I can answer those Madrid questions...regarding "slotted into first team", Vinicius in the 2018-'19 season fits that description pretty well. He had fortunate timing - post CR7 era, hadn't gotten Hazard yet, just sacked Lopetegui after being a massive flop, so the season itself was something of a transition year with an interim manager who was risk-taking - but he was pretty much a tacked-on starter until he got injured in March and ended his season.
If we're lowering the standards a little bit, I'd say 18-year-old Eduardo Camavinga in 2021-'22 settled in as a regular player pretty quickly, especially for someone who was only signed at the end of the transfer window and didn't have a pre-season with the eam.
But they're buying these kids.
They buy them after 1 or even 2 full seasons at a professional level of rather high standards. Even Arda Guler, they're slowly introducing him and he looks very promising, but they got him at 18 and he'd already have 1.5 seasons
As far as their own academy goes, you're right that you have to go back a ways on that...it's probably Carvajal and even he didn't settle in as a starter before having proven himself at Leverkusen for a year before that. Vazquez and Nacho have gotten plenty of minutes over the years but they've never been first choice when everybody's available. Hakimi never really had the chance to settle in because Carvajal still had years ahead of him at the time.
They didn't trust Hakimi nor Carvajal enough when they got "promoted". They sent both to Germany. One was bought back, the other was sold before getting top play.
They got Brahim Diaz from City's youth, didn't really rate him, sent him to Milan and now they're using him.
There's Lucas Vazquez, Nacho and Fran Garcia? Sure, you can add Carvajal here as well I guess. That's 4. And none of these was impressive during their loan spell (Nacho didn't go on loan for the record). They just.. played.
If anything, it's closer to what we do. Think Dimarco. Was he really showing much to most of the world in terms of his production at Parma, Verona, Empoli or Sion? Nothing really worth of note, but I for example always rated some of his attributes. What did we do? We gave him a few roles, he was poor in some (LCB or defensive LWB) and excelled in a free roaming LWB role where he'd cut inside or effectively focus much less on the defensive side of things. Now you'll hear Inter fans rate him as a top 3 LWB in the world...
And here's when I'll do my favorite thing on FIF and disagree with my friend
@.h. on something
I wonder how arguments like this stand in the face of history
The thing is we all sit here and talk about giving youth a chance but most of our youth is absolute shit. Half of our graduates (I didn't check but it's probably about that) aren't even professional footballers. I'm not talking a kut some MF who drops out at u16, I'm talking about people who stay all the way to primavera
Honestly how much real regret do we have? Bonucci for sure. Zaniolo is very debatable from both sides (not really an Inter kid and not really made it).. casadei isn't showing loads yet. I don't think anyone really regrets Biraghi... gnonto perhaps but he's hardly lighting the world on fire..
The biggest ones that have made it is like dimarco.. and who else?
0 regrets so far over pinamonti, bonazollo, benassi, etc
It's not a matter of regretting anything.
It's a matter of giving these kids a role. You think Pinamonti would have been a bad fit as 3rd or 4th striker in our 2 striker setup? He'd be a good asset.
With Benassi there was always the potential, but he had some issues and he never managed to get to the next level on his own. Put him on a good Inter side with a limited role, and he'll eventually find something he can be really good at and useful for the team.
This applies to everyone we have. For example I liked Zanotti before we shipped him to Switzerland and think he can become our future starting RWB within 24 months. He's doing more than fine, but that's not really as relevant. It helps with the filtering out process, if a player does well elsewhere you're going to keep more than an eye on him, but otherwise you can still expect someone to be useful. Bisseck for example, I don't think he was the best CB in Denmark by any chance, but we took a gamble and the kid doesn't look out of place at Inter. Why?
It's easy.
The team works. There's a lot of pressure to succeed, but the core team can handle it and they channel that to the locker room.
What does Real Madrid and Barcelona have in common? The shock factor. You play against them as any Spanish side other than a handful and you expect to lose to 11 jerseys, whomever is wearing them. There's still pressure to play for those teams as there's only a win, and sometimes you need an emphatic win, too, but it comes at a huge advantage. The other teams that face them usually have a loser's complex against them.
This isn't the case with Inter or any top Italian team. Even Juventus who have had a knack for deciding trophies behind closed doors can't really produce too much talent and they mostly tried to leverage their way out during the co-ownership regime. Now they have that U23 squad that gives them a larger talent pool and allows them to evaluate their players' exposure week in-week out by controlling what they want to do.
Marley Ake was one of their most promising players but has been shipped around.
They managed to get Kenan Yildiz up who looks promising, but only because they had injury troubles. But Yildiz hardly played for Juventus u23 team and he was signed as one of Bayern's best prospects, it's not like he came out of nowhere.
Miretti and Fagioli had 1 full season each with the U23 side.
Iling Junior was signed from Chelsea who have been poaching youth players for years. He wasn't signed for the U23 squad, but he did play there a bit because he was signed late and it was easier to get him to a good fitness level before playing for the first side.
If you have an established side that can win games, you can afford to give breaks to some promising players. But you cannot really plan that during the season if you're Inter. We had a wonderful season, but we didn't expect to win the league by +20 points. Mourinho's the only guy who said that and because the difference at the time was marginal, everyone thought he was high. You cannot plan next season thinking that we'll get 90 points and that no other team will exceed 80, which could give us a chance to get a couple of kids as main rotation pieces (say RWB and ST which are positions we need someone right now). Ideally, we should. But imagine your main guy gets injured, you'll put all the pressure on a kid and it's a big gamble.
Barcelona does not gamble that way. They have a youth system that works and has produced amazing talent, they know when that can translate into the first team and they're very careful not to give that player a different role. I like to think of Bojan Krkic as a great case study here. The kid was an immense talent, but because his role was already saturated, he had to play something else which he wasn't comfortable with. That didn't go well, he moved to other teams that play completely different and he looked like a fish outside of water. There's a reason why his best season was his first professional one. After that, his role became different, they got other players and Guardiola had other ideas. If he had continued to play on that trajectory, he'd probably be hailed as one of the best players that team had during the previous decade. Instead, he's a kid with loads of talent that didn't impress at Roma, Stoke and Ajax and started declining from his 21st birthday. Not the kid's fault by any chance.
Who else is like that? We're seeing the same thing take place with Ansu Fati. Started as an extremely promising 16 year old and now he's a 21 year old bench warmer at Brighton that's looking for a new team. Lamine Yamal managed to get established but we cannot tell if something similar will happen to him. I hope not for his sake, but that means that Barcelona needs to remain focused on graning him a starting spot for that role he excels at.
One quick note on Kubo - he's always going to be a tricky case. He's a Japanese national, and Japan doesn't permit dual-nationality. La Liga clubs get three non-EU spots (that's fixed), and I think at that time, thanks to COVID, Madrid had a backlog where none of their Brazilians were able to get their Spanish passports approved in a timely order (for South Americans, it's a minimum two years residency in Spain before being able to apply for a Spanish passport and gain EU status), and while that's not a problem anymore, I think Madrid has all three non-EU spots available (Endrick will take up one soon), having one of those permanently used up isn't the greatest for squad building flexibility purposes. Madrid, of course, does a lot of scouting in South America, and not every South American (especially the black ones) is going to have direct ancestry they can trace back to Europe and have instant eligibility for an EU passport...anyway, just figured I'd share some stuff I've gathered over time.
Sure, I am aware that there are such difficulties and honestly we need a lot more of those to reverse the course of football and restore some parity in the European scene, but that's another story.
Real Madrid in general is a club that had a policy of signing stars and integrating youth products. Some oddly average players have played for Real Madrid in the post-Bosman era.
Raul Bravo, Javier Portillo, Francisco Pavon, Oscar Minambres, Ruben de la Red*, Jese, Alvaro Mejia, Antonio Nunez, Borja Fernandez, Esteban Granero and a few others that had roster spots of the years, especially 2000s.
These guys outside of Real Madrid would just disappear in oblivion. I leave De La Red out of this with an asterisk because the kid was very good but had health issues. But the rest were relegation team material.
Of course Real Madrid has produced some players that had very good careers such as Juan Mata, Alvaro Morata, Marcos Alonso, Borja Valero, Raul Albiol, Pablo Sarabia, Javi Garcia, Diego Llorente, Alvaro Arbeloa, Achraf Hakimi and several others.
So they like to gamble on this, but you'll see that most of those did not really became important at Real Madrid as promoted youth players but had to leave to make their name.
If we were in a position to say that we'll have 20 great professional players and throw in 4 promoted youth players + the 3rd GK, then we'd definitely need to start by upgrading to reaching that number, because at the moment we barely have 15 of those, looking at the coming season. And we can barely afford this.
1. Yann Sommer
2. Benjamin Pavard
3. Alessandro Bastoni
4. Francesco Acerbi
5. Stefan De Vrij
6. Denzel Dumfries
7. Federico Dimarco
8. Carlos Augusto
9. Nicolo Barella
10. Hakan Calhanoglu
11. Henrikh Mkhitaryan
12. Davide Frattesi
13. Lautaro Martinez
14. Marcus Thuram
----
15. Piotr Zielinski
16. Matteo Darmian (only if considered as a RCB)
I cannot say this about Taremi yet, but hopefully he's another.
Then you have roster spots assigned to Bisseck who looks promising but if Darmian is the RCB, there's no real spot for him. Asllani has good qualities hitting the ball but we need to hide his weaknesses every time he plays. Arnautovic is not in the standards we want. We don't have a backup GK now, but if Josep Martinez is #2 or Bento, that'd be great. Buchanan has not shown he deserves to be on the list.
So we have 17 first team players that deserve their role (incl. Taremi) + Arnautovic who unfortunately is too expensive for what he brings but I don't mind his presence or grit if he's 4-5th choice.
Then there's a roster space going to Bisseck, Asllani and Buchanan. Plus Di Gregorio as 3rd GK. That leaves us 3 roster spots for the 25 and we need a reliable RWB to rotate with Dumfries and a 4th/5th striker. You could fill those up with youth kids, since we have versatile players to cover as well if needed (Frattesi or Mkhitaryan can slot as false 9s in a 3-5-1-1 and you have Darmian and Buchanan to play RWB if needed as well) but a guy like Carboni cannot be the 23rd player on the roster. The kid's too talented for that and unfortunately it doesn't look like there's an appropriate role for him in the 3-5-2. He could play a free role with the ball in the midfield, but defensively he'd not be great. He can play up front based on talent, but he wouldn't be as helpful when our midfielders aren't attacking the box to increase our numbers. Eventually I do see him partnering up with either Lautaro or Thuram, but I'm not sure we can give him that role as things stand, with Taremi and even Arnautovic in the picture.
If this were a video game, Carboni, Zanotti and Pinamonti would be those three players. But it's not a video game. We do need to introduce young players, but it has to come at the right time for both the player and club. We usually had one of the two wrong.