Ali Maxwell

But you do, I mean, Fenis, I think your point is around the academy.

And when there is a clear pathway from academy to first team, it can be very powerful for a club.

Firstly, financially, if you can get first team contributors who are young players, you haven't had to buy them, pay them big wages, then obviously that helps with what you can do with the rest of your budget.

But...

I think there's an intangible side to it as well.

The whole fan base buy-in to young players, local players, maybe a bit more.

I think people within the club, if they can see that the academy is not just being siloed and left on its own, that probably increases buy-in as well.

I actually think a lot of EFL clubs just ignore their academy.

I don't really understand why they have one in the first place if they're not seemingly interested in using it.

Everyone says that they will, but it's actually very few teams that walk the walk when it comes to being patient with players but giving them opportunities at the right time.

The benefits of that are amazing, as Barry Murphy in Cardiff is showing.

Well, I think...

When you look at the English pyramid as a whole, Premier League has three down, three up from the Championship.

Championship has three down.

And it's just League One having four down and therefore League Two having four up and then only two down.

It's a great place to be, League Two.

You can be really, really poor and not get punished as you can in higher leagues.

And you can go up without being as good relative to the level.

So it's just a bit of a weird situation that we've got ourselves into due to random historic stuff from decades ago.

But the driver for change, I believe, has to be the clubs voting for it in the EFL.