Casper lands academy role

11/11/2024 12:37 PM

His dad was a star of the Burnley team in the early 1970s and his son is currently an under-21 goalkeeper at the club. Now Chris Casper has become the club's new academy manager.

He has left a long standing role to join us, coming into his home town club and brings a lot of football experience with him. He initially played for Manchester United. He was a member of their Class of 92 and went on to play seven first team games for them including two substitute appearances in the Premier League in wins at Spurs and Coventry and a Champions League appearance in Austria against Rapid Vienna.

He enjoyed loans at Bournemouth, Swindon and Reading before making the move to Reading permanent after two months, but on Boxing Day 1999, at the age of just 24, his career was ended in an incident involving Cardiff's Richard Carpenter against whom he accepted an out of court settlement.

With his playing career over, he moved into coaching and became the manager of Team Bath, leading them to the first round of the FA Cup and he later had two and a half years managing in the Football League at Bury.

He worked for Wigan, Bradford City, where he replaced our former academy manager Jon Pepper, and Grimsby before joining the Premier League to work with clubs following the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Plan, assisting some of the big clubs in achieving Category 1 status, a position Burnley held for two seasons from 2020 to 2022.

More recently, he's been back working alongside his own youth team colleagues from Manchester United as the Director of Football, a position he's held for seven years. It's a position from which he has now stood down to take this role at Burnley replacing WhatsApp man David Longwell.

He starts with his name CASPER held in such high esteem at Burnley and he's been a regular at our under-21 games over the past two seasons watching son Charlie.

He said after his appointment was confirmed: “It feels amazing. It's a privilege to be here. It's my hometown club, I grew up in the town and to be part of the club now is absolutely fantastic. It's maybe fate to follow in the footsteps of my dad and my son as well. It feels surreal to be here but it's genuinely a dream come true."

Having confirmed that he wants to see our academy return to Category 1 status, he added: “"Ultimately, over the next few years we want to make it a self-sustainable business. I want to get more home-grown players into the first team. So, instead of Alan and the board having to go out and buy players they're coming in through us.

I wish him the very best at Burnley.