I'd give it a couple of years older than that - by 21 they need to be going to a better league. It'd be interesting to see the success rates of academies versus smaller professional clubs; I don't think the academies are necessarily the best option.
But you can't ignore developing the LoI for older players though. The whole point would be that promising young players have a proper (senior) league to move into early in their careers. You can't have that if you don't develop it for older players (which really comes down to offering higher wages). The LoI is one of the youngest leagues in Europe and that's actually not a good thing.
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