Moneyball at the lower end of the salary cap is good for rebuilding your club but it won't win a premiership. Not only that, it usually takes a number of years and mistakes along the way.
Local talent takes years of development and requires plenty of financial input to ensure you have the best coaching. The most significant advantage of local talent is the kids have come through the grades at your club, these kids understand the club and its culture. Another advantage is local kids usually love their local club as opposed to playing at a club only because they paid you the most or offered the longest deal.
Obviously, the Panthers over the past 3 years is the perfect example. Their junior development has been outstanding. The majority of their players are there because they want to be there. Many of them could earn more money elsewhere yet they choose to stay. Here is 1 example, (and there would be many more) Panthers fullback, and 2022 Clive Churchill medal winner, Dylan Edwards reportedly signed an extension this year for $500,000 per season, compared to the Eels fullback and captain Clint Gutherson reportedly on $770,000. This is nearly 55% more than Dylan Edwards. When you think about it, if the Eels could find 3 or 4 of these types of players resulting in massive salary cap savings the result would be obvious.
Unfortunately, from the outside looking in, the majority of players the Eels resign/extend receive top dollar. I can't recall many, if any, Eels players extending contracts with the Eels, and me thinking, wow he could have got so much more elsewhere. This must change before the Eels are any chance of producing a premiership run like they had in the early 80s.
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I'm talking about getting kids and developing them through junior rep sides, not so much the finding of players on the scrap heap and buying them, Papali'i comes to mind. I think the best option is to continually find the best 13 14 and 15-year-olds and develop them. Doing this would provide constant talent coming through your systems. When players either leave or get moved on, you always have young stars ready to take their place. This also provides the club with an advantage when negotiating extensions to contracts. When you know you have kids ready to take the step up to 1st grade, extending existing players becomes less important.
Neither is buying players and developing them only to let them leave.
You end up in perpetual development which delivers zero fruit.
It's a balance.
We just buy the quality players in the Panthers system whose pathway to regular first grade is blocked. We already have one. We only need a couple more quality players to keep the window open. If we retain our halves.
The club hasn't taken junior development seriously for years, from the outside the focus is the NRL team - from 1 to 17 you can count local talent on your fingers, under Brian Smith the club was step up for years even after he left right up until the late 2000's the opposite can be said for BA and the footy department for the last decade.
I believe the Eels have developed the wrong juniors for many years. For some reason our club has predominantly selected players to win junior rep competitions instead of picking and developing kids likely to someday play 1st grade. It's not hard to watch under-14s and pick the bigger kids dominating smaller kids and put them into development teams. Unfortunately, these kids rarely make 1st grade. It takes a special quality to identify the kid that isn't dominating at the junior level but has something that can be developed into something special.
The club addressed this issue a couple of seasons ago, I remember reading something about how the club acknowledged the exact things you stated above. This change in approach will take a few years to bare fruit. We haven't won the lower grade competitions for a little while now.
The current Pathways manager has been in the role for 8 years, that's more than enough time to deliver at least a NSW Cup team full of Junior talent. Rather than being shown the door as a result of the dearth of Junior talent coming through his pathway while having one of the largest nurseries to develop, somehow he's managed to retain a role on the new elite pathways programme...
Totally agree slippery, It is a massive problem within the game from juniors right through to the NRL, discarding players because they are to small.
Smaller players usually have better footy brains as they need to find ways to compete with the bigger or more powerful Polynesian players when younger.
That is why the most halves are smaller white kids. They got dominated and had to find a way to stand out to be noticed and that would be through kicking game, game management or great passing game. Look at the Polynesian halves like Milford and Luai. They have great running games but don't have work ethic required to be top quality half with well rounded game, so they need to play with great game manager with kicking game to overcome their own deficiencies. They became stars though their elusive and powerful running around bigger slower players. The problem is with sports science improving the fowards are getting fitter and faster each year so halves need to have greater skillset then just running around tired fowards.
Other smaller players succeed because their massive heart and workrate. Previously the country players usually fitted this mould but country football is dying. The good young country players are given scholarships in city schools and lose the country work ethic and farm boy strength pretty quickly when they get treated like superstars to early.
You need to keep some of the big powerful players but they are plenty of them so choosing which to keep isn't as important as keeping the right hard working player who will be consistent despite not having superstar highlight package. The other is keeping young halves with either great work ethic who will stick around and develop the required skills. Cleary obviously has natural gifts but it is his work ethic that has gotten him to where he is. He didn't star in any junior representative teams. Same as Cooper Cronk and Cameron Smith who put plenty of extra training in to be the best despite not standing out as juniors.
On this topic I heard MG on the radio the other day say that Nathan Brown was in line to replace Flanagan as the head of junior development at the dragons, seems his stint in that role here at the eels was short lived. BA get his way?????.
Or Broen sees potential to get a head coach job by rd 6 next year
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