It started with a Jonas Elmer goal, and a fight.
Chelsea’s 2-1 win over Cardiff City in September 2006 was a routine Under-18 fixture that was only memorable to those in attendance for an actual fist-fight (not the usual football handbags) involving Blues midfielder Lee Sawyer, who let’s say wasn’t a stranger to confrontation. What began as a speculative watch for yours truly turned into a passion, an obsession and a journey right up to the current day, twenty full seasons and nearly twenty years later, with a close-up view of the development of youth football at Chelsea, in England and beyond.
Chelsea’s academy in 2006 was in a state of transition. The Roman Abramovich takeover three years earlier afforded a once-in-lifetime opportunity to radically overhaul a programme that had been reasonably successful by most standards – led by John Terry’s emergence at the turn of the millennium – but wasn’t prepared to be pioneering and world-beating in the same way their senior counterparts were well on their way to being by this point. Neil Bath was installed as Academy Manager after a decade working his way through the coaching and management ranks, Jim Fraser was drafted in from Swindon Town to work with him, Frank Arnesen led a wider recruitment programme across continental Europe, and the Cobham training ground was rapidly expanding to give the academy facilities and opportunities it had never dreamt of having before.
To understand that opportunity is to understand where youth football was in 2003 at the time of Abramovich’s takeover. Wayne Rooney and James Milner had made their debuts that August, London rivals were comfortably beating them at age-group level, but Chelsea were still only able to find fleeting opportunities for Carlton Cole, Robert Huth and Joe Keenan in a campaign where their sole first-team signing was the free transfer arrival of Enrique De Lucas. They were broke, close to going out of business, and finished that U19 (as it was then) season without a win in their last five, while the Reserves ended with one victory in their last eight.
When they beat Cardiff three years later, they did so with goalscorer Elmer among a number of continental teenagers recruited to help accelerate the bridging of the gap to be competitive with the country’s best academies. Ben Sahar, Fabio Ferreira, Ricardo Fernandes, Miroslav Stoch, Morten Nielsen, Sergio Tejera, Tomi Saarelma and Nick Hamann were all recruited by Arnesen’s team while the likes of Ryan Bertrand, Scott Sinclair, Michael Woods and Tom Taiwo were enlisted by Bath and Fraser to lead the domestic charge.
The acquisition of Woods and Taiwo from Leeds drew national attention and, amid allegations of ‘tapping up’, would be the first of several occasions over the next two decades where Chelsea found themselves accused of rule-breaking. A £5m settlement to avoid an investigation meant sums previously unheard of for 16 year-olds now become something of a benchmark and, rather unfortunately, left the two young players shouldering the burden of attention not meant for them, and not at all healthy for them either. It was, in many ways, an early look at what lie ahead for players of their ages.
The club found itself in hot water again in 2009 when the signing of Gael Kakuta was deemed to have been induced by illegal approaches and both the player and Chelsea were subject to bans that were eventually overturned on appeal. It’s impossible to tell the story of the modern Chelsea academy without entertaining the suggestion that they not only forced their way to the top with a succession of moves that, at best, skirted the rules, but also opened the door for rivals and contemporaries to follow suit with teenagers increasingly being commoditised by agents, intermediaries and recruitment teams desperate to steal a march over their rivals.
Abramovich’s investment afforded them the means to set up the most comprehensive national scouting network anyone had ever seen, casting the widest net and forging relationships with countless grassroots talent hotbeds, which would typically be seen as doing things the ‘right’ way, but with Woods, Taiwo, Kakuta, and later on Andreas Christensen, Karlo Ziger, Billy Gilmour and others they were slapped with another transfer ban in 2019 for egregiously flouting the regulations that had continually evolved directly because of their prior antics.
Even now, in 2026, the academy operates under restrictions for irregularities discovered during the ownership change in 2022 (which some believe helped accelerate Fraser’s exit from the club, more on that later). Cynically, an attitude of ‘if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying’ pervades across the game from the highest levels all the way down, and there’s long been an understanding of those closest to the academy environments that everyone is at it to some degree, it’s just a case of whether you get caught. Every big club in England has faced the music at one point or another, but Chelsea were undeniably at the forefront of it, faced the sternest punishments, and yet…it scarcely seemed to matter. The foundations built in the mid-2000s meant they could absorb hit after hit and keep on going.
Woods made his first-team debut for Jose Mourinho mere months after joining, while Taiwo’s time at the club was marred by injuries that would affect him right through until he made the decision to retire in his late 20s before embarking upon a new career in scouting that saw him return to the Blues, where he has served as a National Lead for several years now. That circular journey was a core tenet of the Chelsea that Bath and Fraser would build together; ensuring that academy pathways were not just limited to what unfolded out on the pitch, that individuals would be given opportunities to excel in other roles and duties and, no matter when their playing careers ended be it as teenagers or thirty-somethings, the door at Cobham was always open to them to take the next step forward.
Today’s club staff include James Russell, James Simmonds, Andy Ross, Jake Askew, Tom Howard, George Cole and Sam Hurrell, who each went from player to coach with various stops in between. Joe Edwards, Eddie Newton, Andy Myers, Jody Morris, Ed Brand, Harry Worley, Jack Saville, Tom Bird, Ali Gordon, Ashley Cole, Tore Andre Flo, Frank Lampard, John Terry, Joe Cole, Jon Harley and so many more got their coaching starts under Bath’s tutelage, while a similarly prolific list can be compiled for those who never served as players but graduated through the academy ranks with distinction to serve and drive success ‘over the road’ at men’s first team level or elsewhere in the wider game; Brendan Rodgers, Paul Clement, Steve Clarke, Adi Viveash, Steve Holland, Dermot Drummy, Eva Carneiro, Steve Hughes, David Porter, Glen Driscoll, Jo Clubb, Mick Beale and many more raised their game at Cobham.
Clement and his staff reached a first FA Youth Cup Final in nearly fifty years when Kakuta, Jeffrey Bruma, Patrick van Aanholt, Jacob Mellis, Ben Gordon and several other new arrivals guided them to a showpiece occasion they would eventually lose to a Daniel Sturridge-inspired Manchester City, but that match was just a taster for what was to follow. In five years of Abramovich ownership and just two years into this personal twenty-year journey, Chelsea were finding their place at the top table and were poised to enter the 2010s, a decade that would see them accomplish record-breaking feats of success.
After arriving from Tottenham in 2005 in another one of those highly-publicised and controversial transfers that cost Chelsea more than they expected, Arnesen’s remit grew from Head Talent Scout into first de facto, and then formal Sporting Director, expanding his remit from international youth-age recruitment to having oversight of the entire men’s operation, and with no little success too. But at the end of 2010 he signalled his intention to leave to join Hamburg, and the resulting redistribution of power would have a dramatic effect on the academy’s fortunes thereafter.
For, while he was instrumental in bringing dozens of European talents to the quiet Surrey commune of Stoke d’Abernon (where the training ground is actually situated), Bath and Fraser had spent those years combing the length and breadth of England to ensure the cream of the crop were in Chelsea blue as early as possible. While the duo rightly received their flowers and then some over the years, the work performed by Darren Grace as Head of Local Recruitment did not receive anywhere near the acclaim it deserved, as the expansion of Development Centres and the cultivation of partnerships and relationships throughout London and the South East saw a generation of elite English talent start their journey under their combined tutelage. More about them later.
With Arnesen now out of the picture and Michael Emenalo moving through the scouting ranks to undertake a similar role as Technical Director in 2011, Bath officially became Head of Youth Development. This was the cue not just for Chelsea to take the next step themselves, but for them to become industry leaders in the most important programme English football had seen for a decade when the Elite Player Performance Plan was conceived.
Following the England men’s national team’s disappointing showing in the 2010 World Cup, where they recorded just one win over Slovenia before a humbling exit at the hands of Germany, the usual post-tournament fallout demanding a ‘root and branch’ reform came back around, this time with a bit more gusto than usual following the Three Lions’ absence from Euro 2008. The difference this time is that Bath spearheaded a working group designed to affect real change; not since Howard Wilkinson’s 1997 Charter For Quality had there been a directive to overhaul the way youth development worked.
Then, it was about empowering clubs to own their own progression pathways rather than the centralised centres of excellence like Lilleshall being the primary route through for the country’s elite youngsters. Now, come 2011 Bath along with respected colleagues Jex Moxey, Brian McClair, Ged Roddy and senior figures from across the top flight sought to take it a step further, removing restrictions around recruitment for the very best clubs, who would be identified by regular audits, ensuring a best-on-best competition that would provide the majority of the annual games programme, while increasing coaching provisions by fostering links with local schools to allow players to spend more time on-site at training grounds.
With no little controversy and no shortage of EFL-fronted protests, it was voted through late that year and inaugurated in 2012, by which time Chelsea were primed not just to emerge as a force, but to take full advantage of the new regulations they were central in crafting. Now, their sprawling recruitment network could cover every corner of the country. Now they could offer bigger and better opportunities on and off the pitch. Now they could not just compete with their rivals, but pull away from them.
By now they’d finally claimed a first FA Youth Cup trophy in half a century after seeing off Aston Villa in 2010, before being crowned Reserve League champions a year later. 2011-12 saw them return to the Youth Cup summit with a rampant aggregate win over Blackburn and, while their success two years earlier was still laden with recruited talent, the balance was shifting towards those that had come through from younger age groups. Jamal Blackman, Todd Kane, Alex Davey, Nathaniel Chalobah, John Swift and Lewis Baker all started and played key roles alongside the like of Nathan Aké, Islam Feruz and Lucas Piazon, and having collected trophies three seasons in a row, there was a ruthless determination to raise the bar again.
This all coincided with the rise of social media and wider attention on youth football from all around the world. What was previously a niche interest for hardy souls who gave up their weekend mornings and weekend evenings to stand on touchlines or brave the winter weather at Aldershot or Brentford was now becoming a fully-fledged sub-genre of the sport that had increased accessibility on television and online. Chelsea TV had long since broadcast Reserve games live and continued to do so with the switch to Under-21 (then 23, then back to 21) designations, and highlights of Under-18 matches turned to full matches and weekly Inside The Academy magazine shows to bring additional insight to the lives of players, staff and families. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram perpetuated the growth and stimulated conversation (even amid growing the toxicity that would come to define them) and, as Chelsea went from strength to strength, the spotlight shone fiercely on them. The scrutiny brought out their best.
Back to back Youth Cups didn’t quite happen with a defeat to Norwich in the 2013 Final, but they would wrestle it back in 2014 and not yield it again until the end of the decade, registering five successive triumphs to match a feat only previously accomplished by Manchester United’s Busby Babes of the 1950s. Several players joined an elite group to have won the competition in all three years of their eligibility; Jay Dasilva, Jake Clarke-Salter and Dujon Sterling among them
Victories over Fulham and Arsenal bookended three consecutive slayings of Manchester City; a rivalry that defined the era on and off the pitch, and that would ultimately have ripple effects that lasted well into the current day version of Chelsea. With each passing year, City’s expensively-assembled squads that aped the Blues’ accelerated recruitment of the century’s first decade not only failed to find a way to win, but were increasingly humbled by Edwards and Morris’ groups that had come through from the foundation stage. Kelechi Iheanacho, Pablo Mafeo, Angelino, Brahim Diaz, Jadon Sancho, Rodney Kongolo, Manu Garcia, Arijanet Muric, Lorenzo Gonzalez and everyone else were no match for their rivals, who crowned their three-peat with a 5-1 thrashing at the Bridge in 2017, a margin of defeat City wouldn’t be subject to again for nine years, when the Blues did it to them again last month.
On that 2017 night, nine of the starting eleven had come through the local development programme. The year before, every single starter had joined the club at U12 or earlier, something not seen at this level in a generation. When Reece James, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Tino Anjorin, Billy Gilmour and company ran riot against Arsenal in 2018 to make it five-in-a-row, they did so at the end of two years under Morris tutelage in which they won all seven trophies available to them, spending more than 1000 days unbeaten at home, and elevating themselves into truly rarefied air.
And that was just in domestic competition. The UEFA Youth League provided the stage to show the rest of Europe what they were made of and they claimed back-to-back wins in that with victories against Shakhtar Donetsk and Paris Saint-Germain, each team full of future professionals and players who would make an impact for the men’s first team. It could and should have been more; denied entry into the 2015-16 edition because the men’s first team missed out on qualification and UEFA had no provisions for the holder to defend their title in those circumstances, a dominant squad had no chance to three-peat, while their successors did go on to reach a pair of Finals themselves, losing to Barcelona and Porto in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
Over the course of the decade, Cobham provided more players to the English national team age groups than any other club in the world; they had more call-ups season-by-season, playing a central role in a development pipeline that, at one point saw them responsible for half of all senior England maiden call-ups in a given time period and, under Gareth Southgate’s leadership, they provided more than 20% of all debutants.
An era of record-breaking dominance culminated in Porto in May 2021 with a second Champions League win. In eighteen months under Frank Lampard’s management, more was done to further the cause of academy graduation over the road than at any point during his illustrious playing career and, while he’d made way for Thomas Tuchel by this point, his fingerprints were all over that famous success against (again, of course) City. Reece James and Mason Mount started and played pivotal roles; Mount famously laying on the winning assist for Kai Havertz. Andreas Christensen came off the bench early to slot into the back four, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Billy Gilmour were on the bench, Tino Anjorin and Tammy Abraham had played meaningful roles across the course of the run, and Joe Edwards and Chris Jones were among the Cobham-laden technical staff. The now-famous picture of celebration at full time, and several more behind the scenes, provided scenes of justification, of vindication, of so many hours and so much effort from so many people to arrive at that point together. The pride felt in the academy building was unlike that of any other accomplishment they’d contributed to.
While the explosion of social media and increased scrutiny of academy football was arguably helpful for the game in affording people a more considered insight into how things worked and the importance of each discipline involved, it also carried an intensely poisonous undercurrent with bad actors who routinely created controversy and conflict, then amplified it for profit without caring who was impacted. Academies were being forced to adapt and learn on the fly as new and unexpected outside influences impacted the young people they were responsible for. Player Care teams grew in importance, aftercare for those leaving a system that often failed them was the subject of books and documentaries and deep dives from respected journalists and writers and, with those increases in financial incentives came a saturation in agent and intermediary involvement, players moving from club to club before finishing secondary school, all in search of that life-changing deal that the game never guarantees anyone.
When the world shut down three months into 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it felt like the EPPP era had peaked, and an uncertain future lay in store. With clubs richer than ever and under pressure to deliver a return on investment almost immediately, some clubs very publicly opted to close their academies and focus on a more streamlined operation. Others were punching well above their weight just to compete at what was quickly becoming a bloated Category One level. Generations of players faced uncertainty with months spent at home instead of the training ground and, although things started to return to a semblance of normalcy by the start of 2022, an even bigger bombshell was about to hit Chelsea themselves.
On 10th March 2022, Roman Abramovich was sanctioned by the UK Government. The irony of the date was not lost on most Chelsea fans; on the 117th anniversary of the club’s founding, a new era was immediately set in motion. Eighty-one head-spinning days later the Clearlake-Boehly takeover was complete and suddenly everything we knew (or thought we knew) was in doubt.
By this point the academy, though still enjoying its position as a force in the game, hadn’t been able to match the successes of the 2010s. The pandemic proved challenging for all academies, with Under-9s to 16s afforded little to no in-person training time, the Dev Squad were awarded the PL2 title unbeaten but at the end of an unfinished season, and the Under-18s could only claim one League Cup but no regional, national or Youth Cup titles. Amid a perception of slipping standards and a significant increase in external third-party influence, they lost Jamal Musiala (2019 to Bayern Munich) and Sam Iling-Junior (Juventus, 2020) at the end of their Under-16 seasons and didn’t quite have the same pull for talent in the recruitment market at the same age as they once did; Sam Edozie and Max Alleyne were among those opting for Man City’s lighter shade of blue.
In the summer of 2021, Tino Livramento, Lewis Bate and Myles Peart-Harris were all wooed by other Premier League clubs informed of their dissatisfaction with their development pathways and, banished to train with the Under-16s, all finished that transfer window in new colours; Livramento at Southampton, Bate at Leeds and Peart-Harris at Brentford. Marc Guehi engineered a move to Crystal Palace for similar reasons after a stellar loan spell at Swansea, Abraham and Fikayo Tomori headed to Italy after finding the post-Lampard era less to their liking (in Tomori’s case it started under Lampard), and half a dozen other academy pros decided this was their time to move on. Losing a dozen graduates to rivals in the same summer set alarm bells ringing
City’s emergence as legitimate competition for the title of ‘best academy in England’ was probably overdue despite their extended humiliation years earlier and, in a delayed single-legged decider at the neutral and empty St George’s Park in October 2020 owing to pandemic conditions, they finally got the better of their London rivals as Cole Palmer bagged a scrappy late winner with Chelsea missing captain Anjorin through injury plus key protagonists Ian Maatsen and Armando Broja to loan moves that happened in the six months that passed between the Semis and the Final.
Nevertheless, The Citizens continued to flex their muscles. They won four straight Under-18 league titles, three straight PL2 titles and plenty in between, so that when Clearlake began to evaluate every department of the club, conversations around the academy were squarely focused on how and why that balance of power had shifted, and what the new Chelsea should be learning from them. The Cobham curriculum, while not strictly idiosyncratic, did not necessarily adhere to the Premier League’s desired practices and directives, particularly on organisational structure, job titles and responsibilities, and it did not come as much of a surprise that one of their first moves was to ‘promote’ Bath from Head of Youth Development to Director of Football Development with a ‘whole club remit’, while Fraser assumed the HOYD title and responsibility for academy recruitment in collaboration with incoming Director of Recruitment and Talent Joe Shields, who he spent much of the previous decade competing with when Shields was at the Etihad Campus.
The club’s new football operations structure that also comprised Paul Winstanley, Laurence Stewart and Christoph Vivell sought to organise and define responsibilities that had previously lived with Marina Granovskaia, Bruce Buck and Petr Cech in a similar manner to the redefinition over the road in the academy building, with Bath’s Director-level position now intended to collaborate with them. It met several challenges in a troubled 2022-23 that saw the academy teams well off the pace and the men finish 12th under a beleaguered interim Lampard following the decision to swiftly dispense with Graham Potter.
Forgiving everyone some time to work things out, the discord behind the scenes was palpably growing, the old clashing with the new, and everything came to a head in the summer of 2024. City successfully convinced Ryan McAidoo to move up north, ending an informal agreement between these two titans of the game to not raid each other’s academies for fear of the fallout it could have on the rest of the game, and then Rio Nguhoma declined to sign his scholarship and left for Liverpool.
While there were many factors involved, some structural, some recruitment-based, some surrounding the way in which business was attended to (and led to multiple transfer bans), these two exits more than any other developments proved the catalyst for the seismic developments that saw Bath and Fraser leave the club. Losing players of their calibre – particularly Ngumoha – was deemed unacceptable and changes were made; Fraser was gone, Bath soon followed having disagreed with the decision to axe his long-time friend and colleague. Jack Francis’ subsequent promotion to Director of Academy Football Operations ensured a continued lineage while Glenn van der Kraan’s appointment as Technical Director brought further CFG-based influence to the fold, having spent the previous four years as Head of Coaching for their Youth Development Phase.
It was and remains an incredibly hard transition for everyone at the academy to go through; Bath’s thirty years and Fraser’s twenty were not supposed to end in the manner that they did, not as abruptly, and it’s to Francis’ and Van der Kraan’s credit that they navigated those choppy waters with poise and focus in the months that followed. Guided by the football leadership at director level above them, however, a host of personnel changes have followed over the two years since then; from senior department heads to age-group coaching leads, from casual scouts to career-long servants, the pace of change has been swift and it hasn’t always been handled as gracefully as it could have been.
The most visibly controversial of the more recent changes happened back in January when Hassan Sulaiman moved from his position as Under-18 lead to a role within the Loan Department. His replacement was Under-16 lead Dan Hogan, one of three prominent former Kinetic Foundation graduates to have climbed the ladder at Cobham this season along with Development Squad lead Harry Hudson and Interim First Team Head Coach Calum McFarlane. A lot has been said about their respective journeys to this point, their credentials, their relationships and the contrast between them and those they have succeeded, some of it more accurate than others, but as 21s and 18s have both been successful, they will point to the fact those decisions have been justified.
It pays to listen more and say less when assessing the impact of radical change, and to hear from those impacted most to get a measure of any situation. Certainly, the players have bought into the new direction; on more than one occasion since the turn of the year there have been very pointed scenes of celebration involving the coaching staff, and Hogan in particular is seen as someone who gets the job done on and off the pitch; his pastoral care and connection with young teenagers approaching adulthood comes very highly rated aside from the results produced on Saturdays. It shouldn’t come as a surprise; the work Kinetic have done in South London is worthy of recognition and those who have bridged the gap into the professional game will undoubtedly lean on their strengths building connections, earning trust and fostering a growth mindset.
Two things can be true at the same time, however, and the very transactional way business seems to be handled at the very top of the club sets the tone and the culture for how it’s conducted at other levels. Recent exposés into the the end of the Paul Green era in the Women’s team lent further credence to suggestions that it isn’t always done with kindness. This naturally matters more to some folk than others, and the only people management are answerable to are their immediate constituents; if players aren’t clamouring to leave, if confidence and spirit is high inside the building, if progress is being made then tough decisions being handled in the way they have been is worth the cost of doing business. ‘Do The Right Thing’ was one of six core club values in place during the ownership change until very recently; it has now been replaced (despite remaining on the website…) by BLUE behaviours – Brave, Lead, Unity, Edge.
Is that any different to how it was in the Abramovich era? To some, probably not; Arnesen, Granovskaia, Emenalo and numerous managers made decisions that unduly and unfairly affected the academy and questioned their autonomy, but as long as Bath was in charge there was a collective understanding that things were in good hands. As Chelsea finish a fourth BlueCo Premier League season in 10th place, supporter confidence in many aspects of the club is low, and a sense of apathy is tangible with limited capacity to rebel (certainly amid suggestions that one of the most notable club fanzines was politely reminded that criticism would not be well-received and may carry repercussions).
Success cures all ailments though, and a national title for the Under-18s will have gone a long way to keeping a lid on things over the summer and, more importantly, demonstrating to academy talent that their future lies at Chelsea, not elsewhere. They have absolutely no appetite for a repeat of the McAidoo and Ngumoha summer, they successfully kept hold of the likes of Ryan Kavuma-McQueen and Reggie Walsh last year despite major interest from elsewhere, and they will continue to evaluate their success and failure by these measurables.
So, where are we now? The Xabi Alonso era follows the Enzo Maresca era, which followed the Mauricio Pochettino era after the short-lived Graham Potter era. The academy revolution continues at pace with James Houghton, Andy Boughey, Ed Brand, Marlon Fahy and other long-serving staff members saying their farewells, while Emma Hayes and Paul Green have long since been swapped out for Sonia Bompastor and Phil Radley on the Women’s side. This is BlueCo’s Chelsea.
But beyond that, where are we in academy football in 2026? In September 2024 I outlined some of my concerns with the way the development scene was heading in England, and the eighteen months that followed have done little to assuage those worries. There has never been a time this century where clubs are operating more selfishly, ruthlessly or brazenly, with children increasingly commoditised by their families, agents, representatives and clubs. Young boys – still at primary school – moving halfway up and down the country on the promise of a career that is further away than the time they’ve been on this planet. One-to-one coaching has exploded into an unregulated wild west of an industry that preys on families desperate to give their progeny that extra few percent that might get them through the door into an academy and change their lives forever.
And, really, can you blame anyone for it? The Premier League’s riches mean there’s almost no downside for clubs to act now and think later, to make mistakes, to speculate far and wide knowing that a few darts will inevitably land. Families of myriad backgrounds know they can instantly change their situation for the better if the cards fall their way. Those who represent them are more than happy to help them on their way knowing that their careers can similarly blossom if they put in the groundwork during the teenage years for future professionals. Money makes the game go round just as money makes the world go round.
When EPPP was conceived in 2011 it was by a collective of experienced, respected and capable leaders who wanted to set the agenda for the next generation, framing everything through the lens of improving the England national team, even if there were countless benefits for their own clubs. None of those people remain in football now. The longest-serving academy leader in the top flight is Crystal Palace’s Gary Issott, who took charge in 2014, while the average tenure of his contemporaries is continually trending downwards as clubs make changes incomprehensibly early when attempting to evaluate their work, trying to take a shortcut in a sub-industry that simply does not afford them. More pointedly, there is far less shared thinking and collaboration across the youth landscape; clubs are pilfering players from one another more than ever, shopping in the same restricted Brexit-induced transfer market, and the potential for a swift return on investment means nobody wants to miss out.
At its inception, twenty-two clubs were awarded Category One status, intended to uphold the highest of standards and to ensure a best-on-best environment. When Brentford confirmed their successful application for that recognition earlier this year, they became the 30th active club at that level, while two others have come and gone. Bournemouth could yet add their name to the list and, with Watford and Crewe dropping from Cat 2 to Cat 3 this summer citing financial and operational reasons, it means as few as 16 teams might line up in those competitions come August.
If twice as many teams are in the top tier as in the second, what does that say about the level of elite competition? EPPP has been wildly successful in developing English talent individually and collectively, with record-breaking age-group successes, historic numbers of home-grown players plying their trade across major European clubs and playing key roles for their clubs on home shores. Its fingerprints are across every major development of the last fifteen years and it would be easy to think it’s set to continue in the same vein for many more to come, but will it? Is Category One at risk of being diluted by too many teams undeserving of being at that level because auditing criteria hasn’t been properly revamped? Are Cat 2 and 3 clubs increasingly struggling to be viable and are they simply looking to pick up players released from higher up the pyramid? What happens next?
The work put in over that time has also incontestably improved the fortunes of England’s youth national teams. On the pitch they went from strength to strength at all age groups, they won everything in a golden summer of 2017 across those, and the pipeline of talent going through to play under Gareth Southgate and more recently Thomas Tuchel has been better than ever before. The education players are getting has produced an extraordinary range of profiles, talents and solutions, just as it was meant to. But even that process appears to have cracks forming; the Under-17s failed to qualify for this year’s Euros and haven’t made it beyond the Quarter Finals since 2018, while the Under-19s have qualified just one in four attempts since winning it in 2022. Winning isn’t everything, sure, but amid reports that players find their club environments considerably more stimulating, and that the operation of identifying, selecting and managing talent is subject more than ever to politics and friction with other stakeholders, it’s another piece of the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit as nicely as it once did, that needs attention and improvement for the next stage of the process.
How do you address the impact English football’s inexplicable wealth has had on youth development, for better or worse? Who and what is academy football actually for now? Money has eroded so much of the game’s heritage and continues to do so, it stands to reason that the youth game will follow suit, and there are enough signs that it’s happening. Across the game, not just in England but particularly in England, people who don’t understand or care that the development of young people is about much more than producing professionals to be sold for pure profit are now running clubs. People who don’t understand that it has always been a community endeavour to lead or assist in the growth and education of young people, to send them into the world prepared and capable, to bring families along with them, to be custodians of the very best that their club represents. People who don’t get it and who never will.
People who don’t work in academy environments day in and day out, though. Those that do are invariably the best that this game has to offer. Casts of thousands who perform humble, important, life-affirming work who never get the recognition they deserve because they never seek it, because they know what it’s really about, because they’re there for a reason. This has been my biggest privilege in two decades of following the academy game at close proximity; getting to know them and understand the work they do, shining a light on them where possible and giving them their flowers. Football needs more of them.
It hasn’t always been plain sailing, far from it. For everyone who appreciates an academy-biased sentiment there’s someone who doesn’t. Public criticism rarely sits well and navigating those choppy waters without creating unnecessary drama is something you learn over time. Over those two decades, though, I’ve made far more friends than enemies. I’ve met people who have become friends for life, I’ve had opportunities to explore experiences I wouldn’t have imagined possible, and I’ve been able to cultivate relationships that have reaped rewards personally and professionally.
A 3-1 win against Charlton’s Under-18s in 2009 was the first game I ever live-tweeted updates from. Such was the infancy of the technology at the time, it was done via text message to Twitter. Match Reports from academy games were complemented by weekly Loan Reports for a decade where the operation had 40+ players to track around the world at any given time. On TheChels.net alone I’ve published almost 1800 articles and more than 1.2 million words, all for free and all while retaining editorial independence.
I haven’t written as much in recent years for various reasons, though. Match Reports became less essential with the increase in live social media coverage and increased broadcast availability. Loan Reports were a huge undertaking that proved a challenge to sustain even before FIFA’s rules changed the way the department operated. Life changed too; the naive 21 year-old who rocked up to that game against Cardiff is now a tired middle-aged father of two and writing opportunities just aren’t as easy to come by, and it’s just as hard to balance football against family life. It is, however, a rich man’s problem; if everyone was so lucky the world would undoubtedly be richer for that.
That feeling extends to the live updates during matches too now. Chelsea showed almost every Under-21 and Under-18 match live last season; they have a thriving academy Instagram account and supporting website content, restoring a level of coverage they had at the peak of the 2010s’ successes but didn’t always provide during the time in between. Dozens of clubs now have an academy-specific online presence that simply did not exist at the start of the social media era and it’s been fascinating watching that landscape evolve around fan-led coverage; from Young Guns Blog to Jeorge Bird, from ManUnitedYouth and MCFC_EDS_ACAD to YouthHawk and EnglandYouth in the beginning to so many others later on I dare not list for fear of forgetting someone, they each made a difference to how people engage with youth football now.
The need or want for blow-by-blow updates doesn’t seem to be there any more though, at least on an independent level. Whether it’s on the permanently toxic X or on alternatives such as Bluesky, it’s doubtless appreciated by a hardy minority, but the ecosystem has changed and people are digesting their football in other ways away from the permanently fractious online world. It’s also a very different experience watching and reporting on a match at the same time than it is to sit and watch free of other responsibilities, a more enjoyable one for sure at times (all the while recognising the privilege of having people want to engage with my own coverage at all in the first place). The time is right for a change; what that looks like, well, we’ll find out together.
This isn’t the end, not at all, but twenty years feels like a nice milestone to mark by taking a new direction. A more considered one that doesn’t need all-encompassing coverage, that doesn’t require the volume and intensity that it once did, that evolves with the times we now live in. In football terms, think of it as moving upstairs into a more hands-off role that comes with an opportunity to do things differently. The last two decades have been a wild ride and I appreciate the support and interaction and the relationships built with so many people more than (ironically) I can find the words for. Some of the people I’ve gotten to know in that time are into their fourth, fifth and sixth decades following Chelsea’s younger teams; so there’s a long way to go and many more stories to be told yet.
Here’s to the future.