Youth & Reserves

On the face of it, Chelsea wouldn’t be considered among the favourites to win the 2024-25 FA Youth Cup. Sure, last season’s crop reached the Quarter Finals and were national runners-up at Under-18 level, but the majority of those who contributed to those successes have graduated to Development Squad football, leaving a younger and less experienced generation behind them, one which has experienced the peaks and troughs of academy football…

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…

On Friday night Chelsea’s Development Squad kick off a new academy season at home to defending Premier League 2 champions Tottenham Hotspur at Kingsmeadow. The following morning, Hassan Sulaiman’s Under-18s get under way against Brighton as they seek to retain their South league title and go one better than last year, when they finished runners-up for the national crown. To preview a new campaign, though, is to reflect on as…

Sometimes, Chelsea’s class of first-year scholars come into their new full-time jobs a little inexperienced. Take last year’s nine-strong cohort, for example; Kiano Dyer and Ollie Harrison had effectively played a full season of youth team football as Under-16s (Harrison at Newcastle before moving down South) but, of the other seven newcomers to Hassan Sulaiman’s group, only Frankie Runham had really even flirted with a breakthrough, and half of them…

Four minutes after Josh Acheampong’s equaliser in the Under-18 Premier League National Final, Donnelly McNeilly clipped a shot agonisingly wide of the post at the Matthew Harding End. Two minutes after he’d restored parity in the PL2 Playoff Semi Finals, Deivid Washington watched as his effort hit the inside of the post, rolled across the face of goal and away to safety. Chelsea lost both of those matches by fine…