Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has called for the loan system to be overhauled, saying the tendency of some clubs to stockpile dozens of players who only get sent out on temporary deals is "one of the big problems of the modern game."
The comments made to the Arsenal Magazine are an apparent swipe at Chelsea, who have 38 players out on loan this season -- compared to 13 for Arsenal -- and have been criticised in the past for "warehousing" players who do not get a chance in the first team.
Asked whether having such a high number of loanees is healthy for football, Wenger said: "It is one of the big problems in the modern game. You've invested a lot of money into players because we're paying more and more money, and then at the age of 20 you don't usually get much money for any of the players, so the reflex is to stockpile the players. That's not right.
"When you look at the number of loans that happen here and there, the whole system has to be thought about again because we have two kinds of solution in there. The first is to continue developing players, the second step is just to make sure your investment is safe -- that's not the right way to think about it but it's the natural reflex for the clubs."
Wenger said a possible solution could be to allow Premier League clubs to own part of a lower-division team and use it as a feeder club, or to simply limit the number of players they can have on the books.
"The way a youth team is organised now is that all the best young players go to the richest clubs, which is where they have fewer chances to develop, so you have to make sure the system shares out the best young players equally," Wenger said.
"It's difficult because the development of the players depends on the concentration of the good players. The more good players you have together, the more chance they have of becoming even better players."
However, Wenger also added that going on loan can be vital to the development of young talents, singling out Ashley Cole (to Crystal Palace in 2000) and Jack Wilshere (to Bolton in 2010) as the most successful examples during his Arsenal tenure.
"These are two players who became internationals and made huge careers after going out on loan," he said. "At the time I sent them out, the competition here was too high, but they came back ready to play and then developed very quickly after that loan spell. You have many examples like that."
Wilshere is on loan again this season at Bournemouth to get back to playing regular football after two seasons largely ruined by injuries.
Aside from young academy players, Arsenal have also sent players including goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny and forward Joel Campbell out on loan rather than selling them.
And Wenger agreed that a loan move can sometimes be used to avoid losing a player altogether.
"That is the most difficult part of it," he said. "The level of the Premier League has gone up, the requirements are much higher and, because everybody has a different speed of maturing, sometimes the boy is 20 years old and he's still not playing. You think, 'This boy has arrived here at the age of nine, we have taken care of him for 10 years and now for six months, while he has to wait for a first-team chance, you're in danger of losing him completely.'
"As a manager, that's something difficult to swallow because you worry about him and think 'his destiny is here, not somewhere else.' That's a very difficult situation. On the other hand, you do not want to spoil his future because you've forced him to stay here and he only has a 10 percent chance of playing. That's the difficultly for me as a manager, having to make these kinds of decisions."