EPPP: The end of lower-league football as we know it?

December the 20th, 2011 was a day to savour for 16-year-old Jordon Ibe. The youngster who came through Wycombe Wanderers' youth academy had just signed a contract with Liverpool. A month earlier, 14-year-old Seyi Ojo did the same thing, signing with the Reds after being scouted at his then-club MK Dons. Big clubs signing prodigious youth talent is nothing new - but in all likelihood Ibe and Ojo are the first two in an exodus of youth prospects moving from lower-league clubs to the big time. The reason? In October, the 72 Football League clubs voted - reluctantly - to allow the EPPP (Elite Player Performance Plan) to come into effect from the start of the 2012-2013 season. That vote potentially opens up the biggest gap between top-flight and lower-league clubs since the advent of the Premiership.

So what is the EPPP? In layman's terms, the EPPP sets out to ensure that top quality youth players across England get scouted, identified and are allowed access to the finest coaching and training to achieve optimum development at England's elite clubs. This, the FA say, will ensure that England's youth prospects flourish in the coming years, allowing us to dominate the world to the sounds of "INGERLUND" while we all get misty-eyed watching Jack Wilshere lift the World Cup in 2018. Sounds great on paper, right?

Wrong.

There are downsides - and in this case they're absolutely massive ones. As mentioned, one of the tenets of the EPPP is that the best youth talent get developed at the best teams - who obviously play in the Premier League. The Premier League, in all their compassionate wisdom, threatened to withhold funding (estimated at over £6m a year) for youth development at lower league clubs if they didn't accept the terms of the EPPP. The EPPP was also drawn up solely by Premier League members, even though it influences and affects the entire Football League.

The EPPP champions a four-tier academy system; the best club academies are level one, and the worst (not worst per se, but roll with me) are level four. The FA estimates a level one academy will cost around £2.5m a year to run; in short, only the big clubs will be able to afford them. However, a club with a level one academy will also get financial rewards from the FA for HAVING such a great academy - rewards that they don't need, due to being a club that can already afford such an academy! Baffling logic, but then again it IS the FA we're talking about here.

It gets worse, though. Clubs with category three or four academies (i.e the majority of League One and Two clubs) won't be allowed to sign players until they're 12-years-old. Currently they're allowed to sign players at nine - enabling them to pick-up undiscovered talent ready for developing. The EPPP will remove that three-year cushion, ensuring that the best talent will have been snapped up by the clubs with the top academies by the time the lower-league clubs are allowed to sign any players.

Another major change that the EPPP is set to bring in is the end of tribunals. A tribunal is called when clubs can't agree a reasonable transfer fee for a youth player - such as in the transfer of Crystal Palace teenager John Bostock to Tottenham. Crystal Palace said they wanted a certain amount for Bostock. Tottenham said he was worth less. They couldn't agree, so a tribunal said "right Tottenham, this is how much you have to pay Palace." Not ideal, but certainly better than the ruling EPPP will bring in. With no more tribunals, the club that's selling the player (almost always a lower-league club) will receive a flat fee based on every year the player has spent at the club's academy - which is almost comically low (we're talking hundreds of thousands of pounds (and in some cases millions) less).

So what to do? As we've seen in the cases of Ibe and Ojo, lower-league clubs are now pressured into selling their best prospects before EPPP comes in. Wait until after it's introduced? Sorry mate, that's millions of pounds less you'll be getting.

A worrying effect of the EPPP is the simple fact that many lower-league clubs may simply abandon their youth system altogether. What's the point in spending money that these teams can ill afford to waste on running a youth system if the bigger clubs will simply swoop in and poach them for pennies? What does an extra £500,000 or couple of million matter to the biggest clubs in the land? Nothing. What does the same money matter to a club like Leyton Orient, Hereford or Plymouth? Everything. That additional money could mean the difference between survival and administration, but a negligible initial transfer fee means that the top clubs have barely any risk in signing the hottest prospects from other academies. No fee, no risk. No risk, no hesitation.

As MK Dons boss Karl Robinson says: "If we lose our youth players for nominal fees, how are we going to survive? I don't think it's fair. Kids develop at a phenomenal rate at the highest level, but are these kids going to play in people's first teams at the age of 16 or 17?"

Whether you support Liverpool or Morecambe, the feelings should be the same. Yet again the big teams are screwing over the little ones. Capitalism at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.

(Contributor: Kriz)