'Wales U21s producing players despite poor results'

Disappointing results for Wales Under-21s are an unavoidable side-effect of producing players for the senior team, says Football Association of Wales chief football officer Dave Adams.

Wales are bottom of their qualifying group for the 2027 European Under-21 Championship, losing three of their four games and conceding 16 goals in the process.

Matty Jones' side will resume their campaign in March aiming to improve on last year's performances, which reached a low when they were thrashed 7-0 at home by Belgium in October.

Although Adams says there are "no excuses" for such displays, he believes the age-grade teams are fulfilling their primary purpose of providing players for Craig Bellamy's senior side – more frequently than many of their European rivals.

As a result, the Under-21s are often depleted by call-ups to Bellamy's squad and have to rely on younger players less experienced than their counterparts.

"There are a number of reasons why the team hasn't performed as consistently in this campaign and we're fully aware of those challenges internally," Adams told BBC Sport Wales.

"That doesn't worry me the slightest bit because fundamentally we've managed to graduate seven players into our men's national team in the past 12 months.

"We're graduating 1.6 players per season into our men's national team and across Europe it's about 0.6 players per season on average, so we're tracking way above that.

"You see the quality of players like Dylan Lawlor, who's transitioned so quickly into a national team player, and Ronan Kpakio, then Jordan James has got 25 caps and could still be playing for the Under-21s."

The emergence of Cardiff City centre-back Lawlor is a prime example of what Adams is describing.

Having only turned 20 on 1 January, he already has more appearances for Wales' national team than their Under-21s, earning the first of his three senior caps in September.

"It's going have a huge impact on the performance of your under-21 squad when you've got between five and seven players being named in each [senior] international window who could be in an under-21 squad," Adams added.

"Full credit to Craig for putting a lot of trust in young players and giving Wales an opportunity to keep building a successful squad for the future.

"The knock-on effect of course is then you're going to be less competitive at under-21 level but the reality is our strategic goal is to consistently qualify for tournaments for our men's and women's senior teams.

"So there's no specific KPIs (key performance indicators) around what our under-21 performance looks like. The most important measure of success for our under-21 head coach is to graduate players through that system which obviously we've done relatively successfully in the last few years."

As well as Lawlor and Cardiff team-mate Kpakio, fellow Bluebird Joel Colwill and Coventry City midfielder Kai Andrews all made their senior Wales debuts in 2025 and are all still eligible to play for the Under-21s.

That has reduced the pool of players available to head coach Jones, but Adams added: "That's not an excuse for some of the performances.

"I think the Belgium game, losing by that number of goals, there's obviously going to be a review into the tactical plan, how we set the team up to be competitive.

"Some of these under-21 squads are closer to our men's senior team transfer market value, so there's also got to be realisation that of course we want to be competitive every game - and we never give up, that's our mentality as Welsh people - but there's also a realisation that you're playing against some of the best talent in European football.

"Their players have played 100 games, some played in Champions League games, whereas a lot of our boys are not playing in league football or they're playing under-21s football, which we all know is not a good barometer for successful transition into international football."