Another deal that shows how cards are stacked against Carlisle United

Nuance can be lost, nuggets of helpful wisdom washed away.

Nobody could argue Steven Pressley’s Carlisle United reign was a success. The Blues went from promotion candidates to relegation contenders in the same time it’s taken Paul Simpson to turn them the other way.

That doesn’t mean Pressley didn’t know what he was talking about, though. In occasional areas, he was absolutely on the money. Youth football in particular.

Pressley was speaking openly and ruefully about Carlisle United’s loss of the young midfielder Josh Galloway to Leeds United, in the same summer of 2019 that the winger Liam McCarron had gone the same way.

Nobody could argue Pressley's Carlisle reign was a success - but that doesn't mean he was wrong about everything (Image: PA)

Galloway, who was then 17, had not played a first-team game. He had shown up brightly in a pre-season friendly or two, but remained above all a matter of promising but unclear potential. And Carlisle couldn’t keep him.

Pressley was frustrated at the way United were, on a financial basis, crushed by the system: by the rapacious recruitment needs of clubs with bigger academies. The pressures on those at Carlisle’s level were heavily apparent.

"In my day you had to earn the right to a contract – now, if we don't protect a young player who's had a couple of good games within a week, we're in danger of losing him,” said Pressley.

"We offered a contract to Josh, which was declined, then you're in a position where if you don't negotiate what you consider to be a good offer – an offer that gives you an opportunity to earn money as he progresses in his career – you're in danger of losing him to a minimal amount of money through a tribunal. It's ridiculous at this moment in time.

"That's what the system is creating and it's incredible. It's not right."

READ MORE: Simpson sheds light on Blues teenager's Ipswich move

It is why, to a large extent, Carlisle under director of football David Holdsworth and with the eagle eye of Edinburgh Woollen Mill on their bottom line, did what Pressley said they inevitably must, despite themselves.

Players were spirited from youth team deals into the professional ranks ahead of their time. In some cases, it undoubtedly protected Carlisle. But it also lit the landscape which Pressley had highlighted.

Paul Simpson, when discussing the departure of Ryan Carr to Ipswich Town this week, came at it from a different angle. He said to have prematurely awarded Carr a pro deal, this early into his second year of youth football, could have had a detrimental effect on his peers who were not so fortunate.

Ryan Carr left Carlisle for Ipswich this week (Image: Richard Parkes)

Their focus, he argued, could wane. And Simpson has worked with young footballers long enough for us to listen.

There is, these days, heightened risk whichever road you choose. Carlisle lost Carr ("it's still early, but he has a chance," Simpson said) to Ipswich’s under-21 squad this week for a fee and deal which will have been largely governed by the guidelines of the Elite Player Performance Plan; the youth development system which came into being in 2011.

Had they played hardball, and pushed for a tribunal, Simpson is confident they would not have got better terms (not least because he had only joined the club in his mid-teens, not at a younger age). Had they tied Carr down earlier, there could have been negative ramifications elsewhere.

Pressley was surely right here. Carr is an undeniably promising young player; anyone capable of making a first-team debut whilst still a youth teamer, albeit in the Papa John’s Trophy, is worth noticing.

READ MORE: Carlisle United boss makes appeal to council and businesses over training facilities

But worth chaining to a pro contract at that instant moment? Ideally that decision would have been allowed to develop over time, and United would have found a good, nurturing middle ground for the player, instead of finding themselves caught between two options, neither helpful to them in the end.

These pressures have been created, be in no doubt, by the EPPP, and those who argued from the outset that it would be primarily a recruitment tool for the powerful have hardly been disabused of that idea.

There are now big under-21 squads at most of those up the chain, and those squads must be filled. There is no 90-minute rule on recruitment radius. Chances are offered and taken more readily.

The bar, let us be frank, has been lowered for a breadth of young players to join big clubs (and Ipswich can be held up as that, despite currently being in League One). More, as a consequence, are coughed out at the other end, left to resume and rebuild lives and careers with at least one inflated dream let down.

This, again, was a feared consequence at the very beginning. The increased imbalance at the expense of smaller clubs led some to close their academies down. Others, like Carlisle, battled on, sometimes producing a player who goes all the way through (Jarrad Branthwaite, Jack Ellis, Taylor Charters) but always now at the mercy of a predator moving in earlier than ever.

John Nixon spoke about the benefits of EPPP when the system was introduced - but it has made life harder for smaller clubs (Image: Barbara Abbott)

One of the familiar tells is that the EPPP was a matter of Premier League design and accepted by the EFL. Never the other way round, is it? Hello, Pizza Trophy, we’re talking about you…

In other words: the parameters were set, and then enough persuasive power was applied for those lower down to stomach it. It undoubtedly enables a more thorough method of elite preparation for the nation’s best young players, but at what cost in terms of waste, and arm-up-the-back coercion when it comes to taking, and taking, and taking?

“The end product is a group of young players who can step up into the professional game at a very high level, and go on to have successful careers,” said one of EPPP’s advocates in 2011 – Carlisle’s then managing director John Nixon, saying it was a way England could catch up with nations like Spain.

What Nixon and others did not necessarily put as prominently into play was the idea that none of the risk was attached to those clubs operating at “a very high level”, yet more of it than ever fastened to the likes of Carlisle and the young players who, in some cases, pass fleetingly through.

As such, Leeds can take a Josh Galloway ahead of his time, and wave him off to Annan Athletic a few years later. Ryan Carr deserves the very best of wishes as he ventures down to Portman Road. But it doesn’t mean Pressley’s complaint of 2019 has lost any of its urgency or force.