Gavin Cooney

LIAM BRADY DEDICATES a chapter of his new autobiography to his time running Arsenal’s academy, in which he crowns an unlikely hero of England’s stunning production line of elite talent. 

“Howard Wilkinson broke down the old barriers between clubs and schools that allowed football clubs to train kids much earlier”, writes Brady. “Why were skill levels [of English  players] constantly compared unfavourably to players in Spain or France or Italy or Holland? I’m certain it was down to the rules in place that stopped us coaching players younger than 13. In Holland, they had them from seven.” 

Nowadays, Premier League academies work with players from the age of eight, and their assuming control of a player’s entire development has given England one of the best national teams on the planet. 

So if England go on to win the Euros next summer – and steel yourself, because it’s a very real possibility – we will be swamped with pieces hailing the success of their academies and the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan. 

But most assessments of the success of any football academy are usually an exercise in survivorship bias. To counter that, here’s a jarring stat: 0.5% of players who join an English academy at U9 level go on to make a living out of the game. 

How can a score of 0.5% be any mark of success? Premier League academies can have up to 250 kids: the above stat tells us that just one of those players will go on to have a professional career in football. At any level. 

You can argue that the entire point of elite, professional sport is the survivorship bias; that sport is a process of finding the best and winnowing the rest. But it is one thing to do this among adults, and another thing entirely to do it with children and young teenagers. Major football academies have become successful and lucrative operations, but they are morally objectionable.

That is not to denigrate the many talented and conscientious coaches and support staff working in academies: this is a design flaw. The vast, vast majority of kids will be cut loose and face a profound sense of rejection before they are 16, and while clubs are now obliged to provide education for players, bringing them into an elite professional environment from such an early age naturally denies them some of the realities and rituals of growing up. This is of particular relevance to Irish football, as our best and brightest can be tossed aside without the wide support network which home provides.

Away from those fundamental problems, academies have become just another part of the game in which big clubs seek to find an edge on their rivals, to the point that in 2019, a squad photo emerged of an “elite” group of under-fives at Manchester City. (The Training Ground Guru website subsequently reported that this ‘elite’ band of children trained three times a week at the club’s academy and receive official kit.) 

Locked in brutal competition, Premier League clubs say they cannot afford to overlook a talented eight-year-old near them. 

“It is so important for an Academy to sign the best local players at U9″, said Chelsea’s assistant head of youth development, Jim Fraser, in 2016. “There will always be a handful of outstanding players across London at that age and if you don’t sign the majority into your programme at U9, it is obvious that you’re going to be playing catch-up.”

In the spirit of not missing out, English academies are fleshed out by players kept around as an extra body on the training pitch. We know of talented Irish players who are desperate for a move out of elite academies, but are being kept there to effectively make up the numbers at training. 

Another fact: clubs are increasingly training academy players not to play for their first-teams but to finance them. We have seen this in operation at Chelsea, where Financial Fair Play rules have incentivised them to sell off their academy players as they can be recorded in the books as “pure profit”, as their sale price does not have to take any initial transfer fee into account.  This is plainly a perversion of the original idea underpinning academies: the best of ours against the best of yours. Now it’s a case of the best of ours paying for a chunk of the best of yours. 

If you’re swept up into, say, Chelsea’s academy as a kid, you’re more than likely going there to be sold by Chelsea rather than play for them. This fact was accentuated in a report released by the European Clubs Association last week, which should be of particular resonance in Ireland. 

The report studied 1,223 players who moved abroad to a club of a higher level before the age of 18, between 2011 and 2017. Just 160 of these players managed a single minute of domestic league action for the club they joined, and only 49 of them played more than 20 matches for the club. 83% of these players had returned home by the time they were 23, and 29% of them had quit football entirely by that age. 

It’s a staggering statistic: players who joined a club abroad before the age of 18 were three times more likely to have quit the sport than have played a league game for that club by the age of 23. 

These facts lay bare the decades-long madness of Irish football’s policy of outsourcing youth development to the UK. 

Brexit has of course closed this route for Irish players to the UK now, though it hasn’t stopped several talented Irish teenagers heading to Italy, who now recruit more under-18s from abroad than any other European country. None of the early Irish pilgrims to Serie A have made a dent in their respective first-teams: Kevin Zefi is struggling to progress at Inter Milan, while Cathal Heffernan and James Abankwah are now playing in England. Not that they should be criticised for failing to either: they are swimming in deep and shark-infested waters. 

So yes, you could say that England’s youth academies have never been so successful. Or you could argue that they have never delivered so little for so many.