Fra Bates-intervjuet:
BF: You mentioned the backroom staff, there has been an appointment this week to the backroom team – Chris Sulley has joined as the new academy manager. What pedigree does he bring to the role?
KB: To start with, I think we have to go back to probably last year, when we decided the quality of players coming through and the fact that our youth team were bottom of the league, that changes had to be made. But there’s no point in replacing the then incumbents with somebody else just for the sake of making a change. I think it’s a significant tribute to the diligence of the manager and Gwyn Williams, the head of football, that they have taken over four months to make an appointment. That indicates their determination to get it right. A lot of youth team managers and so on and so forth are ex-players who sometimes they were assistant managers or first team coaches. Sometimes they were even managers and then they sort of take this job as academy director as a last resort because they are looking for a job.
Chris Sulley is different. He started at Chelsea as a kid and Gwyn knew him of old so there is form there if you like. So we know a lot about his character. Secondly, when he finished quite a reasonable journeyman’s footballing career, he had played over 400 games, he went straight into youth.
So has been concentrating on youth for over 10 years now and his current position before he joined, he was in fact a freelance consultant to the FA and one or two other clubs. During that time he spent time at his own expense travelling Europe to see how other countries tackle their youth challenges, particularly Holland which is generally regarded as having the best system in Europe.
So he comes in and he hits the ground running, knowing what he wants to do and having done it elsewhere. So we are very pleased to have him. He lives in Darwin in Lancashire, he joined us on Tuesday March 1 and he is already house hunting. He’s not going to commute from Lancashire, he’s going to move into Yorkshire, which again is a good positive sign.
And I think we have laid the foundations for hopefully a very successful renaissance of our youth policy, which had stalled. We’re the biggest club in Yorkshire. Yorkshire is the biggest county, it’s population is bigger than Scotland , it’s bigger than Northern Ireland, there should be enough talent there to start building a homegrown team of Yorkshire boys at Leeds leavened with a few international quality stars and that’s our target.
