The Premier League’s Academy Problem

The Premier League is awash with cash and that makes a lot of people very upset, which you may have gathered if you have read the opening paragraph of literally any piece of football writing from the last two years.

One of the main causes for concern has been the effect that this newly amassed wealth will have on the academies of top flight teams; producing and utilising young players from your own academy is not only a cheap way of running a football club, but is seen as a purer way of doing things as it represents perhaps the last tie between clubs and their local communities in a world where football is increasingly anodyne and corporate. The argument is that with substantial financial power at their disposal, Premier League clubs will rely on buying players who are the finished article from abroad to fill out their squads, rather than invest the time and resources in developing players from closer to home.

So, when Huddersfield Town announced last year that they were restructuring their academy system in such a way that would phase out their youth teams below under-16 level, plenty of pearls were clutched. These grievances were exacerbated over the summer when both the England under-20 and under-17 teams won their respective World Cups. In the view of many pundits, that achievement would count for little if those players were not afforded a clear pathway to the senior team and opportunities in Premier League games.

With over half the 17/18 season played, now seems like a good time to check in to see how regularly those under-20s players have played (the under-17s are naturally a bit further behind in their development and it’s probably unrealistic to expect them to be playing significant minutes at this stage) and to assess the broader landscape of youth development in the Premier League. Below is a table that illustrates the number of academy players developed at each Premier League club who have started roughly a quarter of their league games this season.

At the time of writing, all top flight clubs have played 23 games, so I’m counting players who have started 5 or more games — appearing in over 20% of games seems like a reasonable amount for a developing player. I’m only including starts rather than total appearances because starts indicate a degree of trust from the club in an individual and generally provide more valuable experience than appearances off the bench. That’s not to say that coming on as a sub is devoid of worth. It’s just more difficult to evaluate, even when actual minutes played as a sub is taken into account: a player being subbed on for the last 10 mins to close out a game where his team has a narrow lead or coming on to try and nick a goal when his team are 1–0 down is more useful to the player in question than coming on in the 80th minute when his team are 5–0 up. Judging the value of substitute appearances made by academy players on a case-by-case would be extremely time-consuming, so using starts will suffice for this broad overview.

It’s worth explaining exactly what I mean when I use the term “academy player”. Here I’m defining an “academy player” as someone signed by a club before the age of 18 who spent at least a year in said club’s youth teams before making his Premier League debut. I’ve chosen this method rather than the Premier League’s home-grown rule (any player who spends 3 seasons before the age of 21 at a club is considered to be home-grown) because it presents a more accurate reflection of the type of thing I’m looking for. For example, under the Premier League’s home-grown rule, players like Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé would both count as academy products if they stay at PSG and Barça until they’re 21. Both of those clubs will undoubtedly provide those players with experiences and coaching that will provide vital in their individual improvement, but the fact that both of these lads were already playing Champions League football before they were signed by those mega clubs suggests to me that their formative years of growth had taken place elsewhere. I want to look at cases where clubs have given first team chances to players they’ve developed from an earlier stage.

So, for the purposes of this article, Francis Coquelin (signed by Arsenal from Stade Lavallois at age 17, spent several years in the academy/out on loan before making his first team debut at 20) would counts as an academy player, whereas Theo Walcott (signed by Arsenal from Southampton at age 16 in December 2006 and made his first team debut 9 months later) does not count as an academy player. A more stringent definition would give a better idea of clubs who are better at growing players from scratch and those who simply polish players developed elsewhere, but this definition will do for a general assessment.

*Massive fucking asterisk for this one. Pogba technically counts as an academy player even though they let him go to Juventus and then bought him for a world record fee 4 years later.

**Like Pogba, Mariappa was an academy player who was sold and then brought back at a later date. Unlike Pogba, Mariappa returned to Watford on a free transfer.

Honourable mentions: Declan Rice (4), Paul Dummett (3), Matt Targett (2).

(I didn’t miss Coquelin off the list. He just didn’t start a Premier League this season before his move to Valencia.)

So what can we infer from that? Here are some general observations (for clarity: where I mention “academy players” I’m referring to academy players who’ve started >20% of their team’s games.) :

• Of the 5060 starting positions available so far this season (20 teams naming 11 starters for 23 games), 291 have been occupied by academy players. That works out at 5.75%. Without looking at the ratio for previous seasons, it’s impossible to tell just what to make of that number. I’d say it’s probably higher than I was expecting, while also reflecting how rare it is for a player to break through into the starting lineup as an academy player.
• Despite Mauricio Pochettino’s reputation for giving academy players a chance, it’s actually the other North London manager who has provided the most opportunity for players from his academy this season. Wenger has used the greatest number of different young players as well as giving the greatest total of starts to players from Arsenal’s youth system.
• Hector Bellerín is one of only two academy-grown players, alongside Lewis Dunk, to start every Premier League game this season.
• The top six clubs have used one fewer academy player (12) than the other fourteen Premier League clubs combined (13). Those six clubs have also handed out nearly half of the total starts made by academy players(142 by top six clubs, 149 by all other clubs). That’s not unexpected as the top six clubs A) have the greatest financial resources, the most expansive scouting networks and state of the art development facilities/coaching and therefore should have access to the most talented young players; B) all come to major metropolitan areas and therefore have a comparatively huge local population to draw from (which links to the previous point); and C) compete in multiple competitions and therefore have more games to play and therefore rotate their starting lineups more and therefore afford more opportunities to squad players.
• It’s also not unexpected from the perspective of the other 14 — relegation from the Premier League is financially damning thanks to the discrepancy created by the most recent broadcasting rights deal and young players are perceived to be unreliable as they are inexperienced and are more prone to making mistakes in the process of their physical, technical, and tactical development (whether that is actually true or not is another matter). Those mistakes are extremely costly for sides for whom one or two bad results could mean relegation, so their reluctance to give opportunities to youth players seems justified, at least from their point of view.
• 6 clubs don’t have a single academy player who meets the threshold of 5+ starts. City and Burnley haven’t relied on youth team players and have been performing above expectations. Newcastle are a newly promoted club so their reluctance to use players they developed is understandable. The same is true of Huddersfield and makes even more sense considering the reduction in their youth system mentioned earlier. Eddie Howe has been giving minutes to young players this season (Nathan Aké, Lewis Cook, Jordon Ibe) but they’re players who’ve been acquired from elsewhere rather than reared by them; Bournemouth are still a small club though and they have a relatively small catchment area to draw from too. Swansea have been struggling all season long so it makes sense that they’ve relied on players signed from elsewhere, but given the weakness of their squad, it’s perhaps surprising that they’ve not given a chance to some academy players to bring something fresh and compensate for their poor depth in the same way that Everton have.
• In fact, there’s perhaps a case to be made that the clubs who have utilised the greatest number of players drawn from their own academy — United, Arsenal, Everton, Southampton — have underperformed this season, either in terms league position or in terms of style. Whether the increased use of academy players is the cause of that underperformance or an attempt to correct it is certainly up for debate.
• A criticism of Southampton’s recent managers (Koeman, Puel, Pellegrino) is that they’ve failed to integrate players from their highly regarded academy into the first team squad in the same way that Pochettino did. While Pellegrino hasn’t quite hit those heights yet, Southampton have used a higher than average number of players developed their own academy: Ward-Prowse and Stephens have both started ~50% of Saints’ games this season. However, some of the criticism of Pellegrino is possibly justified as Jack Stephens made his Premier League debut last year under Claude Puel and James Ward-Prowse played his first game for Southampton under Nigel Adkins back in 2011(!).
• Leading on from that criticism, one of the major things that springs out from the table is that the majority of players who are counted in this manner have been regular fixtures in their respective first team for several seasons now; Tom Edwards of Stoke is the only player on the list to have actually made his Premier League debut in the 17/18 season who has gone on to play a decent chunk of games. Sam Field, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Andreas Christensen, Jonjoe Kenny and, arguably, Trent Alexander-Arnold are the only others who can be considered to be currently having their breakout season with their parent club. There are plenty of things to say about that, but one thing it speaks to is the way that player development frequently works — rarely do players make their debut and then immediately establish themselves as first team squad members. Those players in the breakout category all made a handful of appearances for their club in the last couple of seasons and only now are starting with regularity. That means that there are probably several players who are currently under the 5 game threshold that will end up getting more game time next season. There also seems to be some sort of natural selection process going on with the more senior pros who I’ve listed on the table that I can’t quite articulate properly. At the very least, the fact that there is only one shiny, entirely new toy in the league this season explains why the general perception is that academy players don’t get significant first team opportunities in the Premier League.

Something else that was striking while scouring through squad lists was the number of graduates from United and Chelsea’s academies that are plying their trade for other Premier League clubs. The full list is as follows:

Manchester United: Welbeck (7), Heaton (4), Bardsley (10), Simpson (19), James (6), Keane (15), Cathcart (1), Cleverley (21), Fosu-Mensah (13), King (18), Shawcross (15), Fletcher (22), Evans (20).

Chelsea: Solanke (3), Cork (23), Chalobah (5), Loftus-Cheek (15), Aké (22), Bertrand (20).

When young prospects sign for these clubs, particularly Chelsea, they’re all too often accused of doing it solely for financial reasons and criticised for lacking the ambition to play first team football. And while that may be true in terms of breaking through to the starting lineup of United/ Chelsea, these clubs clearly provide a good footballing education that allows them to regularly play first team football at a high standard elsewhere. Both United and Chelsea have also been reasonable about selling players when they want to leave which makes them more appealing. Moving to big clubs makes sense for young players, even if their chances of actually playing for that club are slim, as it gives them extra rungs of the ladder to fall from.

(Given the imbalance of the number of players listed from both United and Chelsea, it might seem odd to group them together but those Chelsea players are more recent graduates and all of them (barring Solanke) are integral players for their current clubs.)

What about the members of that England under-20 World Cup winning squad?

As we’ve seen, Jonjoe Kenny and Ainsley Maitland-Niles have both broken through at their respective clubs and are now established members of the first team.

The same is true for Lewis Cook, Dom Solanke, Ademola Lookman, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin but all of those players have already been transferred once and as such don’t fit my definition of “academy player” for the clubs they’re currently playing for.

Of the other players currently owned by Premier League clubs, Kyle Walker-Peters played 90 minutes for Spurs on the opening weekend of the season but has only made one sub appearance in the league since and Freddie Woodman has made his solitary first team appearance so far for Newcastle in their FA Cup tie against Luton.

The rest of the Premier League owned players are out on loan, mainly at Championship clubs, but are all starting regularly: Calum Connolly (at Ipswich), Fikayo Tomori (Hull), Josh Onomah (Aston Villa), Adam Armstrong (Bolton/Blackburn), Kieran Dowell (Forest), Sheyi Ojo (Fulham). Jake Clarke-Salter had been at Chelsea since the summer until he signed on loan for Sunderland recently, while Dean Henderson is on loan at Shrewsbury Town of League One from United.

The players owned by clubs outside the top division have been getting some game time too. Dael Fry has been in and out of the Middlesbrough first team while Harry Chapman has been starting for Blackburn on a semi-regular basis on loan from the Riverside and Ezri Konsa has been one of the first names on the teamsheet for Charlton under Karl Robinson, a manager with a good record when it comes to youth development.

The only players from the World Cup winning squad who have yet to play any first team football at all this season are Luke Southwood of Reading and Ovie Ejaria of Liverpool.

Overall, that seems like it could be deemed a success.

It’ll be worth keeping an eye on how much this changes over the course of the second half of the season. For instance, I’d imagine as Harry Winks’ and Danny Rose’s injuries clear up they’ll push Tottenham’s percentage up and we might see a reduction in the number of starts given to academy players at Everton given Sam Allardyce’s reluctance to place his faith in youth.

Managerial changes, the arrival of senior players in the rest of the January transfer window, increased squad rotation as teams progress further in cup competitions, and injuries to first team players will all influence the number of starts granted to academy players as the season reaches its climax.

At present, the situation for academy players in the Premier League is a long way from being healthy, but it’s perhaps not quite as moribund as it’s made out to be.