Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard delighted as Merseysiders welcome back Steve Heighway to Anfield

Steve Heighway, Liverpool's former academy director, has been welcomed back to Anfield to coach the club’s youngsters - with club captain Steven Gerrard saying his former mentor should never have been allowed to leave.

Heighway left his role at Liverpool in 2007 after a prolonged power struggle at the club, but has been invited back by academy director Alex Inglethorpe to coach the under-nines.

It is understood Heighway is working voluntarily for a few months, but it is a symbolic gesture by the Anfield regime to bring back the man who oversaw what is considered the golden period of youth development at the club in the late Eighties until the late Nineties.

Heighway was credited by Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen and Steve McManaman, among others, for nurturing their early Liverpool careers.

His exit seven years ago caused plenty of dissatisfaction among his former charges. Carragher was particular vocal in opposition to Heighway’s departure, while Gerrard believes it is wrong to give managers control over academies, where continuity is essential.

“Steve Heighway should never have left. That’s what I can’t understand at clubs,” said Gerrard. “The managers change so often - there are not many Wengers or Fergusons [who stay for years] - but the structure of the academies should stay the same whoever the manager is of the first team. The manager shouldn’t have the power to change things every two or three years.

“Roy Hodgson, for example, could have turned the academy around here at Liverpool in six months and then left. The kids wouldn’t know whether they were coming or going. I don’t know what the right structure is but we need to find it and then keep it in place for the next 50 years so that the kids come through. And that should be the same at national level.”

Heighway was involved in a theoretical debate during the latter stages of his first spell at Anfield, which now appears to have gone full circle back in his favour at the club.

He strongly supported rules restricting the recruitment of youngsters who lived within the vicinity of academies, thus preventing poaching from wealthier clubs in other locations or the targeting of teenagers from overseas.

Former Liverpool manager Rafael Benítez argued the rules were being bent by the club’s rivals, wealthier teams such as Manchester United paying to relocate a prodigious player’s family to the North-West - as they did with David Beckham - to steal an unfair advantage.

Arsenal were also pioneers in moving players from abroad at a young enough age so that they could - technically - be considered academy products. They did this most successfully with Cesc Fabregas.

Benitez was given full control of the academy in 2008, frustrated by the lack of academy graduates, and there was a period where Liverpool’s youth scouts embarked on a much broader recruitment drive beyond Merseyside. That policy is responsible for Raheem Sterling’s signing in 2009 when he just 15, but Liverpool now believe too much money was spent on others who lived beyond the city boundaries who were not of the required standard.

Inglethorpe and manager Brendan Rodgers are firmly behind Heighway’s idea that the primary focus for Liverpool should be shifted to recruiting players from the Merseyside area.