BLUES ACADEMY CHIEF ON CHALLENGE KIDS FACE
Academy chief on why it’s so hard for youngsters to get into City’s first-team
CITY youngsters have been warned by the head of the club’s academy that many of them face a difficult challenge to break into the Blues’ first-team squad.
Phil Foden is expected to succeed David Silva in Pep Guardiola’s plans next season in what would be the biggest breakthrough for the academy in the Sheikh Mansour era.
Tommy Doyle and Taylor Harwood-Bellis are among the best of the other youngsters at the club to have made senior debuts, but crossing the short road from the
Academy Stadium to the Etihad is harder than it has ever been given the standards being set in the first team.
Despite ambitions from the owners for the squad to be filled with homegrown talent, Guardiola has made it clear that cannot be done under his watch if he is expected to challenge in every competition as he is.
The City coach has given opportunities to players in the league and the cups, and many more have trained under his gaze, but the patience that Foden - seen as a once-in-a-generation talent - has needed is a sign of how difficult it is for anybody else to make it.
City’s youngsters are all told at the beginning of each season by academy director Jason Wilcox what is expected of them when they train with the first team, and there is regular feedback from first-team coaches on how the session has gone.
An awful lot is asked, with youngsters training with the first-team expected to show the same respect and maturity as the world-class senior professionals while standing out enough with their quality and character to be noticed for the right reasons.
“We’ve got to try to produce players that are better than the players that the manager wants to buy,” Wilcox told M.E.N Sport. “That’s a big ask but it’s not something we’re afraid of.
“Phil (Foden) is being patient. The manager believes in him and knows that he’s going to be a long-term player for Manchester City, and now if young players want to come straight through the academy and play in City’s firstteam they have to earn the right.
“They’ve got to go and train with the first-team and when they go up there they’ve got to make an impact, not just be a number. They’ve got to have personality and presence and conduct themselves in the right way because if they don’t and they don’t work hard or listen to the manager’s instructions or help the first-team prepare for games and be focused 100 per cent, then they might not get a second opportunity.
“That’s why the level of person is really important that they’re able to go up there and conduct themselves in the right way - get the kit in, hold a conversation, be respectful to the senior pros and staff - because ultimately every senior pro who is up with the first-team is doing that.
“The young kids train a lot with the first-team whether that is helping them prepare for a game or just in general training. They’re up there a lot, the opportunities that they’re getting to showcase their talent are many.
“Ultimately they’re training alongside the best players in the world and being coached by the best manager in the world in my opinion so what an experience that is. Sometimes we get criticised saying there’s no pathway but there’s a pathway for the best.”
Not all players are prepared to wait for their opportunity.
Jadon Sancho, an England youth team-mate of Foden, left the Blues in 2017 because he thought he stood a better chance of regular football elsewhere and he now has a £100m price-tag on his head following a few years of impressive performances for Dortmund. Rabbi Matondo and Jeremie Frimpong are others that have chosen that road.
City are under no illusions about
We have to produce players that are better than the players the manager wants to buy
Jason Wilcox
the task of producing players for their own first-team - Wilcox describes one a year as being highly unrealistic - and under the former Blackburn winger the academy is trying to move them on. Four or five-year deals for youngsters are now the exception where they were until recently the norm.
There is still a duty for the academy to turn out footballers even if it won’t be at the Etihad, and there is still a great demand for the young players.
City have become incredibly adept at turning that demand into money. Brahim Diaz’s move to Real Madrid in January 2019 took the Blues past the £150m mark for fees pocketed from 16 players that had made a combined 33 appearances for the first-team.
Wilcox counts those as successes for City’s academy system and would rather players carry on with their professional careers elsewhere rather than be left waiting at the Etihad for a chance that may not come.
Buyback clauses that allow City to re-sign the player for a set fee, sometimes in a set timeframe, are increasingly common when the club strikes such a deal.
“I would like the academy to be judged on maximising potential, developing great players and great human beings,” he explained. “Our aspiration without doubt is to produce players for our first-team squad and our aim is to produce as many of them as we possibly can, but if you think about age group, there’s 15 players on average.
“Even if we produced one player every year like a conveyor belt coming through - which is completely unrealistic - that leaves another 14 players who we’ve developed who are top talents that we’ve got to make sure we do right by.
“We can’t keep hold of them forever because if we keep hold of 14 players we’ve got another 15 coming behind them and within three years we’ve got 45 players.
“We have to understand that while our aspiration is to produce players for our first team we have a duty to maximise every ounce of their ability and potential and at some point we have a duty to allow the players to go on to another football club and pursue their dream of being a top professional and have a lifelong career.
“Inevitably we’re going to produce a lot of players that we can’t keep hold of and we have to make sure that we maximise the return. I have to stress it is just a fallout of having the aspiration of producing world-class young players.
“What we have to do is find the right club for them and the right platform where we allow them to go out on loan, some get sold, the majority will get sold with buybacks like Angelino but we can’t just hoard players - because that is wrong.”