In the summer of 2023, a primary school-aged player left a Category 1 academy to join a rival more than 100 miles away from home. He has since moved onto another club, the family benevolently compensated for their willingness to do so, in a potentially worrying example of what the academy and development ecosystem in England could look like by 2030 if current trends continue without intervention.
The Elite Player Performance Plan was codified in 2011 and implemented into practice a year later. We now have a decade of lessons to learn from and evidence to base future decisions on. It has been considerably positive, at least at a headline level, with the England national team enjoying unprecedented success across all age groups with the depth and breadth of talent graduating into the senior game transforming the English football landscape, largely in many tangible and sustainable ways.
Of course, it’s impossible to talk about the EPPP without the criticism from many so-called ‘smaller’ EFL clubs, who feel the system favours those at the top of the pyramid, leaving them short-changed when teenage talent takes off for bigger challenges. The counter-argument has always been that it’s a natural progression that has always happened regardless of the rules in place at the time, that children should not be held or traded as commodities, and that the talent trickles back down the pyramid ten-fold as the bar is raised at the top.
That argument about commoditisation of players, however, is where an increasing number of clubs are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Twelve years ago, when EPPP was in its infancy, Eden Hazard’s £32m move from Lille to Chelsea was the top deal made by a Premier League club, the only transfer north of £30m, in a summer window where the top-flight collective spent less than £500m combined. That summer’s new television deal with Sky and BT landed them a 71% increase in revenue, however, and that £3bn figure has since grown to £6.7bn. Hazard’s £32m move would be roughly valued at £85m in 2024 accounting for transfer inflation, according to The Transfer Index.
It’s the era of Profit and Sustainability (Rules, PSR as it is familiarly known), of amortisation, of having so much money that you can just about get away with anything, particularly in academy football, where investment is unlimited as far as compliance with PSR (or Financial Fair Play (FFP) in a former guise) is concerned. In a market where English clubs cannot go shopping for Europe’s best 15 and 16-year old talents as they did so often before Brexit-related restrictions came into force in 2020, and where they are richer than ever, with tens of millions burning holes in their pockets, they’re now battling it out in condensed domestic market operating under decade-old rules. And they feel compelled to spend big..
In a summer where Rio Ngumoha and Ryan McAidoo left Chelsea to join Liverpool and Manchester City respectively, much has once again been made of ‘pathways’, something of a nebulous concept that speaks to expectations and demands of a clear route to senior first-team football, but one that is all too often distilled down into its simplest form without a proper critique of what that means. With Chido Obi-Martin swapping Arsenal for Manchester United, Dante Plunkett leaving Aston Villa to make the same move, Rory Finneran moving north from Blackburn to Newcastle despite making a senior debut as a 15 year-old last season, Harrison Miles and Alejandro Gomes Rodriguez opting out of Southampton – who are held as an example of opportunity – to seek fortune and fame at Man City and Lyon, and many, many more examples, we have to ask ourselves why they’re moving, and what their ‘pathway’ actually might be.
For many, ‘the project’ (often equally hard to define) is king; they’re shown around a shiny new training facility with indications of plans in place for that space to grow and evolve into a best-in-class building, with a five-year plan outlining how they’ll go from first-year scholar to a lucrative professional contract on their seventeenth birthday (Obi-Martin will reportedly earn close to £30,000 p/w at United), a sooner-than-average promotion to Premier League 2 football before a loan into the senior game by the age of 19, ready to challenge for a first-team place by the time they’re 21. The blueprint is the same everywhere, the sales pitch is familiar, but the sweeteners are a bit more dependent on short-term context.
Ngumoha (who supposedly turned down more money from Chelsea to leave) and McAidoo, for example, might feel justified in moving to play for clubs who will feature in the UEFA Youth League in 2024-25, with Chelsea having failed to qualify by any viable route for the second successive Clearlake season. As the world’s foremost club competition for academy-age footballers, it is an illustrious and important stage upon which a player can forge a reputation and explode to prominence, and it should not be overlooked just how much players want to see their names associated with the elite.
Stability of structure in leadership, at both academy and senior levels, is also valued highly, as is a healthy respect of the academy operation by key decision-makers across the club. Sure, many will talk a good game, but actions always speak loudest. As an entirely subjective venture, it doesn’t matter what an outside observer thinks about how a club comports itself in these areas; the players, their families, connections and representatives will always have a more personal experience and will always go where they feel most valued and celebrated. The ‘pathway’ is about the here and now; who can make the strongest sales pitch to take advantage in the moment, to weave a story and to sell a dream. Media narratives don’t play as much of a role as you think, and neither does any amount of noise generated on social media; it’s nice to pretend you’re looking three to five years down the line, and maybe some players are, but making them feel important and convincing them the grass is indeed greener is where the battles are won and lost.
This whole process has become very familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in the academy game since EPPP came into effect; children are now routinely referenced by transfer industry titans, minors are commonly photoshopped onto adult bodies wearing their prospective new team’s colours without shame or recrimination, and agents with a remit to strike the best deal control the narrative at every turn. And as well they might; football guarantees nobody a career and if there is life-changing money on the table for families who, in some cases have come from very little, you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who would turn it down. It’s easy for those in more comfortable positions to preach patience on the premise that greater riches await further down the road, but tell that to a 23 year-old who was once a highly-touted boy of 16 only to suffer a catastrophic injury that changed the course of his life, let alone his career. The incentive to take what you can get right now has never been higher, because clubs are richer and can throw their money around at Under-16 level with little to no impact on the bottom line or on compliance with financial rules.
And the signs are that this largesse and wilful commercialisation of children is only going to expand down into the younger age groups. Boys typically sign two-year registrations that expire at the end of their Under-10, Under-12, Under-14 and Under-16 seasons, at which point they are free to consider their options with minimal compensation required should they change clubs. This summer has seen a rapid and accelerated growth in the number of U14s moving around and, left unchecked, there’s little reason to think the market won’t eventually swallow up everyone in the same way.
What would be left at that point is a system in which perhaps a majority of players – or at least a decent portion – have a scattered education of two-year spells across as many as half a dozen leading academies, which poses a question that doesn’t necessarily have a right answer. Is it better for a young prospect to have an education centred at one club with a diverse, rich and challenging curriculum for a decade, or to dip in for little bits of education from those half a dozen clubs at the same time, arguably a mile wide and an inch deep to critics, but wide-reaching and world-building to others?
Whatever your preference – and there is empirical evidence at Chelsea at least that the former is more successful than the latter as discussed here – the emphasis on recruitment will invariably lead to coaching taking a back seat at a time when it is more important than at any other stage of an individual’s career. Senior academy management positions are increasingly being given to people who come from recruitment backgrounds rather than coaching backgrounds, perhaps reflective of another of football’s short-term, empty-calorie, win-now idealisms where they can get ready-made (or close to) talent instead of waiting for their own development to shine through.
Aston Villa are a prime example of a club that sits just outside of the supposed elite academies, those scoring highest in EPPP audits, leaning heavily on the recruitment side of the process to try to catch up. Academy Manager Mark Harrison joined from West Brom in 2019 and brought a number of former colleagues with him across the Midlands, including Stephen Hopcroft, who masterfully identified generations of talent at The Hawthorns that turned into excellent senior pros. Villa’s development pipeline now feature former Baggies Lino Sousa, Rico Richards, Louie Barry, Jamal Jimoh, Triston Rowe, Max Jenner, Keilan Quinn and Luka Lynch, with Chisom Afoka and Ruben Shakpoke recently released, and Morgan Rogers in Unai Emery’s first-team squad, all taken from a former club struggling to adjust to the reality of Premier League relegation in a post-parachute payment era, without power or recourse to resist, with those same EPPP rules for a 2012 world still unchanged a decade later.
This copycat culture is more prevalent than you might realise. Villa’s example is a lot closer to home but, when Manchester City have won six of the last seven Premier League titles and accumulated an impressive haul of academy silverware in the same time, their rivals are increasingly taking the view that ‘if you can’t beat them, steal from them’. Tottenham Hotspur’s Academy Director is Simon Davies, former of City’s academy and latterly their wider Football Group. Manchester United paid a hefty compensation fee to bring in Jason Wilcox from Southampton, where he’d been in place for barely a year after leading City’s youth setup for a decade. Chelsea have welcomed Glenn van der Kraan from City’s U9-14 age group as part of their succession plan for the post-Neil Bath era. These changes have all happened in the last year, and the picture painted beyond the leading clubs is somewhat scattergun.
Crystal Palace’s Gary Issott is the longest-serving Cat 1 academy director while everyone else has changed their leadership since then, in many cases inside the last 5 years. Why is there so much change? Because everyone wants results now. When the focus tips more towards the recruitment of talent over the development of talent, the development landscape changes considerably. The EPPP delivers a curriculum framework for clubs to follow; some stick more closely to this than others and Chelsea have traditionally done things slightly differently to the rest, with compellingly brilliant results. Depending on the direction of travel from 2024 onward we might see a closer alignment with what everyone else is doing under the banner of ‘uniting the first-team and academy under a single style of play’.
Is that a good thing? Again, it’s entirely subjective, but to begin to try to answer that you have to start by asking what is the aim and why? Getting players into the first team under a ‘single style of play’ is a fundamentally flawed ideology – at least in its basic presentation – because there isn’t a single style of play anywhere. ‘Producing world class players’ is also flawed; you don’t produce them, you open the door for them when they come knocking if they live around the corner. If you’re fortunate enough to recruit them later on, your job is to point them in the right direction and get out of their way. They are unicorns.
The next level of talent down, though, the quality top-level and international players, are the best you can possibly produce through your own hard work, and the volume Chelsea have churned out is remarkable and unrivalled in England, if not Europe. To look at Chelsea’s decade-plus record of production and conclude that it’s anything other than world-leading in its generalist approach (and that is not a phrase used in the pejorative sense whatsoever) is, in the politest of terms, naive.
This convention will continue in the PSR era as clubs will want a quicker return from their academy, not least because the senior transfer market continues to expose bad decision-makers and leave less latitude for mistakes. They want to have their cake and eat it, to be able to continue to spend recklessly on first-team recruitment and to have the academy pay for it. Academy successes are the golden ticket on the spreadsheet and on the pitch so people without a clear understanding of what it takes to succeed in that environment want to take shortcuts to get to the end without investing, ironically, in the process.
When EPPP was introduced, twenty-two clubs were granted Category One status. We’re now at 26; the maiden cohort has lost Bolton Wanderers, gained Brighton, Crystal Palace, Derby, Leeds and Nottingham Forest, seen Reading come and go and come back again, and had fleeting visits from Birmingham, Burnley and Swansea. The auditing process has remained almost entirely unchanged, leaving strong Category Two academies like Charlton, Sheffield United, Millwall and Ipswich on the outside looking in as they fall short by a few percentage points because their facilities aren’t quite of the required standard. As successful as the programme has been, it is ripe for review and reform. Those chiefly involved in its introduction – Ged Roddy, Neil Bath, Brian McClair – are no longer directly involved in the game, and when they were it was 13 years after Howard Wilkinson’s ‘Charter For Change’, its most direct predecessor. We’re exactly 13 years on from their work; the time is right to evolve, to reflect on what the academy scene looks like now, and provide adequate direction for the future.
What does this all mean for Chelsea? Well, for the first time in two decades, we really don’t have a lot to go on. Bath and Jim Fraser have been ousted and the new era will be led by a joint effort between newcomers Van der Kraan and Delroy Ebanks (a Fraser-type recruiter with an extensive network of connections and background in on-the-ground scouting in London and the South East) and those with a historic and institutional background in the academy like Jack Francis, promoted to Head of Academy Operations having previously been Academy Manager and Head of Player Care in a career that dates back to his time playing in the youth team itself.
Van der Kraan’s specialty is very much in the coaching side of the game, having come through and led Feyenoord’s excellent youth system before working in the Foundation Phase at Man City, and if the old and new can combine to healthy and collaborative effect without any more collateral damage to long-term custodians of a setup that does and did things better than any of their contemporaries, there’s little reason to think that a steady flow of high-level professional talent won’t continue. It is, like a lot of other things at the club now though, a very big if. It is a self-declared new era for the men, the women and the academy.
Beyond the reaches of the Cobham training ground, a site that preceded the EPPP and both figuratively and literally laid the foundations for the radical change that was to follow, the rest of the country has closed the gap in infrastructure, expenditure, recruitment and silverware. Everyone has money now, everyone knows the industry, and finding those clichéd marginal gains over your ever-more competitive rivals is as challenging now as it ever has been. As long as everyone is working under rules that have been stressed, bent and often broke beyond reason, written at the apex of a problem that has since been solved, there will be even less scope to get ahead, to avoid a dog-eat-dog world where children are the collateral damage, and coaching takes a back seat to recruitment in the desperate search for ‘the next one’.