Academy productivity rankings 2016/17
Training Ground Guru | Academy productivity rankings 2016/17
By: Simon Austin
WHEN Mark Crane started to investigate which Academy to send his son to, he struggled to find out the category each was in, let alone how successful it had been.
"A young player and their parents have little objective basis on which to judge whether it's in their interests to join a club's Academy," he said.
When you can consider that only 0.5% of eight-year-olds in Academies make it into professional football, you can see why kids and parents want as much information as possible before entering the system.
Rather than make a decision in the dark, Crane, an environmental toxicologist, decided to
work out how productive each Academy was himself. First he had to work out which category each Academy was in (there's no publicly available list), before compiling first-team squad lists (using
footballsquads.co.uk), working out which of the players were England-qualified (probably trickiest of all) and finally which Academy those pros had attended.
Manchester United are top, with 70 of their England-qualified graduates playing professional football last season (18 in the Premier League). Spurs are second with 58 (12 in the Premier League) and Chelsea third, also with 58 (six in the Premier League).
Category 1 clubs produced more English pros than all the other categories put together, but perhaps the most impressive performance was from League Two Crewe Alexandra, a club long associated with youth development (as well as huge controversy in the last year).
Despite being in the fourth tier of English football, Crewe are 26th in the table, and the highest of the non-Category 1 clubs, having produced 39 English pros last season (2 of them in the Premier League). The data was crunched using Analyse-it software and the result is below - a ranking of the 86 Category 1-3 clubs in 2016/17 in terms productivity for England-qualified players.
Bottom of the table are Cheltenham Town, who only had one graduate playing professional football last season, in League Two. When a Category 3 Academy can cost up to £500,000 a year to run, you have to question whether this is good value for money.
Crane admits there is room for improvement. "It would be preferable for the leagues or FA to publish audited data that could then be analysed independently," he said. "This study could also be extended to include several seasons and comparisons between English and non-English players."
But his study is a great start and should be a big help to any child or parent trying to decide which Academy to attend - or indeed whether to attend one at all.
TGG contacted the Premier League for a comment about Crane's study - and to ask about their own Academy productivity data - but is yet to receive a response.