Missed tonight's one but having seen some of the highly touted ones for England youth levels I'm not sure there's one you can safely assume is going to be a PL player or even that much better than our players (outside of Gelhardt and I'm not even sure we were eligible to sign him). There's obviously talent in Yorkshire it's just they're not good at attracting it. There's plugging gaps and then there's what they're doing.
Also not sure where the idea we don't plug gaps comes from, the problem is we've just had a summer where we spent 1.7 million on the first team never mind the reserves so of course we are short this season. Previous years we've signed Nkounkou-which only served to annoy Small, Adeniran, Markelo, Bowler, Foulds, Branthwaite amongst others. The rumour was we were in for Jebbison this summer, that would've been plugging gaps but also stunting the opportunities afforded to Dobbin who is probably on a similar level except homegrown and far cheaper
Brighton and Leeds need to recruit aggressively because of the lower ages being worse. Villa have done well but its still early days, they made their own bad mistake loaning Barry out when he wasn't ready this season. Nobody is infallible. Could we do with recruiting a bit more aggressively at the over 18 groups? Yes of course but the Leeds way has done nothing yet