Home-grown stars: A fading football vision

The news that Paul Scholes, aged 35, would be invited to sign a further year’s contract with Manchester United is a symbol of an older age in English football when one-club players were not uncommon and a career, from teens to retirement, would be played out with the same team.

The fact that Scholes’ team-mate, Ryan Giggs, a further year on in life, is also a continuing force in the United squad adds further rarity to the situation: home-grown players who perpetuate their position in the highest echelon of the professional game.

Both were part of a so-called golden generation of United player who emerged in the early to mid-1990s and set the club on course for an unprecedented era of success in the national sport. Giggs’ feat of winning 11 Premiership championship medals is surely beyond repetition and Scholes is not too far behind.

Their role in the Old Trafford club’s domination of the domestic game for the last decade and a half is a reminder of how football teams once relied on that kind of self-nurtured talent and avoided spending stellar fortunes on an internationally-sourced line-up with several top-notch and expensive players allocated to most positions.

Half a century ago, the Busby Babes – a sequence of teams of youngsters shaped by manager Matt Busby – won the first five FA Youth Cups, a clear sign that United were developing a conveyor belt of unknown talent. By the middle of the 1950s, there was every presumption that this supply line of apprentices would create an extended domination of trophies at home and abroad.

When eight of the young players – including probably the greatest of all, Duncan Edwards, the youngest ever England international – were killed in the Munich air disaster of 1958, the plan was severely disrupted. Busby himself only survived by the skin of his teeth and dreams of an expected European victory were dashed.

Busby, for a period, had to abandon his home-grown squad plans – but not for long. In the early 1960s he splashed a phenomenal, and record-smashing, £115,000 on the Scot Denis Law, unhappily ensconced in Italy at the time. But when the reconstruction saw United eventually win the prime continental prize, the European Cup, Law was absent through injury and eight of the triumphant line-up were from the United nursery, including the mercurial George Best.

Yet, when we contemplate the golden moments in the history of successful teams who eschewed huge spending and, instead, relied on their own, self-generated stars, we have to reserve a special place in the canon for a pair of legendary sides – the Glasgow Celtic European Cup winners of 1967 and the Ajax outfit who repeated that feat in 1995.

Celtic, who beat United by a year to the title of the first British team to capture that prestigious prize when they defeated Inter Milan, consisted of nine home-grown footballers – only goalkeeper Ronnie Simpson and forward Willie Wallace had played elsewhere. More incredibly, especially when set aside the cosmopolitan nature of the present scene, all eleven players were from the city of Glasgow, an attainment of parochial majesty that will never be witnessed again.

The Dutch team who saw off AC Milan had several club-sourced individuals – and some on the bench, too, as the substitute possibilities had expanded several times since Celtic’s achievement – and were also a younger, less experienced line-up when compared to the earlier Scottish team.

Ajax’s side reflected, too, a growing, if relatively tiny, international influence. Nigerian Finidi George and Finn Jari Litmanen stood for an emerging trend – long common in Italy, by then spreading speedily to Spain and England – that players did not need to be drawn from within the borders on one nation. The 1995 winners were quite quickly dismantled: this brilliant gathering was dispersed to the most commercially powerful leagues in Europe as money inevitably talked.

Today, the idea that home-grown talent is to be valued is barely respected. Liverpool once played Liverpudlians by the dozen; now a couple make the starting line-up. Manchester City had a superb record of finding their own, often Mancunian, players; the 2008 buy-out that saw them becoming the globe’s richest club has done for that. Chelsea, in the Abramovich era, virtually said goodbye, captain John Terry aside, to chicks from the club’s own brood.

Yet Manchester United, even at a time when massive deals have brought Berbatov and Rooney and Ferdinand to Old Trafford, have tended to persist with players they can claim as their own – Fletcher and Brown, O’Shea and Gibson, Neville and Evans, Giggs and Scholes are just some of the genuine Old Trafford-ites who are still key players in the 2009/10 squad.

One place, though, where United have been extraordinarily exposed in the last 30 years is in their failure to find an outstanding striker of their own – Liverpool had at least two in Owen and Fowler and maybe three, if we include Rush’s signing as a teen, lower league performer.

Since the long-gone days of the prolific Best and Brian Kidd, the Manchester side may only cite Andy Ritchie and Mark Robbins as examples of goalscorers who came through the ranks with high reputations. But neither quite proved to be the finished article, drifting off to enjoy only moderate attainments with lower profile clubs.

Perhaps, of the current crop of adolescent forwards, Manchester-born Danny Welbeck and – a real indicator of changing times – the Italian Federico Macheda may fill that vacuum. If they do manage to hit the net consistently, we may even have a United manager – perhaps Darren Ferguson, son of Sir Alex the current, and enduring, boss – announcing, during the season 2025/26, that one of them has had his had his deal extended into his 35th year.