Youth & Reserves

The headlines will lead with news that Michy Batshuayi and Antonio Rüdiger guided Chelsea’s Development Squad to a 3-0 win over Liverpool on Monday night but, make no mistake about it, this was a confident and swashbuckling team performance that offered all manner of encouragement for the season to come. Certainly, having two seasoned pros in the ranks helped, and Batshuayi grabbed a brace, but there were also promising outings…

The start of a new season is a typically exuberant time, full of excitement and possibility, before the grind of the ten months that follows begins to take effect. Thar wide-eyed wonder at what might be possible brings out both the best and worst in people and, in academy football, that typically means scintillating moments of promise mixed in with no little error. Throw in playing in front of Frank…

At any given time, Chelsea have a stunning array of individual talent running through the academy, but the collective is more powerful than any single player can ever be. We’re just two games into the new season as far as the Development Squad are concerned but, on the evidence to date, we’re looking at a group capable of mixing it with anyone. They might lack for numbers, and they’re going…

Time. A valuable commodity, a great healer, all powerful. Whatever way you look at it, time is as much of an influence over academy football as anything else and, as Chelsea kicked off their new Under-18 season with a 2-1 win at Arsenal, it came into focus once again. Five months ago, Andy Myers’ team essentially yielded their four-year stranglehold on the Under-18 South league title by losing 3-0 on…

What is Leasing.com anyway? The controversial Football League Trophy, with a new headline sponsor nobody seems to have heard of, returned on Tuesday night in sparsely-populated stadiums where teams of teenagers wearing numbers more closely associated with bingo than football take on senior pros who’d rather be just about anywhere else. Teams from the third and fourth tiers of the domestic game are compelled to play roughly one-third of their…

Three months ago, the 2018-19 Chelsea academy season drew to an unusually subdued conclusion. The Development Squad claimed a hard-earned 2-1 win away to Brighton on a cool Friday night on the Sussex coast, just a week after the Under-18s had rounded off their campaign with a similar victory on their travels at Reading. There was no hoopla, there were no memorable celebrations and there was no silverware. For the…

Two years after visiting darkest France in Périgord to catch a glimpse of Chelsea’s young players in an exhibition game against FC Bergerac Perigord, I’ve been immersed into French Brittany to follow the progress of Chelsea’s U23 team. First, it’s important to emphasis that the sarcastic jibe of “loan army” is growing increasingly inaccurate and, instead, the spotlight i on the work being done at academy level for a few…