The 2024-25 academy season at Chelsea was very much the start of a new era. While the sum of the overall changes and the impact therein may have been small overall to date, the first campaign without either Neil Bath or Jim Fraser involved in some form since 1993 began amid much uncertainty, picked up momentum as time went on, but ultimately finished with the same frustrations and disappointment as last year and, indeed, much of the last seven years that may have contributed to such dramatic events last summer.
That disappointment must and will be tempered, however, by a number of positives the club can point to. The Development Squad once again competed at the top end of Premier League 2 and associated cup competitions for the majority of the schedule, the Under-18s overcame a slow start in the league to emerge as legitimate but ultimately unsuccessful title challengers, while another eight academy graduates made their men’s first-team debut, including Under-16 midfielder Reggie Walsh, as both Josh Acheampong and Tyrique George established themselves ‘over the road’ at Cobham.
The academy is now under the joint leadership of Jack Francis – Chelsea man and boy, steadily working his way through the ranks in coaching and player care to Academy Manager and now Football Operations Director – and Glenn van der Kraan, who formerly headed up Feyenoord’s storied youth setup before being named Head of Coaching at Manchester City, leading to his appointment as Technical Director for the Blues. Francis primary looks after the people side of affairs, Van der Kraan the footballing curriculum and strategy, and together with Head of Academy Recruitment Delroy Ebanks plus increasing input from Co-Director of Recruitment and Talent Joe Shields, these are the people now charting the course for the Blues’ next generation. Additionally, Darren Grace has this summer departed as Head of Local Recruitment after more than two decades of turning six and seven year-old boys into international footballers, Champions League winners, Premier League winners and so much more.
Perhaps the most frequent question from those with even a passing interest in academy affairs this season has been to ask about change. What has changed? How much has changed? What’s the difference? And in truth, it’s still a little too soon to really feel the impact of such a dramatic upheaval, particularly with the new leadership only confirmed in October. Most of the people working at the club are long-serving Cobham custodians; from Francis to Ben Knight (now Academy Manager) to U18 lead coach Hassan Sulaiman and many, many others throughout the younger age groups and in recruitment, this is still an operation underpinned by so much good work over ten and twenty and thirty years.
Van der Kraan has been widely well-received; a conscientious man who listens intently and has sought to integrate himself into a strong culture while patiently but effectively implementing not just the changes directed of him by senior management, but that he feels are required based on his own considerable expertise. To that end, some end-of-season coaching exits were certainly awkward, as in any walk of life, but by the time the first ball is kicked in anger next August for 2025-26, this will be his and their show.
Filipe Coelho could have been forgiven for wondering what he was getting himself into when he agreed to replace Mark Robinson as the Development Squad’s lead coach a year ago; Bath reportedly handled the hiring process for the role only to leave before the Portuguese’s official appointment. He came with a burgeoning reputation for good work at both Benfica and Estoril in development football and the early word from those close to the squad was that he brought fresh impetus and ideas to a group that needed that sort of direction. Pre-season offered glimpses of the same prosaic build-up approach preferred by Enzo Maresca but that quickly faded into what really looked like a similar style of play to his predecessor; recording just one win from their first five league games might have that sort of effect.
To his and the team’s credit, it was often player-led solutions that saw a strong run either side of Christmas; six wins from seven and progress through the Premier League Cup came comfortably, with the likes of Harvey Vale, Deivid Washington and Alex Matos having not secured loans and instead found themselves lending their considerable talents to a squad that had an average age in the high teens otherwise. A good start to their EFL Trophy campaign saw Vale score twice in a win at League Two Bromley, for example, but defeats at both Charlton and Cambridge in the space of a Hallowe’en week were flat and saw another premature exit from a competition that Chelsea once reached the Semi Finals of. A group stage departure from the PL’s International Cup was similarly before time, having reached the knockout rounds the year before.
January saw those three players land belated moves, and the team grew younger still with first-year pro Landon Emenalo an increasing fixture in defence, and several schoolboys getting their first taste of action at an elevated level, with results still positive. Yet when all was said and done in early May, they had fallen at the Quarter Final stage of the PL Cup away to Category Two outfit Burnley, and were humbled in the PL2 Playoffs at the same last eight stage by a 6-0 drubbing away to Crystal Palace.
Both eliminations were a round sooner than their equivalents twelve months earlier, and in evaluating the squad it doesn’t feel like too many players were truly given a platform – or indeed, stepped up to it themselves – to take their games to the next level. For the debuts doled out and the emergence of George and Acheampong – who let’s not forget was exiled for the first half of the season owing to an alleged contract dispute – only Shim Mheuka and perhaps Sam Rak-Sakyi can claim they took significant steps forward this season, with multiple appearances at first-team level.
It might sound a harsh assessment of a team that found themselves in with a shout of silverware, but they won 21 of their 37 matches in all competitions, just over a 50% winning rate for the second year in succession (it was 23/40 in 23-24), and while the familiar refrain in academy football when results suffer is that they’re secondary to development, this is a club that continues to prioritise winning as a key component of producing high-quality players. The standards remain the same and there will be an expectation more than a hope for next year’s group to bring a trophy back to Cobham, with the welcome return of the UEFA Youth League offering an additional path after two years away.
For the Under-18s, it was a second successive season of nearly but not quite, albeit they didn’t lose in the national final and they relinquished their hold on the South league title. That owed much to losing their first three games of the season and five of their first seven with an increasingly young squad amid significant absence among elder players while also deliberately choosing to blood the next generation early, such has been the precocity of their talents so far.
They lost just three league games from the seventeen thereafter, a record none of their competitors could better, but unfortunately the season is played out over twenty-four matches and that slow start proved costly. A seventh successive season came and went without recapturing the FA Youth Cup trophy that belongs at the Bridge, while attempts to win the Under-18 version of the Premier League Cup came up short in the last eight at home to Liverpool, where a 2-0 lead with ten minutes to go crumbled into a 3-2 defeat with the fatal blow struck by Rio Ngumoha, who had traded Chelsea blue for Merseyside Red the previous summer, one of two departures along with Ryan McAidoo that might have been another catalyst for such radical reform at the top of the hierarchy.
Age group lead Sulaiman remains a measured and considered character who never gets too high in victory or too low in defeat, and was in reflective mood overall when describing this as “a season of growth” where “I don’t think any of us truly realised just how testing the early part of the season would be.” The opening day defeat to Brighton saw Under-16 forward Chizzy Ezenwata start and four of his age group contemporaries come on as substitutes. Fast forward to May, where two of those involved on that August afternoon had made first-team debuts and twenty-two schoolboy-age players had claimed at least one appearance for Sulaiman’s squad, and you can see why he was able to wrap up the campaign with “experience, learning and signs of long-term promise.”
It wasn’t just that nearly two dozen players still in formal academic education got their chance; they accounted for almost half of all appearances made across the country’s youngest squad this season. They drove momentum in the second half of the season, they went to a Leicester team that had won 5-2 at Cobham and returned with all three points while fielding a squad that featured just three scholars, six Under-16s, six Under-15s and the Under-14 winger Trey Faromo-Adebayo on an especially memorable (if wet) afternoon in the East Midlands
In that sense it drew close comparisons to the 2013-14 Under-18 season, where a similar number of early graduates came through and made a significant impact en route to delivering the first of five successive Youth Cup triumphs. Then, it was Tammy Abraham, Jake Clarke-Salter, Jay Dasilva, Dominic Solanke, Fikayo Tomori as Under-16s and Trevoh Chalobah, Mason Mount, Iké Ugbo and others at Under-15 who got the early call and never looked back; a decade from now it might be Mahdi Nicoll-Jazuli and Reggie Watson who’ll look back to these last ten months as the springboard for stardom.
Like the 21s though, the standards are high and the expectations for next season will be to make up ground on those who aren’t just perceived to have pushed ahead of them, but who validated that perception on the pitch. Manchester United were dominant in a 5-1 victory that saw the Blues lose another chance at Youth Cup redemption. That Liverpool Cup collapse was immensely frustrating but they also failed to beat both Arsenal and Tottenham home and away in league action; turning the tide on their elite Category One rivals will be central to their aspirations of winning things again next term.
The overall trend within the academy game is for clubs to field ever-younger teams at all age groups. The motivations for doing so will be unique to each but it does offer an interesting discussion point for the years ahead as we move towards fifteen years of EPPP football. Much of continental Europe operates with an Under-19 and Under-17 structure, as do UEFA national competitions. England have typically been out of sync since the late 90s, when they shifted to Under-18 and Under-21 or Under-23 football, but with senior academy leadership at major clubs now slowly growing in European influence – Van der Kraan joins Thomas Krucken at Man City and Per Mertesacker at Arsenal in leading an operation – conversations about finding consistency with their peers across the channel may restart after meeting resistance almost a decade ago. All three clubs have notably gone younger across the board in the last two years.
When zooming out to take a wider look at the academy’s overall place within the club, it’s clear that the messaging about the new approach across the entire men’s operation is to demonstrate clinical, efficient, sober process-bound practices free from emotion that might cloud judgement. It stands to reason that it might eventually be the way this academy operates, at least as a foundational principle. This sounds more pejorative than it’s really intended, but Maresca has been the very public face of the new era and he continues to tell everyone that this ‘is a different Chelsea, it’s not the same Chelsea’, and that applies across the board by design. Everything that came before the Boehly-Clearlake era’s arrival in 2022 is gone and this is Chelsea reborn, CFC LDN by brand, which raises all sorts of questions but an increasingly important one in particular: How many clubs have reinvented and successfully decoupled themselves from what they had been historically known for and identified as, both as a community of supporters and in the wider public perspective?
How do you dispose of a culture and capably build a new one in your own image? Manchester City are possibly the only high-profile example of it happening in England and it did so under such dizzying wealth to a club desperately seeking to move on from a controversial regime under Thaksin Shinawatra that it was…easier? With no criticism intended towards City fans, there was little by way of resistance and they were able to deliver early success sufficient to silence most internal criticism, all the while accruing 115 Premier League charges relating to how they went about it.
But can you do that at Chelsea in 2025? Can you do it by force with so many prominent former City Football Group employees themselves trying to drive that change on and off the pitch? Have they been specifically identified for their background in delivering that very change the ownership clearly desires? We’re very much in the process of finding out, and Champions League qualification combined with a Conference League triumph certainly allows them to go into the 2025 off-season with positivity rather than yet another summer rife with speculation and drama. On the academy side, can you safely move on from twenty years of success at senior and youth level and say ‘that was then, this is now’ and make it stick? Chelsea will never be the easiest club to pull this off at and, while success muffles the loudest of complaints, there are still more questions than answers.
Again, this isn’t to say it’s the intention of anyone in the academy to do this directly, but they’re a piece of the puzzle and likely bound to the same ruthless resolution down the road. This is business, we’re told, there are no hard feelings to be had, no time to waste. They’ve assembled a new group of personnel from the top of the club right through every department, one that scarcely represents those who went before them in terms of new arrivals, because the old club doesn’t exist anymore, so why would they? At a certain point everyone ends up swimming with the tide.
The academy may well continue to be as successful as ever, if not more, and it’ll carry a different vibe, a new feeling, maybe a rich and rewarding one in its own right. As the transition continues into season two and then three and four beyond that, the real sense of family cultivated by the previous custodians will yield to a new family finding its own way and making their own memories. Will retirees and former academy players who moved into coaching or scouting roles in their 20s still be welcomed back to forge a new path at the club as before? Will out of contract former graduates needing somewhere to train to get ready for new challenges still be given the opportunity to do so? Will it still feel very much a part of the Chelsea fabric? How much does any of this actually matter in the modern football ecosystem?
We’ll inevitably find out and, even if the answer to some of those questions is ‘no’, it’ll be more a case of Chelsea falling in line with the majority rather than standing out and doing things their way. There should always be room for heritage, heart and soul in a high-performance environment, for individuality, creativity and flair, vision and foresight, improvisation and ingenuity, trying and failing and trying again. Football has largely forgotten that at senior level; English academy football has at least tried to hold on to the last vestiges of a comparable culture and it’s important for those currently driving the game forward at those levels to retain it in an environment where young people are finding their way in the world more than ever before. The sense around the academy building and from those working in it day-to-day is that these all remain highly desirable traits of a successful operation.
Last autumn I wrote about my concerns for academy football and the season that unfolded since then has done little to assuage those fears. This is a different Chelsea academy and a different landscape overall; we can reflect and reminisce about the storied success of the 2010s, and we can know that the players we’re watching now are the products of that vintage, but what we see going forward will be increasingly impacted and therefore measured by the new sheriffs in town. They have a hell of a lot to live up to, the holding pattern is over and, as Chelsea fans, we should all support them and hope they deliver everything and more.