Manuel Pellegrini, the Manchester City manager, explains his ethos on youth development at the Premier League club:
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On a philosophy
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“It’s not easy to develop in such a short time.
“We are just starting to play in a different way, but if you ask me if I’m happy for the moment with what we’re doing.
“Yes, I think that in six or seven months we have improved a lot.
“I think when the players have more confidence, more trust in the way they must do things, I’m absolutely sure that this club will continue improving.
“That’s why it’s so important to win the title, to win something important this year, because the only way that the players will trust in what we’re doing is by winning.
“There are different ways to win, I choose one throughout my whole career and it’s always a philosophy about wanting to be a creative team, to be an attacking team.
“Maybe a lot of people confuse what that means, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have to defend, it means that it’s important to know how to defend but with less players.”
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On instilling a style
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“Of course that’s what we’re trying to do here at Manchester City.
“The work in this team is just starting, the owner has had just four years here, the philosophy of the club in those four years has been taking shape and I hope this will remain the same in the future, with or without me.
“The manager of the first team must use the same philosophy across the whole academy. We will have a way of developing our young players who will be very useful for us in the future.”
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On Uefa Financial Fair Play
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“It’s important to promote young players, but also it’s not always easy to promote them when you have an significant amount of money to buy players. During the past years Barcelona have shown, you can mix both.
“To promote one or two players here from the academy and to continue being a competitive team, because if you want to be a formative team, it’s very difficult to remain competitive in the short term. So I hope that in the future we can do both things. Maybe we can promote a lot of players, not all will end up playing for Manchester City but they can play in other teams, and we can try to have two or three good players from our academy.”
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