doing this.
"If they do and it’s the right thing to do and it’s part of the wider strategy and plan, then I believe it’s something we’re able to aim towards and I think from having worked in it and what I see that we’ve got in place here, I don’t think it would be a massive challenge for us to to achieve it if we set our stall out that’s what we’re going to aim for.
"I think the club, the desire from the club to be the best we can be and the facilities, the staffing, all the pieces that you would have to put together, I think we would be in a position to achieve that if it’s the right thing for us to do.”
Further instalments of our interview with Town's new academy manager will be posted in the days to come.