Watford are in the process of overhauling their academy, radically increasing their local presence and adding a new B team to their list of squads, to finally get them back producing young players worthy of pulling on the Hornets shirt again.

Andy Scott, brought in as the club's UK recruitment director in November, has been in charge of the fairly radical moves, which were sanctioned by owner Gino Pozzo and chairman Scott Duxbury to address why Watford have not had a real breakthrough youngster in six years.

The B team will sit between the existing Under-23 squad and the first team, and will play ad-hoc games during the season. It will be populated by existing Under-23 players, fringe first-teamers and new additions recruited from elsewhere, and is intended as a more competitive alternative to the moribund Professional Development League.

Watford will still put out a team in the PDL, but it will be predominantly populated by Under-18 players, and other age groups will also move up the ranks to test their wits against players of older ages.

The club is also planning to plough new resources into local recruitment, including more high-profile youth scouts, and will make an extra effort to bring in young, hungry Watford natives to the club to challenge the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs' dominance in the region.

"The feeling from Scott [Duxbury] and Gino [Pozzo] was that we weren’t getting enough young players in contention to be in the first team," Scott told the Watford Observer. "Since the middle of November when I came in I’ve been assessing the academy and looking at everything.

"That's the coaching, finances, recruitment, pathways, sports science, medical and everything else.

"We’re going to remain as a category two academy side, it’s good enough for us, but we want to accelerate our players through and give them a clearer pathway and a bigger pathway to the first team."

That pathway will come through the B team, and by arranging ad-hoc games throughout the season against some of the best youth teams in Europe, it is hoped it will serve Watford's young players better than the drab Under-23 league.

The fledging side, which is still in the process of being set up, has already travelled to Holland this week to play Jong Ajax, the Ajax reserves side, coached by Michael Reiziger.

Scott oversaw a similar, but more radical change of approach at his former club, Brentford, where the board removed the academy altogether at the same time. Brentford B have already faced youth sides from Benfica, Chelsea, Legia Warsaw and Inter this season.

"Because we’re in category two, we don’t play against Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United," he said.

"As we’ve seen with Brentford, they play around 50-60 games a year and many of them are against category one clubs.

"It gives us a chance to take our teams abroad, too, on tours and make them understand what it’s like to prepare for games.

"We’ll be involved in tournaments abroad, and that will get our players to understand what it’s like to play against foreign players, with different tactics, environments, styles and coaching methods. That will all improve their development."

Watford's youth pathway has failed the club in recent years for two reasons - losing out on young talent to bigger clubs (and seeing them poached, in the case of Jadon Sancho) and because of an uncompetitive league structure.

Having Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham on their doorstep was enough to convince Brentford, and Scott, to get rid of the Bees' academy set-up altogether when he was at Griffin Park.

But at Watford he is looking at actually increasing the quality of local recruitment at young ages - and looking to emulate some parts of category one clubs, without the exorbitant costs the club feels would come from getting to that level themselves.

He said: "With category two, there’s a significant investment from the football club into the squad and academy.

"We have to be realistic. The average investment of just becoming a category one club is £5.9 million. Look at the local clubs - Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs - they’ve got really established, strong academies at category one.

"It would have to be a huge investment to challenge them, not just in terms of facilities, but staff, and we’re not quite ready for that.

"We’ve got some very good players in the academy already though, some good staff and I’ve looked at the academy and give them support and assistance to be successful.

"We’ve changed our recruitment for the academy, we’re looking at more local players and we’ve brought in some well-respected new scouts. who are very well known.

"We think it’s very important to look at our young players within the vicinity of Vicarage Road who would want to play for the club, and we want to give them the opportunity to do that.

"I think our web was spread a little bit too wide, and we needed to focus it a little better locally before we think about spreading it out.

"But this was never a case of shutting the academy, it was a case of how can we improve it."

Scott plans to follow in the footsteps of Brentford, and will be a big part of bringing in young players cast aside by the likes of Arsenal and Chelsea, as well as from abroad - and at Griffin Park seven B team players have already featured in the Championship.

The only negative, on the surface, appears to be that for the club's existing youth players, a new team represents added competition and another hurdle to jump before they can hope to get anywhere near Javi Gracia's first-team squad.

But Scott argued: "I think the players here will see it as a good opportunity - the fixtures they were playing in the Under-23s weren’t condusive to them getting into the first-team squad.

"The only way they could do that was to train with the first-team or go out on loan. In this window, we’ve got nine players from our Under-23 squad out on loan, which has never been done before.

"We’ve never made a real point of accelerating their progress, and also enabling us, with them going out, to promote our Under-18s. We’ll have Under-18s in our Under-23 matches for the rest of the season, and moving up down the levels too."