By TownFans.co.uk
July 26 2014

Town Academy director Bryan Klug has admitted that a lack of Town players graduating through the academy in the past few years was a key reason for failing to achieve Category One status for the 2014/2015 season.

Town fell just short of the required 75% pass mark required to achieve the top level accreditation for their academy, and whilst the club scored highly in a number of areas, Town stalwart Klug admitted that the lack of players coming through to be professionals at Portman Road, was the main reason for missing out by just 0.3%

Speaking in-depth to the East Anglian Daily Times, a very disappointed Klug said: “You have to get the 75% mark and there are some things we couldn’t do anything about. There are 11 KPIs where you get your marks and for 10 of them our average mark was 89%. The one we could do nothing about was ‘productivity’ which dragged it down to 74.7%.

"There is nothing we could do about that because that was determined by the practise that has gone on over the last few years. We just haven’t had as many professionals come through as we had in previous eras. Effectively there was 10% of the overall score we just couldn’t get so we knew we had to do really, really well in every other area.”

Another area where Town could have faired better was on the admistration side. The club lacked a piece of Premier League backed software in favour of their own solution. Town fans will be encouraged to know that the club has now acquired the software from the Premier League and will be using it going forward with a vew to helping the club atain category one status in the future.

“The Premier League have now provided us with what they call a Performance Management Applicator. That actually brings it all together and we didn’t have that for the audit. Rather than buy our own in we knew we’d be getting a free one in at the start of this season. We developed our own system which provided all the information that we needed, but it wasn’t as in depth as the PMA will be. We did get punished a bit for that." Klug added.

So where now from here? The club have indicated that there will not be an appeal over the verdict, but now will prepare in earnest for the next set of audits which start in the coming months. The first date of note in the process is in September when the critieria for each category will be set in stone by the powers that be with the audits starting not long after. If all goes well Town could then be certified as Category one for the start of the 15/16 season.

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