Are Manchester City's Ambitious Academy Plans on Track?
There’s so much off-the-field innovation at Manchester City these days that it can be difficult to anticipate their next step.
Profitable and with more commercial partners than ever before, City are in a healthy financial position, aided by the creation of the City Football Group (CFG), a unique venture in world football. The club are now very much a globalised operation, with teams in New York, Australia and Japan, and with one in China likely to follow.
Shanghai City, or something similar, is surely the next logical step in their bid for a truly global network of clubs, particularly after CFG sold a 13 per cent stake to China Media Capital (CMC) last year.
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China is a huge, relatively untapped market. If City can become the most prominent football club in the region, it could provide them with the income needed to join the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester United at the top of the financial tree.
There’s also stability on the field. Their first team continues to compete at levels it never dreamed of prior to Sheikh Mansour’s investment in 2008—even if last season saw almost wilful stagnation as they waited for Pep Guardiola to take over.
The appointment of the Catalan is perhaps the most significant moment since the takeover, both in terms of its likely impact on the first team and the message it sends out to the rest of the world. This season is likely to be very different to the last one.
Still central to their long-term strategy, though, is the City Football Academy (CFA), the £150-million facility opened in 2014, where their youngsters are being honed in preparation for life in the first team.
The club want it to become a breeding ground for top-quality players for years to come—those capable of supplementing the first team and becoming world stars. There will be those that don’t make it at City but who are sold for a decent fee that helps to balance the books. It’s all part of the plan.
It is a wonderful facility—the best in England and perhaps even all of Europe—but until it produces a player that becomes a first-team regular, it will be questioned.
Here, we dissect City’s academy setup, assessing its current approach and looking at whether it is capable of becoming the conveyor belt of talent the club wants it to be.
The facilities
One tour of the CFA is enough to convince even the most hardened sceptic of its merits. The attention to detail is immediately obvious, with players’ needs catered for comprehensively. It houses every single City player, from eight-year-olds right up to the first team, with everything they could possibly need to reach their full potential laid on in abundance.
Brian Marwood, the managing director of City's global football programme, oversaw its creation. The former Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday player, who was unfairly derided in his role as the club's director of football, has gone on to become a central part of the City’s rapid development off the field.
He is currently a key player in CFG, but his part in designing and creating City’s academy may be his finest legacy. He travelled the world, looking at similar ventures for inspiration, before bringing it all together and crafting a bespoke design that suited City’s needs.
It boasts a team hotel, world-class medical facilities, a 7,000-seater academy stadium, 16.5 pitches, classrooms for youth players and rooms dedicated to statistical analysis. It is the heart of the club and, indeed, CFG.
Success
Results at youth level are secondary to preparing players for life in the first team, but they are important, nonetheless.
Any youth coach will tell you they are judged on the amount of top players they produce and not on how many trophies they win, but it’s increasingly clear that the youngsters at City are becoming comfortable in tournament formats.
A winning culture is being developed at the CFA. Last season saw success at almost every level, far outstripping the results the senior side managed.
The under-10s became National Futsal champions and won the Wormerveer Tournament. The under-13s are national champions. The under-15s are the Floodlit Cup national winners. And the under-18s are national champions and reached the FA Youth Cup for the second consecutive season.
It is an incredible set of achievements that provided evidence of the academy's trajectory.
And the club want to increase the number of tournaments their young sides compete in.
"It's a great opportunity for us in terms of developing the players—tournaments are a big thing,” academy director Mark Allen told me in May.
“It's part of a bigger picture at this football club in terms of making sure these opportunities are available to the boys and a great chance for them to sample football in another country.
“It's a fine balance between development and winning. We're very conscious we have to develop them first. Winning is a by-product of development.
"But it's an opportunity to put them in a competitive arena where it’s a knockout situation and hopefully they'll gain some important values out of that. In a knockout situation you get one chance."
However, the focus remains on style of play. Every single side, from the under-nines right up to the elite development squad (EDS) team, play the game in the same way.
Possession is key. Being able to turn into space when receiving the ball—no matter how tight their opponent is to them—is a skill developed from the earliest juncture. Coaches focus on the technical and tactical side of the game as soon as a youngster joins the academy, with the physical development seen as secondary.
City’s technical staff say it would be easy to spot a City academy side against another, even if they weren’t wearing the club colours, and they claim that a No. 3 from the under-12s could move up into the under-16s and, even though there would be physical limitations, he would know where to play the ball to a No. 6 and which runs the No. 11 will look to make.
Compared to where they were back in 2014, it’s perhaps this element of the CFA that has developed most impressively. City's youngsters have a clear style and identity—one that has synergy with the way the first team play.
St Bede’s linkup
One of the most important developments in City’s academy has been the linkup with local independent school St Bede’s, which allows their youngsters to enrol on a fully integrated football and education programme designed by the club and the school.
Any young player offered a contract at the age of 11 or above is now entitled to join the programme, and even if they are let go from the football side of things before they are 16, City will continue to pay their school fees until the end of their GCSE period.
It’s understandably proving a winner with parents when City are trying to tempt young talent to sign for them, but it’s also having clear benefits for the players and the club.
St Bede’s has high behavioural standards and pushes students hard academically. Add in the strict code of conduct across the CFA, and the cohort currently enrolled on the fully integrated St Bede’s programme is incredibly mature and well behaved, as well as extremely disciplined and easy to manage.
But it isn’t just football and school that the programme involves. Other carefully selected elite sports, such as cycling and boxing, are taught, as well as art, sports science, medicine and life skills.
If a youngster doesn’t make it at City, they are wonderfully well prepared for a life in an alternative field.
First-team players?
As yet, none have made the jump from academy to first team on a regular basis, and until that changes, the club will continue trying to find ways of doing so.
Kelechi Iheanacho’s development was mostly engineered elsewhere, and the other players to make appearances have done so only fleetingly.
Manu Garcia played four times across three different competitions last season, scoring one goal, and he is perhaps the most advanced of the current EDS side.
Bersant Celina also played four times and looked comfortable, while Tosin Adarabioyo, Cameron Humphreys-Grant, David Faupala and Aleix Garcia all played in the FA Cup fifth round against Chelsea in a game that saw former City manager Manuel Pellegrini make a stand against what he saw as unfair scheduling ahead of a trip to Kiev in the Champions League.
But considering the CFA only opened in December 2014 and represents a long-term project, is the lack of first-teamers so damning?
There have been murmurs of discontent among the more reactionary supporters, and, indeed, across certain parts of the media, but anyone who expected the club to suddenly start feeding the first team with world-class young talent almost immediately were misguided.
The improvement in the first team that followed Mansour’s investment was always going to mean a period in which the academy lagged behind.
There are high hopes for a number of current young players, particularly now that Guardiola is in charge.
This week, the Catalan took training for the first time, and with a host of senior stars still on holiday or involved in the Euros, a number of the EDS players were invited to work with the first team.
Guardiola will have a few weeks to assess them, and if any have the requisite technical quality, they will be promoted and considered part of his plans. He has a record for doing exactly that.
One name to remember is Brahim Diaz, a 16-year-old attacking midfielder with incredible technique and skill. This season may be too soon for him, but his is the name on everyone's lips at the CFA.
The future
The St Bede’s programme will continue to be accelerated, which staff see as key, and the style of play encouraged across all levels so the academy can become entrenched in the culture of the club. More tournaments, a staff reshuffle that could see Jason Wilcox take on a more overarching role and increased resources are all part of the CFA's immediate development.
These things take time—but make no mistake: City are serious about youth development and are doing everything they can to become leaders in that area. All the signs are their academy is heading in the right direction.
Rob Pollard is Bleacher Report's lead Manchester City correspondent and follows the club from a Manchester base. All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted. Follow him on Twitter @RobPollard_.
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