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| Against The Odds: Football has a glamorous image, but British pitches are far from paved with gold. Recent FA Cup winners Portsmouth faced a winding up order from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs after having four owners this season. They need a fifth. Two years ago Cardiff City were beaten in the FA Cup Final, but their fans share the misery of Pompey as their club faced the prospect of being wound up by HMRC too. Both clubs were given a stay of execution and were on different ends of 4-1 scorelines in the last sixteen of this season’s cup. Cardiff’s Chairman Peter Ridsdale is confident that the £2.7m debt can be paid in time to save the club – they remain the only non-English club to win the FA Cup. A controversial scheme to persuade fans to pay for season tickets in advance and a land deal with Cardiff City Council staved off the immediate threat of both liquidation and the winding-up petition. They moved to a new stadium recently, which meant that money promised for new players has not been forthcoming and the resources due from the Football League up to the end of the season have already been targeted to service the debt, but the land deal suggests that the club has found a way to survive and convinced both the City Council and HMRC that it can survive.. Despite its financial worries, Cardiff City FC has one of the best run and most successful academies in football. In around five years it has performed miracles and done so without significant financial support from the club. We were fortunate enough to secure an extensive and exclusive interview with the Academy Director Neal Ardley. His playing career was cut short by injury two and a half years ago. Ardley made his name with Wimbledon, leaving just before financial problems all but destroyed the club. After three years at Watford he moved to Cardiff in 2005 and then to his last club Millwall in 2006. He was forced to retire as a player on August 30th 2007, but was appointed Manager of Cardiff City’s Academy that day and has been in charge ever since. Successful: Every club wants their academies to produce top quality players. Smaller clubs like Cardiff rely on their academy both for success on the pitch and also financial viability for the club as a whole. “I think this is the sixth year – sixth season – that it’s been in place as an actual academy,” Ardley told us. “Obviously they had a youth set up beforehand which was the Centre of Excellence, but there has been an academy for six years now.” So what has it achieved in that time compared to the old system? “From the youth set up I would say it’s somewhere in the region of about eighteen or nineteen players have come through,” Ardley says. “From the actual academy I think it’s probably nearer thirteen or fourteen players have come through.” The list of graduates includes Welsh internationals Chris Gunter, Aaron Ramsey and Joe Ledley. Fellow Welsh internationals Robbie Earnshaw and James Collins were products of Cardiff City’s youth development programme. The academy has developed many first team players, some of whom have been sold on to bigger clubs as Earnshaw and Collins were before them. Ramsey was the most recent notable departure to Arsenal. “I think that there’s probably about five or six that have been sold on,” says Ardley. “I think at the moment the figure that they have brought intro the club stands somewhere in the region of £14m in transfer fees and on top of that you’ve obviously got Joe Ledley, who’s playing in our first team at the moment and they turned down a bid of £6m for, so if you’re looking over the last five years, it’s a nice sort of profit.” So how much does it cost to run an academy like this? “This can vary depending on the size and the ambition of the club,” said Ardley. “The Football League contributes to all football clubs. I think if you’ve got everything in place that they ask you to it can be upwards to a total of about £180,000 you can receive in funding providing you have got all the certain aspects that they ask you to. With Cardiff, we’re not affluent; we haven’t got pot loads of money. We have to run things on a tight budget, so here you would be looking at including the money we get from the Football League and on youth funding, you are probably looking at about half a million pounds.” The academy is the future of Cardiff City in many ways. It has contributed young players to the first team and players that were developed by Ardley and his team have been sold on for a profit, so does the club invest in the academy? “At this precise moment at this club the answer to that is no and the reasons for that would be that this club over the last five or six years has been fighting really to stay alive – to stay out of administration,” said Ardley. “Now all the hard work that has gone on behind the scenes we are going to have this lovely stadium and hopefully the income stream will be a lot more – round the corner Premiership maybe – and if that happens touch wood then I’m sure the need to sell on players to keep the club afloat will be something in the past and if that happens maybe the academy might benefit a little bit more from that.” Sadly Cardiff City’s financial problems suggest that their academy will have to keep fending for itself and producing talent to sell on for a bit longer, but the academy has played an essential part in keeping the club afloat. |
