Dave Challinor Outlines Aim To Bring Youth Player Through To The First Team

Stockport County manager Dave Challinor is not short of achievements at Edgeley Park.

Returning to the Football League, promotions, play-off runs and big FA Cup away days; Challinor has provided it all.

But in 2023, speaking to the EFL podcast, the Hatters boss outlined one ambition he had for his squad moving forward.

Challinor, and the rest of his backroom staff, are still waiting to land on that one star to help them achieve it.

Challinor outlines aim to bring youth player through to the first team

The County boss revealed in his chat with the official podcast that he wanted the Hatters to start producing their own players, referencing the number of young prospects who don’t quite make the cut at a young age from neighbouring academies at the likes Manchester United and Manchester City.

Challinor said: “When you see where we are in terms of catchment with the big clubs we’ve got around ourselves, they release a lot more players than they sign.

“We need to provide a pathway to ultimately get young players through the academy into the first team.”

Almost two years on, throughout the 2024/25 season, aside from the odd bench inclusion, there wasn’t a player who regularly made a matchday squad that met Challinor’s aim.

Ethan Pye a possible exception, but feels a separate case

Many will point to Ethan Pye, who took his first strides in senior professional football with County, so feels every bit a Stockport product, but he signed when already 18 years old from Rochdale’s development squad.

Signing in the summer of 2021, he went out on loan the following January to Spennymoor, then Gateshead the following season, before breaking into the Hatters’ first team, so will have spent relatively little time in the academy setup.

Nevertheless, Pye’s development under Challinor and his value to the club shows exactly why the Stockport boss is keen to utilise that pathway.

The Pye acquisition has shown young players will get a chance to prove themselves at Edgeley Park, and will be the primary case study moving forward.

Still, it isn’t the traditional case of having a player in the building from childhood and seeing them all the way through to the senior squad, which feels like the pathway Challinor was nodding to.

It will take time for County, but the pathway is developing

Given the club dropped to regional football in the sixth tier and stayed there for a considerable amount of time, plentiful youth resources at Stockport are a relatively new thing.

With Mark Stott’s takeover in 2020, he has made it a key ambition to develop this side of the club, and has made big strides in this area since, getting the Hatters’ academy to a point where auditors viewed the setup as “like a Premier League club”, according to the owner.

And the development is beginning to bear fruit, with the Under-15s side winning the regional final of the EFL’s Floodlit Cup in early 2025 against Burnley, earning a spot in the national final.

As the structure continues to build, and those young players first recruited begin to reach first-team age, more tangible benefits for the senior squad are likely to emerge.

Signals like the Floodlit Cup, and strong words from Stott, suggest that Challinor may not be far away from achieving his key squad ambition.