Chelsea's Loan Army - Should it be allowed?

spudbynight said:
ok, say you limit the number of players who can go out on loan. What do you do in the case of a young player who comes up and develops to the point he needs first team football but isn’t good to get in the first team at his club? Take Chelsea out of the equation. Imagine this is a local guy at Brighton who needs some game time to progress. He would normally have had a load spell at say a Championship club. Now this isn’t permitted because Brighton are at their cap. What about the player on long term injury who has recovered quicker than expected but needs 3 months in the Championship to get match fitness.
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The short term loan system is in place, take one back who isn't getting game time. Its pure and simple hoarding.
 
spudbynight said:
And if they are all getting game time?
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So you don't have a cap and allow Chelsea to have 33 players out on loan, including 2 of the players I mentioned when I created this thread nearly 4 years ago.

I have no idea what the number should be but there will be a reasonable number that allows clubs to continue to run their academy sensibly and allow players that require first team football to go out on loan without having a club hoard players and ruin so many of their careers. You don't even have to have a hard cap - set the cap at 7 u23 players and if you want to loan out any more you need to get special dispensation from the FA.
 
I might be talking nonsense but years ago I seem to recall ChampMan had a limit of how many players you could loan to other clubs, I think it was 8 and I'd always assumed that was based on some rule back then. I wonder if the rules have changed or if that was just some quirk of the game.
 
honestly I think there should be a system in place to allow clubs to sign players from youth squads for minimal / no fee is that player has been in the under 23s for x about of time, is under Y years old and not played for the first team Z times.

That would make parent clubs either push their youth into senior games or expect them to leave fairly quickly to teams in lower divisions that could actually use them.
 
Interesting suggestion, I guess it might devalue the quality of some competitions though because clubs would have these kids on the bench so they can give them a few minutes in games that are already done and dusted, so they can hit that Z target in order to retain their value.

You'd also have the issue of how these kids get paid, suppose you are Billy Bigshot of Chelsea FC, you are picking up your £20k/week just trotting out for the U23s, or out on loan somewhere. This new law comes in and some club wants to steal you off Chelsea for 50p. But they still need to pay you a million pound salary, which these lower league clubs may not be able to afford.
 
I like the idea actually. If Billy Bigshot wants to stay at Chelsea, being farmed out on loan every season, picking up his £20k per week rather than go elsewhere and earn less money then let him. If he's happy with that scenario and Chelsea are happy with it then there's no issue.

What really prompted me to create this thread 4 years ago was the idea that Chelsea were essentially blackmailing these young players - renew your contract or spend the next 12, 18 or 24 months rotting in the reserves. Monty's idea would remove that threat and Chelsea (or whoever) would have to pay even bigger money to persuade that player to stay or convince them that Chelsea is the best place for them.

Chelsea aren't the only club that does this, they're just doing it on a bigger scale and something needs to change. Capping the number of kids a club can have at their academy, capping the number of players that can be loaned out, shortening the maximum length of contract u23s can sign or putting break clauses in deals, allowing players to leave if they're not being played.
 
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