Andre Villas-Boas and his comments about the state of youth development in England were right. It isn’t very good. Everything else that he said in regards to the matter on Thursday afternoon/evening were said purely with the best interests of Chelsea at heart.

Villas-Boas wasn’t trying to be preachy nor was he apparently trying to change the way that the English football league is set-up. His comments were quite clearly an expression of his frustration with the squad that he has inherited as the Chelsea manager shrouded in a declaration of distain for the whole footballing system in England.

The Portugese manager has arrived at the Stamford Bridge club and is forced look at a reserve squad that has nothing but stuttered development for the last seven or eight years. Jose Mourinho has shown, in his time with Chelsea, Inter Milan and Real Madrid that youth development and future planning is not something he spends a great deal of time worrying about. As long as ‘The Special One’ has a squad of player he can work with, everyone else is largely forgettable.

The rest of the Chelsea managers since the club were taken over by Roman Abramovich have barely been in the job long enough to get themselves along to a Reserve team rather start trying to play for the progression of the players involved in it. Their primary focus, rather rightfully, was obviously on making their jobs secure with first team success. The youth development ‘could’ come later.

That has meant youth development hasn’t really happened at Chelsea. Not in a concious manner that has since the plans and futures of young players properly mapped out – and this is what troubles Andre Villas-Boas. Because there isn’t a rigid structure like other nations, the development of players has stalled rather than continuing as normal.

In other European countries, like Spain which was mentioned at length in AVB’s comments, young players are helped through the system without care for who the first team manager is at the time. As a string of Bundesliga and La Liga clubs have shown, talents are able to break through even if the club change their manager regularly. Villas-Boas has arrived to Stamford Bridge and found a youth structure in real ruin. Frank Arnesen cleaned out the reserve squad in the summer, making a string of signings for his new club Hamburg and left behind a handful of players who really should have made more senior appearances than they have.

Andre Villas-Boas is right in what he said. Young players aren’t given enough chances to progress in the English but don’t be foolish enough to think for one second that he has anything other than his own interests in mind. Andre doesn’t care much for the development of the English national team or even young players breaking into the Premier League. His comments were only made to bemoan the shocking number of youth products in his reserve squad.

The only breakthrough player AVB has been able to constantly call on this season has been Daniel Sturridge and he did more developing at Manchester City’s academy than Chelsea’s.

When Andre Villas-Boas said, “The youth development system in England is not right, in my belief. There is plenty of effort and talks to get it right but, in my opinion, it is not. The reserve-team league is not competitive and doesn’t serve the progression of talent coming through. The gap between the reserve team and the first team is immense here,” he was right.

The rest was probably said because he sat through Barcelona dominating the second best team in the world last Wednesday and was jealous of the fact that they used ten products of their own youth system in doing so.

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