Monday, 25 March 2013

Other Hornets Pioneer Dual Registration Route to Success

When the words 'Hornets', 'partnership clubs' and 'season-long loans' appear in the Sunday papers, it's hard not to sit up and take notice.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the current Dual Registration debate was exclusively a Rugby League phenomenon, but it seems that a visionary European football club owner Giampolo Pozzo - owner of Udinese in Italy, Grenada in Spain and now Watford in the UK - sees sharing talent around as a conduit to longer-term stability, growth and success.


Pozzo's pioneering 
'talent sharing' approach has been proven to work across his other two clubs. But it hasn't gone down well in some quarters, where 'traditionalists' - primarily coaching teams below Watford in the Championship - see it as a deviation from 'the British Way', rather than a methodology for delivering rapid success as a catalyst for sustainable success.

Ultimately, regardless of the code of football, there are two basic elements to the squad-building equation: clubs will always need to find players from somewhere, and decent players will always look for a game at a level that befits their talent. If the way these two elements are conjugated is changing, the fundamentals of the output remains pretty much the same. 


If clubs down the ladder can build skills, knowledge, confidence and momentum that will carry them forward, it must be an experiment worth trying. Like all innovations, 'talent sharing' needs pioneers to iron out the wrinkles, smooth out the glitches and find ways to make it work.


And if both Hornets clubs achieve their goals this season, their pioneering spirit just might establish a talent-sharing path that leads to stability and success for more clubs in the future.


Read more about Watford FC's 'Dual Registration' philosophy