Joe Joyce is the man charged with the task of producing a new generation of players at Newcastle United.

Joyce is a man on a mission.

While Alan Pardew steers Newcastle into their challenge for a top-six Premier League finish this season, Joyce is aiming to produce a new generation of first-team players.

Owner Mike Ashley's decision to end the Magpies' fascination with big-money, but all too often ill-judged, signings has prompted the club to adopt a very different recruitment model which in recent seasons, has paid impressive dividends.

Cheick Tiote, Yohan Cabaye and perhaps most spectacularly, Demba Ba, have all arrived on Tyneside for relatively modest outlays as chief scout Graham Carr and his team have produced a series of coups.

However, Ashley has invested heavily too at academy level, and is hoping to reap the same kind of rewards.

It is there that Joyce comes in.

Newcastle's academy manager has been in post for a little more than five years, and the 50-year-old former Barnsley, Scunthorpe and Carlisle defender knows the work he and his staff carry out at Little Benton is a key to Ashley's long-term plan for the club.

He said: "The mission is to produce players for Newcastle United's first team who can represent the club with credit.

"That's something that we have as an academy mission statement. It's something that's been my total focus since the day I came in.

"Football generally at some point has to take a reality check. You can't carry on paying £34million for a player."

Newcastle's academy has since 1998 produced 25 players who have gone on to represent the club's first team, with brothers Shola and Sammy Ameobi, Steven Taylor, Tim Krul and Andy Carroll - whose sale to Liverpool in January last year earned the Magpies £35million - among them.

However, they are now looking to widen the net by applying for category 1 academy status and accommodating the Barclays Premier League's elite player performance plan - a move which could see their annual investment in youth of £1.8million increase by up to a further £1million.

Joyce said: "At the moment, the academy system allows you to recruit players under the age of 12 from within a 60-minute [travel] radius, and players from 12-16 within a 90-minute radius.

"If you know the geography of the north-east, we haven't got much within that 90-minute radius.

"Category 1 status will open up the recruitment market nationally, which means that as long as we can prove as a club that we can provide an appropriate education programme, an appropriate technical programme with guardianship and welfare and appropriate accommodation, then we can take a player from anywhere in England.

"It takes huge investment, and that's what the owner has geared his plan up to do.

"Bringing in the best young players to produce for the first team is what the club needs to do."

The Magpies today opened up their academy base, where the club's full-time scholars combine their football activities with 12 hours education a week, and groups from under-nines upwards attempt to earn the opportunity to join them, to the media to give an insight into their work.

But none of those hopefuls are left under any illusion as to the chances of them pulling on the famous black and white shirt for the first team.

Joyce said: "There's a ratio around the Premier League that says one player into the first team every season.

"But it's very difficult to make those ratios because I would say in the time I have been here, we seem to have worked on a two-year cycle where we seem to have a really good group one year, and then it's not as good the next year.

"What we are trying to build is that every year, we have that good group of players.

"We have predominantly been a club which has recruited from within the north-east within the parameters that we have.

"With this opening up of the recruitment network, we now will operate on a much bigger scale."