Kobbie Mainoo shows what academies are for – and it is not fixing a PSR financial black hole
Kobbie Mainoo is likely to start for England on Sunday, another impressive landmark for the young midfielder - Getty Images/Ryan Pierse
Kobbie Mainoo looks a certainty to start on Sunday for England against Slovakia in the last 16 of the Euros which, whatever your misgivings about the team’s current performances, is a spectacular achievement for a player aged 19 years and 72 days.
Another success for the Manchester United academy which has not been as prolific as those of Manchester City or Chelsea in recent years, but still turns out good players. Post-Sir Alex Ferguson, it has been through as much personnel change in terms of age-group coaches right up to its hierarchy – as much as the first team and the executive leadership. The difference being that the academy has continued to produce footballers for the first team, even if it is not the first team it once was.
Academies at all Premier League clubs are the most active part of the club. More players, more coaches, more hours on the pitch – training and matches – and then all the education and pastoral care on top. At United they have already had 17 first-team debuts this decade; 42 in the 2010s. It has not always been smooth – the Mason Greenwood story in particular – but the bigger picture is one of consistent player development.
It will be the careers of players like Mainoo and many of the others representing England this summer that will be of great importance for academy staff at clubs when they sell their programme, or explain methodology, to parents and children. From the introductions for the under-9s cohort, through the tricky teenage years, to the make-and-break of the scholarship award, the stories of successful players – the challenges they faced and overcame – are fundamental reference points.
Academy coaches are undervalued
The successful graduation from academy to first team, and then senior national team, are what keeps hope alive for all the academy staff. They have to know that what they are doing leads somewhere. They need the assurance that when they tell a child and his parents that there is a chance to go all the way to the top then it is the truth. At any club that has to be a possibility, however slim, for each boy.
Academy coaches are often the most undervalued part of the football ecosystem. Like Jose Mourinho, or Thomas Tuchel, who both spent a significant part of their careers in development, that part of their CV gets talked about only when they become established as first-team managers. But it goes without saying that if you are a parent committing to the hours of driving, and waiting around that the life of an academy parent entails, those coaches become a crucial part of your family’s life.
Sunday marks the financial year end for many clubs and so the deadline for annual results which form a crucial part of compliance with Premier League profit and sustainability rules (PSR). The end of the financial year prefaced a frantic last day of trading academy prospects by certain clubs for the benefit of their profit balance.
The clubs trading young players will blame PSR. The Premier League’s letter to its members this week attempted to close down that avenue. It promised a close examination of transfer fees and the application of the fair market value rules as they apply in clubs trading within a multi-club ownership network. These rules have been in place, in one guise or another, for more than a decade and were voted for by the clubs.
This is what has turned their academy graduates into units of value, based on the most nebulous of criteria. An accounting fantasy of trades, sustained by a market that needs these young players to signify a value on the balance sheet. Presumably those players that do move will be offered some incentive to do so. Yet one has to wonder how this helps their career progression.
Academy players viewed as a useful asset
What a strange business that the natural output of an academy should be the last resort, as a means of generating revenue, when a club has overspent on players from elsewhere. One might assume that it would have been a better course to test the suitability of the players they already have, rather than gamble first on those they do not.
The clubs have created this situation, trying to game a system in which they have overspent. Last summer it was the jacked-up values of the new market in Saudi Arabia. Then Chelsea’s controlling consortium sold the two hotels on their Stamford Bridge site to another company in the same group.
Now it is the turn of the academy players to generate book value. It might work for PSR compliancy but it will do very little to persuade the parents of promising young footballers that this is a profession which puts their children first. Sacrificing all those evenings and weekends, and often the time of their siblings, to become a useful end-of-financial-year asset.
It is the homegrown players who do eventually form the basis of any great team. They are there in all the better sides and some of the more mediocre ones, too. Not always the most popular player in the team, not always its star, but crucial to what the club represents. It is what keeps the families coming through the door, giving up a normal childhood for the hothousing of elite sport.
For those academy coaches who worked with Mainoo, Phil Foden and all the others who became England’s Euro 2024 squad, it has been a monumental effort to reform development in England under the auspices of the Elite Player Performance Programme. These coaches are not paid first-team wages but they are expected to produce first-team footballers, and they have done a good job of it.
Only a few academy boys become players for the club with which they began, and a few more become professionals elsewhere. There are many pitfalls along the way, although the genesis into a useful commodity come June 30 is certainly new.
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