Club Stature

[TaunTon]

I'm very happy that Morton are associated with a positive and developing community programme and it's great testiment that the hard work and commitment of indivduals is being recognised.

 

No it doesn't have a major impact on what happens with the first team on the park but it may have an impact on improving the lot of youngsters and oldies in our hometown which is no bad thing.

[Tonsilitis]

Amongst the advantages of the Community Trust to the club are:

 

1) In interacting with over 1,000 kids every week, they are exposed to Morton branding and fun.  That helps create the next generation of Morton fans

 

2) Through the after school coaching we get a first look at most kids interested in playing football in the area.  The better ones can be directed to our community teams - equivalent to boys clubs - the best from there can be directed to the youth academy.   We are no longer missing out to the likes of St Mirren and Aberdeen although the pull of the old firm still attracts some kids.

 

Maybe there is no direct impact on the first team right now but engagement with Inverclyde is necessary and proper.

[TRVMP]

I agree with the two points above. The community work needs to be judged on its own merits and it's doing very well on that score.

 

Nonetheless, the first team is by far the most important part of the club.

[vikingTON]

If people want to discuss on a separate thread about how great it is that local fatties are getting back in shape that's fine, but those issues are as usual muddying the waters in a discussion of the professional football club's stature within the Scottish game. 

[TRVMP]

That's fair. Only the absolute diehard Scottish football fans will be aware of other teams' community work and it won't impact into their decision.

[GiGi]

If people want to discuss on a separate thread about how great it is that local fatties are getting back in shape that's fine, but those issues are as usual muddying the waters in a discussion of the professional football club's stature within the Scottish game.

Brutal. No chill.

[TONofmemories]

If people want to discuss on a separate thread about how great it is that local fatties are getting back in shape that's fine, but those issues are as usual muddying the waters in a discussion of the professional football club's stature within the Scottish game.

Christ.

 

Whilst this may not be the appropriate thread, that's a bit insulting

[TRVMP]

'Fatties' is not the preferred nomenclature. 'Hamplanet', please.

[vikingTON]

2) Through the after school coaching we get a first look at most kids interested in playing football in the area.  The better ones can be directed to our community teams - equivalent to boys clubs - the best from there can be directed to the youth academy.   We are no longer missing out to the likes of St Mirren and Aberdeen although the pull of the old firm still attracts some kids.

 

I'm not convinced by that claim at all tbh.

 

You talk about Morton "not missing out" on these players; yet the likes of Aberdeen aren't really missing out on much at all, because they are only scouting Inverclyde as part of a national network looking for youth talent. In what other parts of Scotland are Morton looking for talented young players to bring into their academy setup? If they aren't able to do so effectively at a national or even a regional level, then what justifies focusing a lot of time and attention to "most kids in the Inverclyde area", as opposed to a more targeted approach to the much, much larger pool of talent throughout the Central Belt? It's not exactly the Basque country we're dealing with here. Which other clubs use a similar method to recruit a significant portion of their youth academy intake? Those issues are framed in terms of what is best for the professional football club's supposed youth development policy - to bring through and sell on first-team players for revenue. 

 

If 'getting a first look' at local players was key to having a successful youth system then Morton would literally be the last club cottoning onto the idea - because our record of youth development is universally acknowledged to have been piss-poor for a few decades. But Morton are relatively ahead of their peers on the community engagement front. That logically points to there being already established and in all likelihood more effective ways of finding youth academy prospects, that don't involve the extent of community engagement being undertaken here.  

 

You can have both a good community setup and a good youth setup, but the two have fundamentally different goals in mind. To claim that having one setup automatically benefits the other is not actually the case; both systems should be judged on their own merits alone. 

[vikingTON]

Tl;dr version: "If you don't want to miss out on the best local players you can send a few decent scouts to boys' club games; you don't need to coach the entire local area".

[TheGoon]

Until we start actually bringing players through that go on to have careers at a higher level we'd never be attractive enough to youth prospects in the central belt anyway.