Feeder clubs - classic or dud?

However this is just wrong, WRONG, W!R!O!N!G!, and I retract everything I said on the Milton Keynes Wimbledon thread about how Livingston were a good example of club going places. Christ, they qualified for Europe in their first season in the SPL and put a ton of goals past Sturm Graz. Why enter into this nonsense?

Wouldn't this doom Livingston to mediocrity? If they ever got good enough to challenge in the SPL, their best players would get called up to the EPL.

They won't get called up as such David, it's just that Manyoo will have first dibs on players if Livvy come to sell them. It's a bad idea for top flight clubs though, I can't really see the sense in that, lower league teams though, it can be a blessing, almost a guaranteed source of income and loan players.

That aside, I have always thought of such phenomena feeder clubs as an utter blight, an affront to sport.

Many informal feeder systems exist anyway at youth level and any club with sizeable clout can command transfers from the lower divisions. Spurs have no feeder agreement with Peterbrough yet bought two players from them on the same day.

Manyoo do it all over the place though don't they? They've got Royal Antwerp, where they had quite a few players loaned out (Ronnie walwork smacked a ref while there iirc), and a team in South Africa too.

Liverpool have a "relationship" with Crewe too, I'd like to know what Crewe fans think of it, whether they reckon they get a good deal.

One further point, if you look at La Liga, the clubs reserve sides play competitive football in the lower leagues, Athletico B, Barca B etc. This is meant to act as a feeder system, yet some players spend their whole careers trying to break out of the 'B' sides.

Is there a player that looks feebler?

My main problem with this feeder cllub arrangement is that ManUre are planning on having enough clubs spaced around the country in such a way as to circumvent the 90-minute rule (may not be the exact time). This rule means that teams cannot recruit a player for their academy if his journey is more than 90 minutes from his home.

ManU have tried many different methods of avoiding this, and a few years ago tried to get promising Ipswich Town youngster Dean Bowditch by claiming that he could catch a plane from nearby Stansted Airport and arrive in Manchester in less than the alloted time!

If they had their network of feeder clubs in place then we may have missed out on our most promising youngster since Keiron Dyer, and - inevitably - a possible future source of income when we are forced to sell to survive. Don't get me started on the horrific state of football finances at the moment.