Town remain committed to upgrading the Academy to Category One status at the earliest possible opportunity, having missed out narrowly following an audit ahead of the start of this season.

Managing director Ian Milne told TWTD that he is confident that the club will make the grade in the next round of audits and are currently waiting for changes to be made to the process.

“There’s no news at the moment, other than that they’re uprating the audit rules,” he said.

“They’re changing them, so we’re waiting to hear about that before we plan forward, so watch this space.

“The aim is to go to Category One at the next opportunity as soon as we can, that hasn’t changed.”

Regarding last year’s failure to make the grade by just 0.3 per cent, the main failing was the lack of players progressing from the academy in recent seasons, which is unlikely to be a problem going forward with the likes of Teddy Bishop and Matt Clarke having broken through into the first team picture this season.

The lack of a piece of software has also been cited as a factor, although Milne says this was of less significance.

“We know productivity was the issue, [the number of players] who were coming through. That was one point,” he said.

“The Premier League had developed a website, a performance management application. It’s software that has everything from the player’s name and address to their medical history, their injuries, what training they’ve taken part in, to video analysis of them.

“It’s all put on to a system that really measures their performance cycle over a number of years. It’s like a management system you’ve got in business, you’ve got a personnel file on somebody.

“This software has now been passed down from the Premier League, they paid for it and now we get it free like all the other Championship clubs. That’s just gone in to our academy and they’re getting used to that.

“Last year we didn’t have it. It wasn’t a requirement, we didn’t have to have it. We had a system in place which we’re assuming from the report wasn’t quite up to scratch. Now we’ve got it we’ll be able to tick that box.”

Photo: Action Images

olimar added 18:17 - Nov 19 If that software would have made a 0.3% difference to our application, then it was hugely significant that we chose not to pay for it. As I recall, the failure was also partly down to staff not knowing how to use the software we did have.
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RonFearonsHair added 19:23 - Nov 19 Interesting how Chelsea are (presumably) Category 1 when I don't remember them bringing anyone through to their first team for over a decade!
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RegencyBlue added 19:45 - Nov 19 Good point RonFearonsHair! One law for the rich and another for everyone else!!!
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rugbytomc added 09:19 - Nov 20 I was going to say that RonFearonsHair! And they're not the only PL club either I expect. Since Stevie G, who have Liverpool brought through? They signed Sterling from QPR, Shelvey from Charlton, which leaves Martin Kelly? dubious. and no doubt this premier league website is given free to championship clubs then all their data passed on to prem clubs so they can sign the best championship players on the cheap or something like that. never mind corruption at FIFA, it exists right here in the PL! Good on Ipswich for trying to do everything right though - Come on you blues!

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Bluetone added 12:29 - Nov 20 Fully agree with all those views. The trouble is when you are one of the very few honest clubs and the crooked ones aren't being caught and punished then the honest ones are the losers.
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Marcus added 13:06 - Nov 23 Of course the Premier league teams wants other teams on the system - it does a lot of scouting for them and makes it easier to pluck talented players.
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