I wrote about the Manchester City academy approach in mid-January. Long and short: They treat the youth market like the main market. They buy the best kids, train them in City’s vision, then pick off the elite names and flog everyone else. This approach has bagged them £265m in revenue. They regularly sell inexperienced kids for £20m+. They don’t even care that some of them treble in value when they leave.

I’d say it’s a genius approach, but that would be ignoring this is what Arsene Wenger tried to do 20 years ago, but later gave up on. City took a good idea, turbocharged it, and now it’s a viable revenue stream.

Well, a month later, the internet is reporting that Arsenal is finally moving in that direction and Per Mertesacker will be given an actual transfer budget to work with specifically for elite kids. This is brilliant by Arsenal. I like that we’re not stuck in our ways these days and if there’s a good idea, we jump on it.
More broadly, the trend towards growing your own is interesting. Clubs like Leipzig have been doing this for years and taking some wild fees in the process. Why not just replicate their system and spit out the bits you don’t like to them, versus spending £100m to see if someone is good enough" It’s also quite interesting to watch some of the shifts in taste profiles amongst the big clubs. There is a premium on 20-24 year olds these days because of all the obvious reasonsR...