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It is becoming increasingly difficult to escape HYROX. Open Instagram and another training or race video appears. Walk into a gym and somebody is preparing for their next race. Conversations that once centred on completing a marathon, achieving a particular lift or improving general fitness increasingly contain references to sled pushes, wall balls, running splits and compromised running.

The growth has been remarkable. What began in Germany in 2017 has developed into an international fitness competition involving hundreds of thousands of participants, events across the world and an extensive network of affiliated gyms. The obvious explanation is that HYROX has found the right competitive format at the right cultural moment. It combines running with functional exercise, provides a measurable challenge and allows participants to compete individually, in pairs or as part of a relay. The format is physically demanding but straightforward to understand, while the exercises require preparation without making entry dependent upon mastering highly technical sporting skills.

Those factors undoubtedly matter, but they may explain only part of the story. The more I observe HYROX, the more I see something beyond the race itself. I see people training together, travelling together, wearing the same clothing, sharing their preparation and celebrating completion. I see gyms forming teams, coaches creating programmes and participants identifying themselves as HYROX athletes long before they reach the start line.

HYROX has therefore created more than a fitness competition. It has created a community and, for many participants, a sense of belonging. That matters because belonging may not simply make the experience more enjoyable. It may help explain why people remain involved, return to compete and encourage others to join them.

It also raises an interesting question for academy football. What can the growth of HYROX teach us about how successful development environments and wider participation ecosystems are created?

A Comparison, Not an Equivalence

HYROX and academy football are not equivalent environments. HYROX is a commercial mass-participation fitness competition largely involving adults who choose to enter. Academy football is a selective child-development system carrying substantially greater responsibilities for education, safeguarding, welfare and long-term development. The power relationships, consequences and ethical obligations are plainly different.

The comparison should not be stretched beyond those differences. A HYROX race is not an academy, and an affiliated gym is not institutionally equivalent to a grassroots football club. HYROX cannot provide a ready-made operating model for the development of children within elite sport.

Meaningful parallels can nevertheless be drawn between the ecosystems surrounding them. Both depend upon much more than the visible event or elite destination. Both combine coaching, facilities, preparation, challenge, progression, relationships, identity and shared experiences. Both rely upon local environments to make a larger system meaningful, and both demonstrate that belonging is created through repeated human interactions rather than branding alone.

The value of the comparison lies not in pretending the systems are equivalent, but in identifying the environmental principles they share.

More Than a Race

No single factor explains HYROX’s success. Its standardised format gives people certainty because, wherever somebody competes, they encounter the same broad sequence of running and workout stations. Performances can be compared between events, providing participants with a clear measure of improvement.

The race also creates purpose. Training is no longer simply about becoming fitter in an abstract sense; it is directed towards a date, a place and a defined challenge. Different entry categories broaden participation. Some people race alone, while others enter with a partner or form a relay team. More experienced competitors can progress towards professional categories, age-group championships and elite competition.

The event itself is highly produced. Lighting, music, branding, spectators, photography and the finish-line experience create a sense of occasion. The participant is not merely completing a workout inside a larger building; they are taking part in something presented and experienced as meaningful.

Social media then amplifies that experience. Training sessions, race preparation, difficult moments, finishing photographs and personal-best times become part of a visible story. Participants do not simply consume HYROX content; they create and distribute it.

Each element contributes something different. The format provides clarity, the challenge provides purpose, coaching provides preparation, results provide measurement and the event creates emotional intensity. Branding provides identity, social media provides visibility and repeat participation provides continuity. Together, these elements form something more powerful than a single competition: they create an ecosystem.

The Importance of Affiliated Gyms

Affiliated gyms appear to be fundamental to that ecosystem. HYROX provides the overarching format, brand and visible destination, but much of the regular human experience is created locally. Participants may spend only a few hours at an event, yet they can spend weeks or months preparing within a gym.

It is there that they receive coaching, establish routines and develop confidence. Training partners provide encouragement and accountability. Groups share difficult sessions, compare progress and travel to events together. The race may supply the destination, but the affiliated gym often creates the relationships and shared preparation through which that destination becomes meaningful.

This offers a useful parallel with grassroots football. The structures are different, but affiliated gyms and grassroots clubs can perform some comparable functions within their respective ecosystems. Both provide local environments in which people first encounter the activity, receive coaching, form relationships, develop competence and begin to identify as participants.

HYROX supplies a global identity, but affiliated gyms help create the local community through which that identity is experienced. Professional football provides an aspirational pathway, but grassroots clubs are frequently where children first learn, form friendships, involve their families and begin to understand themselves as footballers.

The visible destination depends upon less visible local environments.

A Reciprocal Ecosystem

The relationship appears to create value in both directions. HYROX benefits because affiliated gyms introduce people to the activity, prepare them to compete, sustain their engagement between events and generate repeat participation. They organise training groups, group travel and social activity, creating communities that strengthen the wider HYROX identity.

Affiliated gyms benefit from access to a recognised format and brand, a defined purpose around which to organise training and an event towards which members can work together. The challenge can support member motivation, retention and recruitment. The international system acquires local meaning, while the local gym becomes connected to something larger.

The ecosystem works because value does not travel in only one direction.

The relationship between professional academies and grassroots football should also be understood in reciprocal terms. Grassroots clubs provide participation, early coaching, relationships, confidence, experience and a love of the game. Academies provide specialist development, greater resources, aspiration and possible progression into elite football. The professional game ultimately depends upon the participation base beneath it.

That relationship can, however, become too extractive. A grassroots club may be noticed principally when it produces a player of interest. Once the child enters an academy, the earlier environment can begin to disappear from the story. The academy is then credited with “producing” a player whose development began years before arrival and involved family members, volunteers, teachers and grassroots coaches.

A child does not arrive at an academy as an empty development project. They bring experiences, relationships, confidence and football identity created elsewhere. The academy inherits that work. Its responsibility is not simply to add technical expertise, but to understand what already exists and avoid unnecessarily severing the relationships through which the child first learned to love the game.

Belonging Across the Ecosystem

Belonging does not begin at the academy entrance. A child may arrive with an existing attachment to a grassroots club, friendships with teammates and trust in particular coaches. Their family may have established routines and relationships around the game, while the child may already possess memories that have given football emotional meaning.

Moving into academy football can deepen and expand that identity. The player encounters specialist coaching, new teammates, better facilities, stronger competition and the powerful symbolism of a professional club. The experience may create pride, aspiration and a sense of progress.

It can also disrupt what existed before. The child enters a more selective environment in which comparison becomes stronger and continued membership feels less certain. Familiar relationships may be replaced by new ones that have not yet developed the same trust.

The question is therefore not simply whether an academy creates belonging. It is whether movement between environments protects, extends or unintentionally weakens the belonging already established.

That question matters because the football ecosystem is not always integrated. A young child may simultaneously experience grassroots football, one or more pre-academies before registration, private coaching, school football and other sports. Each environment may impose different demands, use different language and communicate different priorities. Parents are often left to coordinate the overall experience.

An ecosystem is not defined simply by the number of organisations surrounding a child. It is defined by the quality of the relationships between them.

What the HYROX Evidence Tells Us

There is now emerging evidence that community is not peripheral to the HYROX experience. A 2026 study by Ralph Ryan Caumeran and Jonathan Briones de Jesus examined participation loyalty among 320 first-time and repeat HYROX participants in Cebu City in the Philippines.

The researchers considered a range of possible influences, including training readiness, satisfaction with the challenge, coaching and programme support, operational quality, safety, accessibility, pricing, promotion and the wider participant experience. Their most striking finding was that community and belongingness emerged as the strongest predictors of participation loyalty.

Training readiness, satisfaction with the challenge, operational and safety quality, and coaching support also mattered. Conventional marketing factors were comparatively less influential. Repeat participants demonstrated greater loyalty than first-time participants, suggesting that connection may deepen through experience, mastery and continued involvement.

The study therefore presents HYROX loyalty principally as an experience-driven phenomenon rather than the straightforward product of promotion. That finding requires proportionate interpretation. It is one study involving participants in one geographical location, and its design identifies relationships between different factors rather than proving that belonging caused HYROX’s global growth.

Participants who already enjoy HYROX may naturally report a stronger sense of community, while those who feel connected may also be more likely to return. The direction of those relationships cannot be fully determined from a single study.

Nevertheless, the finding provides important empirical support for something increasingly visible around the sport. People may arrive because of the physical challenge, but community and belonging can help turn their initial participation into loyalty. Attracting somebody to an event is one achievement; encouraging them to reorganise their training, identify with the activity, return to compete and bring other people with them is something more.

The Binding Ingredient

This leads to the central proposition:

Belonging is not the entire recipe for success. It is one of the ingredients that helps the other ingredients work together.

HYROX would not succeed through belonging alone. A strong community cannot compensate indefinitely for a poor event, inconsistent rules, unsafe organisation, inadequate coaching or a challenge that participants do not value. The underlying product must retain credibility.

Belonging performs a different function by helping to convert separate provisions into a coherent human experience. A training programme becomes shared preparation. A gym becomes somewhere participants feel known. A race partner becomes somebody with whom challenge, vulnerability and achievement are experienced. A result becomes part of a continuing story rather than an isolated number, while a finish-line photograph becomes a symbol of effort, relationships and memory.

The race remains important, but its significance extends beyond the physical work completed during it. Participants acquire relationships, language, rituals, symbols and a place within a wider group. HYROX becomes something they do and, increasingly, something with which they identify.

That may be one reason its growth becomes self-reinforcing. Belonging supports commitment, commitment produces continued participation and participation creates stories and social content. Those stories attract new participants, whose presence enlarges and strengthens the community. The community is therefore not merely an audience gathered around the product; it becomes part of the product itself.

The Academy Recipe

No successful academy develops players through one provision alone. The list of ingredients is extensive: talent identification, high-quality coaching, appropriate facilities, an age-appropriate curriculum, meaningful competition, strength and conditioning, medical and sports-science provision, performance analysis, psychological support, education, safeguarding, nutrition, individual development planning, progression opportunities, effective communication, family support, organisational leadership, multidisciplinary collaboration, trusted relationships, shared experiences, identity and belonging.

An academy can invest heavily in each of these areas. It can recruit excellent staff, build impressive facilities, introduce sophisticated technology and produce detailed development plans. Yet those individual provisions do not automatically create a coherent development environment.

A child does not experience an organisational chart; they experience people. They experience whether the coach listens, whether mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn, whether feedback is understood, whether staff communicate consistently and whether their family is respected.

They also experience whether teammates provide friendship and support or whether competition for places makes every relationship feel conditional. They experience whether the development plan belongs to them or is merely something adults discuss around them, and whether the badge provides meaningful identity or acceptance appears to depend entirely upon current performance.

Belonging enters the recipe at the point where individual provisions become a lived experience.

What Belonging Changes

Belonging does not replace coaching expertise, but it may influence whether a player feels sufficiently secure to engage with it. A young player who trusts the coach may be more willing to ask questions, admit confusion and expose the limits of their understanding. A player who fears that every mistake threatens their status may concentrate instead on avoiding error and concealing uncertainty.

Belonging does not replace excellent facilities. It helps determine whether those facilities feel like somewhere the child is merely permitted to attend or somewhere they are genuinely known and valued. It does not replace an individual development plan, but it may affect whether the player understands that plan, accepts ownership of it and believes those responsible for delivering it remain invested during difficult periods.

Belonging does not replace competition. It can help prevent competition from eroding every relationship around the child. Nor does it remove disappointment, deselection or release. It influences how those experiences are communicated, understood and remembered.

Research into youth sport supports these connections. A prospective Danish study involving more than 7,000 adolescent participants across football, basketball, handball, badminton and gymnastics found that intrinsic motivation, autonomy, competence, relatedness and an empowering coach-created environment were associated with continuing in both the sport and the club. Frustration of those needs and a disempowering climate were associated with dropout.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of persistent youth-sport participation similarly identified enjoyment, parental support, coach support, peer support, competence and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs among the important factors associated with continued involvement.

Recent research has also examined how positive peer relationships contribute to social identity within youth sport. Friendship quality and acceptance were associated with stronger identification with the group, which was then connected to enjoyment, autonomous motivation and enthusiastic commitment.

The relationship is therefore more sophisticated than simply saying that children stay because they have friends. Relationships can help shape how strongly young people identify with the environment, and that identity may influence their motivation, enjoyment and commitment. Belonging affects how the other ingredients are experienced.

The Ingredients Must Combine

Talent-development research increasingly adopts an ecological perspective. Instead of asking only which individual characteristics predict future success, it examines the complete environment surrounding the developing athlete.

Successful talent-development environments are commonly characterised by skilled and appropriately supported staff, a long-term development focus, coherent organisational values, supportive training groups, appropriate role models, collaboration between sport, school and family, psychological safety and attention to athletic and personal development.

The critical idea is integration. An academy may possess all the required departments and still leave the child experiencing them as disconnected. The coach may communicate one message while recruitment communicates another. The player-care department may promote wellbeing while selection practices create persistent insecurity. The academy may describe parents as partners while involving them only when something has gone wrong. The development plan may emphasise long-term growth while short-term team selection rewards current physical performance.

Each individual provision may appear reasonable when considered alone, but the child experiences the interaction between them. Possessing every ingredient does not guarantee the desired outcome. The ingredients must be combined in the right proportions, at the right time and with sufficient understanding of how they affect one another.

Belonging helps provide that connective function. It cannot resolve every contradiction, but it can create the relationships and trust through which contradictions are discussed rather than simply imposed.

Proximity Is Not Belonging

There is a danger in assuming that placing young people inside the same academy, dressing them in the same kit and asking them to pursue the same objective automatically creates community. It does not.

Research involving adolescent boys inside an English professional football academy found that competition for places could inhibit the development of deep friendships. Relationships described as friendships were sometimes characterised by instrumentalism, limited trust and a lack of emotional intimacy.

Academies bring young people together, but they also require those young people to compete with one another. A teammate may simultaneously be a friend, a comparison point and a competitor for a contract or position. Those tensions cannot be removed entirely. Selection is part of elite sport, places are limited, standards are demanding and decisions have consequences.

An environment can, however, decide whether competition becomes the organising principle governing every human relationship within it. A child can be surrounded by people and still feel alone. They can wear the badge without feeling secure, be selected today while believing they will cease to matter tomorrow, or receive exceptional technical provision while experiencing the wider environment as conditional and transactional.

Belonging is therefore not created by proximity, membership or branding alone. It develops through repeated experiences that tell the child they are known, can contribute and can have a voice. It communicates that mistakes do not remove their right to dignity, relationships do not disappear the moment performance declines and the adults around them remain interested in the person as well as the player.

If the pathway changes, the way the child is treated should continue to reflect the values the organisation claims.

Psychological Safety and Development

A 2026 study involving 157 male players from three English professional academies explored the relationship between players’ perceptions of their talent-development environments and psychological safety. Players who perceived their development environment more positively also reported greater psychological safety, while a long-term development focus and holistic preparation were positively associated with that safety.

The researchers were appropriately cautious. Psychological safety was not presented as an automatic outcome of academy category, investment or compliance. It was understood as a socially constructed experience shaped by leadership, relationships, team dynamics and cultural norms.

That distinction is crucial. An academy cannot purchase psychological safety simply by appointing more specialists, nor can it create belonging by inserting the word into a values statement. Both are experienced through behaviour.

The relevant questions are found in ordinary interactions. Does a coach respond to an honest question with curiosity or irritation? Can a player explain that they do not understand? Can a parent raise a concern without fearing that it will affect selection? Can staff disagree constructively? Can a young player make a mistake without believing that one moment has permanently changed how the organisation sees them? Does the environment remain supportive when development becomes difficult?

These questions affect learning. Development requires young people to attempt things they cannot yet do, which inevitably involves mistakes, uncertainty and temporary failure. An environment in which those experiences are interpreted as threats to status may unintentionally encourage caution, concealment and self-protection.

The best development environments do not remove accountability or lower standards. They make it possible for people to pursue demanding standards without believing that their human value depends upon meeting them immediately.

HYROX Through the Five-Pillar Belonging Framework

Viewed through the Five-Pillar Belonging Framework developed in Beyond the Pathway, HYROX activates many of the conditions through which belonging can grow.

Identity and Symbolism

HYROX has created a recognisable identity. Its name, visual branding, clothing, equipment, event environment and language allow participants to signal membership. Completing a race provides a milestone that can be represented through photographs, times, patches, clothing and shared stories. The symbolism gives visible form to an otherwise personal experience.

Academies possess powerful identity and symbolism through their badges, histories, kits and connection to the first team. That symbolism must be handled carefully. The badge can provide enormous pride, but it can also become so powerful that children and families tolerate experiences they would question elsewhere. Identity should deepen belonging without requiring the child to surrender individuality or perspective.

Relationships and Trust

HYROX is filled with relationships involving coaches, training partners, doubles partners, relay teams, gym groups, supporters and fellow competitors. The event may be completed by an individual, but preparation is often social.

Academy football depends upon an even more complex relationship network. Players interact with coaches, teammates, analysts, medical staff, teachers, player-care practitioners, scouts and other adults. Parents and families carry much of the practical and emotional load outside the academy. The quality of those relationships helps determine whether the technical programme is trusted.

Clear Pathways

HYROX provides understandable routes into and through the activity. Participants can enter doubles or relay competitions before attempting an individual race. They can progress between categories, compare times, target personal bests and potentially qualify for championship events. The destination is visible, even if reaching it remains difficult.

Academy pathways are necessarily less predictable. Human development is nonlinear and first-team opportunities cannot be guaranteed, but uncertainty increases the importance of honest communication. A pathway does not need to promise an outcome. It should help players understand where they are, what they are working towards and why particular decisions are being made. Clarity creates trust; false certainty eventually destroys it.

Shared Experiences

HYROX provides a concentrated shared experience. Participants remember the training block, travel, anticipation, nerves, difficult stations, encouragement, finish line and celebration. That emotional intensity helps turn the event into a story people retell.

Academies create countless shared experiences through fixtures, tournaments, tours, training sessions, travel, setbacks, successes and transitions. Those experiences become part of childhood and family life, regardless of whether the player ultimately reaches professional football. What becomes routine for staff may become a defining memory for a child.

Consistency and Continuity

The standardised HYROX format gives people continuity. The venue changes, but the broad challenge remains recognisable. Affiliated gyms allow involvement to continue between events, while repeated races create an ongoing rather than one-off relationship.

Academy football also needs continuity between words and actions, different departments, age phases and transitions. Children will encounter different coaches and increasing demands. Consistency does not require every adult to behave identically, but the young person should continue to recognise the organisation’s underlying values wherever they encounter it.

Belonging becomes fragile when care, communication and respect depend entirely upon which coach happens to be leading the group.

The Fred again.. Parallel

I have previously been interested in how Fred again.. creates community around music. His work is not simply presented to an audience as a finished product. Voices, footage, stories and moments from everyday life are incorporated into the music and live experience. Fans contribute to the atmosphere and sometimes to the visual and emotional content of the performance itself. The audience is not merely watching the cultural moment; it feels involved in creating it.

HYROX operates in a different field, but the underlying principle is similar. Participants create much of the value experienced by other participants. Their preparation, encouragement, stories, photographs and emotional investment give the event meaning beyond its formal structure.

Academy culture works in the same way. It is not created solely by the academy manager, head of coaching or a document describing organisational values. It is continually produced by the people experiencing it: players, parents, coaches, staff and volunteers.

The institution supplies the structure, but people create the lived culture. That is why belonging cannot be delivered through policy alone.

Belonging Cannot Require Sameness

HYROX also illustrates a potential danger. Strong communities create identities, symbols and behavioural norms. Those qualities help insiders recognise one another, but they can also create boundaries around who appears to belong.

Social-media imagery may unintentionally communicate an ideal body, lifestyle, level of commitment or capacity to spend. Specialist clothing, travel, entry fees and public performance can gradually turn an accessible challenge into a status culture. Some people may feel inspired by that identity, while others may conclude that it was not designed for somebody like them.

Academies face a similar risk when belonging becomes confused with conformity. The “right” player may be expected to communicate, behave, learn and respond in one preferred way. Neurodivergent children, quieter personalities, late developers, players from different cultural backgrounds and families unfamiliar with academy football may find that acceptance depends upon adapting themselves to an unwritten norm.

Authentic belonging cannot mean that everybody must become the same, nor can it mean unconditional selection. An academy will continue to make difficult performance decisions. A player may leave the programme without the experience having to communicate that they never truly belonged. Belonging should protect human dignity, not promise permanent membership.

What Should an Intentional Academy Ask?

The lesson from HYROX is not that academies should create louder events, stronger branding or more social-media content. It is that the quality of an environment depends partly upon how its different components combine within the participant’s experience and how that environment connects to the wider ecosystem around it.

An intentional academy might therefore ask:

• Do our various departments feel integrated from the player’s perspective?
• Can players and families understand the purpose behind what we provide?
• Do our relationships make it easier for players to learn and ask questions?
• Does the culture support challenge without making acceptance entirely conditional?
• Are our symbols connected to lived behaviour?
• Do children have meaningful shared experiences beyond assessment?
• Are transitions between coaches and development phases coherent?
• Do our words about long-term development match our short-term decisions?
• Do parents experience themselves as partners or logistical providers?
• Does every player feel known as a person?
• How do we recognise the grassroots environments that contributed before us?
• How do we behave when a player is struggling, deselected or leaving?
• Are we creating a community that allows different children to belong without requiring them to become identical?

These questions do not compete with performance. They concern the conditions through which performance is developed.

The Recipe for Success

HYROX’s rise cannot be attributed to one idea. Its growth reflects a powerful combination of timing, format, accessibility, challenge, coaching, affiliated gyms, event production, measurable performance, branding and social visibility.

The emerging evidence nevertheless suggests that community and belonging are not incidental outcomes sitting at the edge of that success. They may be among the mechanisms that transform an initial experience into loyalty.

The wider ecosystem is essential to that process. HYROX provides the global format and visible event, but affiliated gyms convert that proposition into regular local experiences. Coaches, training partners and communities sustain participation between competitions.

Football also depends upon an ecosystem. Grassroots clubs, families, volunteers, schools, private coaches and academies all contribute at different stages. The professional club may provide the most visible badge and the most specialised environment, but it does not create the player or their relationship with football from nothing.

The success of HYROX does not belong solely to the event organiser, just as the development of a professional footballer does not belong solely to the academy. Both emerge from ecosystems in which local environments, skilled people, relationships, opportunities and shared experiences contribute over time.

A successful academy still requires excellent coaching, facilities, competition, analysis, medical provision, education, player care, family support and clear developmental pathways. Every one of those ingredients matters, and belonging cannot replace any of them.

Without relationships, trust, shared meaning and continuity, however, those provisions may remain separate services rather than becoming a coherent development environment. The quality of an academy is therefore not determined simply by what it possesses or provides. It is also determined by how those provisions are combined, how they connect to the wider football ecosystem and how the resulting experience is lived by children and families.

HYROX may attract people through fitness and competition, but its community helps give that challenge identity, meaning and continuity. Academy football may attract children through the opportunity to develop as players, but the environment determines whether that journey also helps them feel known, supported and part of something meaningful.

The recipe for success will always contain many ingredients.

Belonging is not the entire recipe for success. It is one of the ingredients that helps the other ingredients work together.

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Evidence and Further Reading

Caumeran, R.R. and de Jesus, J.B. (2026), “Participation Loyalty in HYROX: The Primacy of Sport Experience and the Effects of Marketing Support”, International Review of Management and Marketing, 16(4), pp. 73–81.

Henriksen, K. and Stambulova, N. (2023), “The Social Environment of Talent Development in Youth Sport”, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.

Worley, J.T. and Smith, A.L. (2026), “Positive Peer Relationships, Social Identity, and Adaptive Sport Motivation in Youth Athletes”, Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 78, 102996.

Adams, A. and Carr, S. (2019), “Football Friends: Adolescent Boys’ Friendships Inside an English Professional Football Academy”, Soccer & Society, 20(3), pp. 471–493.

“Predicting Adolescents’ Continuation in Club Sports: A Prospective Cohort Study of the Importance of Personal and Contextual Motivational Factors in Five Sports in Denmark”, Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport.

“Predictors of Persistent Participation in Youth Sport: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, Frontiers in Psychology.

“Talent Development Environment and Psychological Safety in English Professional Academy Soccer Players” (2026), International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

About the Book

The ideas explored in this article—belonging, relationships, organisational culture, family experience and the responsibility to develop people as well as players—sit at the heart of Beyond the Pathway: Belonging, Human Development and the Purpose of Academy Football.

The book is available now on Amazon Kindle:

No Kindle e-reader is required. It can be read immediately on a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer using Amazon’s free Kindle app or supported web reader.

Beyond the Pathway asks what academy football owes every child who passes through it—not only the small number who eventually become professional players.

Chapter 20 begins with the unavoidable reality that elite football is a pyramid. Selection narrows, opportunities reduce and most children ultimately continue their lives beyond the professional game. The chapter does not challenge that reality. It considers the responsibility created by it and asks how excellence in player development can be pursued alongside belonging, stewardship and human development.

The full chapter below gives prospective readers an honest sense of the book’s argument, voice and purpose. Enjoy!

The Pyramid and the Responsibility

Most children leave academy football long before football leaves them. Elite football is, and always has been, a pyramid. Talent identification narrows, selection narrows, opportunities narrow and ultimately only a small number reach the summit. Elite sport depends upon this reality.

A presentation produced by Sporting Clube de Portugal illustrates it vividly. More than 6,500 children enter the club’s talent identification system, around 607 are retained and progressively smaller numbers move through each stage of development before only 28 reach high-performance professional football. Approximately 99.5 per cent of those who enter the system ultimately follow different paths.

This is not failure; it is the nature of elite performance. What is remarkable is not the mathematics, but Sporting’s perspective. Rather than celebrating only the exceptional few who reach the summit, the club celebrates the entire pyramid. Every child who enters possesses talent, every family has made sacrifices and every journey has value. In that view, the pyramid itself is the achievement. This raises a more important question: what responsibilities are owed to the other 6,472? That question sits at the heart of academy football.

The Mathematics of Elite Sport

The narrowing of the pyramid is neither unusual nor unfair. Elite sport is, by definition, selective. Professional opportunities are limited, places are scarce and standards are high. No academy, however successful, can alter that reality. Release should therefore never be interpreted as evidence that something has gone wrong, nor should the absence of a professional contract be regarded as failure. More often, it reflects the reality that human development is complex whilst elite opportunity is exceptionally limited.

The question is not whether the pyramid should narrow — it must. The more important question is what responsibilities that reality creates. If most young people eventually build their lives beyond academy football, preparing them for that future cannot be regarded as an afterthought. It becomes part of the purpose of the academy itself. Elite player development and human development are therefore not competing responsibilities. They arise from the same reality.

Without the Base

The most striking aspect of Sporting’s pyramid is that it celebrates the whole structure rather than simply the summit. Without the base there is no middle, and without the middle there is no summit. Elite players do not develop in isolation. They grow within teams, friendships, cultures and relationships shaped by thousands of other children whose own journeys ultimately lead elsewhere. The other 6,472 are not the price paid for producing the 28. They are part of the same story.

This is one of the central arguments of this book. Human development and elite performance are not competing ambitions. The environments created for the many help shape the success of the few, just as the standards required to produce elite players can coexist with care, belonging and stewardship.

Beyond Compliance

EPPP rightly recognises that children are more than footballers. Its provisions relating to education, player care, safeguarding and wellbeing represent meaningful progress. This book does not seek to replace those principles. It asks a different question: how far can we go in deepening them?

Belonging, stewardship, emotional resonance, communication, meaningful support for parents and volunteers, Human Development Indicators and the principle of leaving people better than you found them should not be viewed as additional compliance requirements. They are opportunities to pursue excellence. The pursuit of excellence is rarely satisfied with minimum standards. It continually asks whether people can be served even better — not because existing practice is inadequate, but because genuine excellence is characterised by curiosity, reflection, humility and continuous improvement.

Transparency and Trust

Another striking feature of Sporting Clube de Portugal’s pyramid is not simply the data itself, but the willingness to publish it. There is no attempt to disguise reality, no embarrassment and no desire to focus solely upon the exceptional few. Instead, the club presents the pyramid openly, creating understanding and, ultimately, trust. That transparency demonstrates organisational confidence. It acknowledges reality rather than attempting to reshape it, and in doing so reinforces the credibility of the wider development system.

This principle extends beyond football. In healthcare, organisations increasingly seek to understand not only clinical outcomes but also how people experience care. Businesses routinely publish employee engagement, diversity and customer satisfaction measures because transparency strengthens trust, and trust strengthens reputation. Academy football can learn from the same principle. Confident organisations rarely fear transparency. They understand that openness demonstrates maturity and that continuous improvement is strengthened, not weakened, by honest reflection.

A Broader Leadership Lesson

The lessons contained within Sporting’s pyramid extend far beyond academy football. Whether in business, education, healthcare, elite sport or public service, leaders who genuinely pursue excellence understand that minimum standards represent only the starting point. The strongest organisations continue asking difficult questions. They seek feedback, remain curious and are prepared to examine how people experience their cultures rather than relying solely upon how those cultures are described. Excellence and humility are not competing ideas. Neither are performance and humanity. The pursuit of one is often strengthened by the presence of the other.

Conclusion

The football pyramid is neither unfair nor broken. It is simply the reality of elite sport. The challenge is not to change the pyramid, but to understand the responsibility it creates. EPPP already recognises that children are more than footballers. The question is whether academy football can continue to deepen that principle — not through additional regulation or greater compliance, but through the continual pursuit of excellence.

The true measure of an academy is not found solely in the number of professional footballers it produces. It is also found in how it serves everyone who enters: the children who progress, those whose journeys take different directions and the families who entrust the game with some of the most important years of their lives. The football pyramid will always narrow. Responsibility does not. Elite football will always produce a relatively small number of professionals, but it also shapes the experiences of thousands of young people whose lives extend far beyond the game. Ensuring that those experiences are positive is not separate from the pursuit of excellence. It is an integral part of it.

About the Book

Beyond the Pathway: Belonging, Human Development and the Purpose of Academy Football develops the wider argument introduced in this chapter. It explores belonging, stewardship, communication, childhood, parent partnership, organisational culture and how academy football might understand success beyond professional progression alone.

If this chapter speaks to questions you are considering within football, the complete book is available to purchase here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HC4R69MD. You do not need a Kindle e-reader: you can begin reading straightaway on a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer using Amazon’s free Kindle app or supported web reader.

There are things you notice when you spend enough time around elite football that will never appear on a scouting report, performance dashboard or individual development plan.

Through my work at Manchester City, I have been fortunate enough to spend time close to the first-team environment. I have been pitch-side at first-team games overseeing the ball teams, as well as working within the academy environment, and that has allowed me to observe from relatively close quarters things that most people understandably experience only through a television screen.

Over time, I started noticing small things about Erling Haaland. I have watched him remove his warm-up top, fold it and hand it properly to the member of staff rather than simply throw it towards them. I have seen him help put footballs back into the bag after training. From pitch-side, I have watched the way he interacts with mascots and children around the first-team environment.

These are not stories somebody has subsequently told me and they are not observations drawn from social-media clips. They are things I have personally witnessed. None is remarkable in isolation and perhaps that is precisely why I find them interesting. They are ordinary behaviours being demonstrated in an extraordinary environment by somebody who has reached an extraordinary level of status within it. More importantly, they are things he does not have to do.

There was another moment that has stayed with me for a much more personal reason.

A few years ago, I took my son into City with me while I was working. He had broken his shoulder the previous day and had only just started secondary school, so he was still a young lad. His arm was in a sling.

Erling was on the indoor pitch finishing a photoshoot. I was waiting at the side because I needed to set up for an academy session once he had finished. When the shoot ended, he could quite easily have walked away without ever knowing we were there. Instead, he noticed my son, walked across to him and started talking to him.

I don’t know whether Erling remembers that interaction. I suspect he doesn’t. It was probably a tiny moment in a day containing hundreds of interactions and demands on his time. My son and I remember it.

The more I have thought about that moment alongside the other behaviours I have witnessed, the more it has taken me back to one of the fundamental ideas behind my book, Beyond the Pathway. Academy football should not simply develop better footballers. It should aspire to develop better people too.

The difficult question is how we know whether it has.

From Bryne to Manchester

That question made me curious about whether what I had observed at Manchester City was simply that: a collection of unrelated moments. So I started looking backwards through Haaland’s development.

What I found at Bryne, the small Norwegian club where much of his childhood football development took place, interested me enormously. Alf Ingve Berntsen coached Haaland through a significant period of his formative years. There were around 40 children in the group and, unlike the highly professionalised academy structures familiar to us in England, much of their early football was being delivered by volunteer parent coaches.

Accounts from Bryne describe Haaland as a happy child who smiled a lot, trained hard and loved scoring goals. His potential was apparent, although predicting what he would eventually become would have been impossible. He was relatively small and skinny during part of that early development and regularly played with older children.

What interests me more, however, is what Berntsen says about the purpose of their environment. He wanted all the players he coached to do well in life as much as in football, and he and the other coaches consciously tried to instil values that those boys would carry through their lives. When people subsequently asked whether he was proud of his involvement in Haaland’s early football education, his instinctive test was revealing: how had those young people turned out and how did they behave?

There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about that philosophy.

It would be far too simplistic to draw a straight causal line from a childhood football environment in Bryne to an adult folding his training top in Manchester many years later. Human development doesn’t work like that. Haaland will have been shaped by his parents, family, friends, coaches, teammates, clubs, cultures, successes, disappointments and countless experiences that we cannot see.

But the continuity is worth thinking about, because we spend enormous amounts of time identifying the behaviours that might make an eight-year-old become an elite footballer. How much time do we spend intentionally developing the behaviours we would hope that same eight-year-old still demonstrates if, one day, he becomes one of the most famous footballers in the world?

What survives the pathway?

That question sits right at the heart of Beyond the Pathway.

Elite academies have become extraordinarily sophisticated development environments. We identify technical, tactical, physical and psychological characteristics. We assess potential, build individual development plans, analyse performance and measure progression. Increasingly sophisticated data allows us to understand young players in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

Those things matter. An academy exists, in part, to develop footballers. But if we also claim to develop people, where are the equivalent outcome measures?

We know how to recognise the football outcome. A child progresses through Foundation Phase, becomes a scholar, signs professionally, plays first-team football or represents his country. At the extreme end of the spectrum, he might win major trophies, break goalscoring records and become one of the most recognisable athletes on the planet.

The pathway has very visible markers telling us whether the football development succeeded. If we say that character, humility, respect, responsibility, empathy and belonging matter too, where are the equivalent markers telling us whether that development succeeded?

Perhaps the more interesting question isn’t simply whether the player made it. It is what kind of person made it.

What Guardiola noticed

What makes Haaland an interesting case through which to explore this is that the observations are not mine alone.

Soon after Haaland arrived at Manchester City in 2022, Pep Guardiola was asked what had impressed him about his new striker. Given the goals, physical attributes and competitive mentality Haaland had brought with him, there was plenty Guardiola could have chosen. Instead, he talked about his education and humility.

Guardiola had particularly noticed how much Haaland spoke to the young players around the first-team environment rather than restricting his attention to the established players. He described him as an incredible competitor but said what had impressed him most was his education, his humility and his willingness to engage with those younger players.

That is revealing because young academy players cannot do very much for Erling Haaland’s career. He doesn’t need their approval and they have no organisational power over him. Yet one of the first things his manager noticed was his willingness to engage with them.

Guardiola returned to Haaland’s character as he got to know him better. He spoke about how quickly his personality had impressed him, describing someone who was always smiling and reflecting on the humility he had encountered among some of the biggest stars he had coached. Years later, that assessment remained remarkably consistent. After making Haaland part of City’s leadership group, Guardiola described the unusual combination of a genuinely world-class player who remained incredibly humble, thought about what was best for the team and possessed a kindness alongside his extraordinary competitive drive.

For me, that consistency matters. It doesn’t prove anything definitive about Haaland as a person, and none of us should pretend we can know somebody’s entire character from observations around football. But when behaviours witnessed informally around the environment are consistent with what a manager working with that player every day repeatedly describes, they become worthy of consideration.

Gratitude along the pathway

There are glimpses of the same characteristics earlier in Haaland’s journey.

Paco Johansen worked with him through Norway’s youth international teams. When their period together ended, Haaland took the time to write personally to Johansen and the other coaches to thank them for what they had done for him. Johansen remembers somebody who was appreciative of what he had learned, listened to advice and remained grounded despite already becoming the biggest young star in Norwegian football.

That interests me because gratitude is another developmental behaviour that becomes more difficult to assess as somebody becomes increasingly successful. Every elite player’s journey contains people who helped when there was no guarantee of what the eventual outcome would be. Grassroots coaches, academy staff, teachers, parents, scouts, physios and countless others contribute small pieces to a development journey that may span 15 or 20 years.

Success can make it easy to rewrite that story around the individual. Human development perhaps asks whether the player continues to recognise the people within it.

When Haaland eventually left Borussia Dortmund for Manchester City, there was another example. He reportedly gave farewell watches not only to his teammates but also to dozens of members of the club’s staff. The monetary value inevitably generated headlines. For me, the more interesting point is that the staff were remembered too.

Elite football depends upon enormous numbers of people whose names supporters will rarely know. Medical staff, kit staff, analysts, chefs, security staff, operations teams and countless others create the environment within which the player performs. That brings me back to the warm-up top.

The significance isn’t really whether a piece of clothing is folded or thrown. A kit member’s job will involve dealing with it either way. The interesting thing is the relationship represented by the behaviour. Do I see somebody whose job exists to serve me, or do I see another person contributing to the environment that allows all of us to succeed?

Those are very different ways of understanding status.

Character under autonomy

Academies spend considerable time assessing behaviour. Players are expected to arrive punctually, listen, work hard, demonstrate respect, respond positively to challenge and behave appropriately towards coaches and teammates. Those expectations are entirely reasonable, but there is a problem if we treat compliance with them as the completed product of character development.

A young academy player exists within a hierarchy in which adults hold most of the power. Coaches select him. Staff assess him. Clubs decide whether he remains within the programme. Adults establish the standards and consequences. A young player may therefore behave appropriately partly because the environment requires him to.

Elite success eventually reverses much of that hierarchy.

Imagine the distance between the child at Bryne and the adult Erling Haaland. The child is learning how he is expected to behave within a football environment. The adult has wealth, fame, enormous professional status and millions of followers. Thousands of people want something from him. Entire commercial campaigns are built around him and members of staff exist specifically to support his performance.

Nobody is going to remove one of the world’s greatest strikers from the team because he didn’t help put the footballs away. That is why I think status provides such an interesting test of development.

Character under instruction is not quite the same thing as character under autonomy.

Perhaps one of the ultimate tests of development is what somebody chooses to do when nobody needs to tell them anymore.

Learning to notice

Thinking again about the moment involving my son, there is another quality underneath kindness or respect that I think we sometimes overlook. Before you can demonstrate either, you first have to notice another person.

Erling didn’t have to notice a young boy standing quietly at the side of an indoor pitch with his arm in a sling. He had finished what he was there to do. My son wasn’t waiting for an autograph or being presented to him as part of an organised engagement. He simply noticed him and then acted upon what he noticed.

The same principle arguably sits underneath many apparently mundane interactions. To acknowledge the kit person, you first have to recognise them as more than a function. To engage properly with a mascot, you have to appreciate that the few seconds you spend with that child may carry considerably more meaning for them than they do for you. To engage with young academy players when you are an established superstar requires some awareness of what your attention might mean to them.

Perhaps an important human-development outcome is therefore remarkably simple: do you continue to notice other people?

What happens when it hurts?

There is another dimension to this that became visible during the 2026 World Cup.

Norway’s tournament had been extraordinary. Haaland scored seven times in his first four appearances as his country reached the quarter-finals, where they faced England in Miami. It ended in disappointment, with England winning 2–1 after extra time. Haaland had been kept off the scoresheet for the first time in the tournament and the conditions had taken an enormous physical toll. The heat and humidity were oppressive, he had suffered a dead leg and eventually had nothing left. Norway coach Ståle Solbakken subsequently explained that Haaland was physically finished and substituted him during extra time.

For somebody as relentlessly competitive as Haaland, the disappointment must have been enormous. Norway’s best World Cup run was over, but what happened around that defeat interests me.

After the final whistle, Haaland remained on the pitch for several minutes to acknowledge the Norwegian supporters. It was subsequently reported that he was the final Norway player to leave the stadium, staying behind until around 9.30pm while meeting supporters and families and taking photographs.

Again, it is a relatively small thing, but perhaps human development is also revealed by what we do when things haven’t gone our way. It is relatively easy to acknowledge supporters while carrying a trophy. It is harder after your World Cup has just ended, your body is exhausted and all you probably want is some privacy in which to process the disappointment.

There is also something here that connects very personally with my own experience of Haaland. A photograph or conversation with another child may occupy only a few seconds of an elite player’s life. For the child receiving that attention, those few seconds can become a lifelong memory.

I know that because I have seen it happen. My son cannot tell you what else Erling Haaland did on the day he met him. Erling probably cannot remember the interaction at all. But my son remembers that Erling noticed him. Perhaps some of those families in Miami now have their own version of that story.

That matters because developing the person cannot simply mean teaching appropriate behaviour when circumstances are comfortable. Football inevitably brings disappointment, rejection, injury, frustration and failure. One measure of development must therefore be how somebody responds when those emotions are at their strongest.

How do I treat other people when I am disappointed? Can I recognise what a moment means to somebody else even when the moment is painful for me? Can I still give something of myself when personally I would rather withdraw? Those aren’t football questions. They are human ones.

Human Development Indicators

In Beyond the Pathway, I explored the idea of Human Development Indicators because I believe we need a broader conception of what successful development means.

I am not suggesting academies should create a spreadsheet awarding somebody 8.7 for kindness or add another coloured box to the multidisciplinary review. Human beings are too complicated for that, and attempts to quantify character can very quickly become another selection tool masquerading as development.

But that doesn’t mean human development cannot be considered, observed and evaluated.

We can ask whether a player recognises the contribution of others and how they treat people with less organisational status. We can consider whether they contribute when there is nothing obvious to gain, whether they demonstrate gratitude, how they respond to another person’s vulnerability and whether they can genuinely celebrate somebody else’s success. We can observe how they accept responsibility, how they remain connected to people and communities that contributed to their development and, eventually, how they use status when they acquire it.

Perhaps one of the most revealing questions is what somebody does when nobody is assessing them.

The purpose of those questions, however, should not be to decide whether a child possesses the “right character”. That would simply turn human development into another Talent ID filter. The accountability should sit with us.

Instead of asking only, does this child demonstrate the characteristics we want?, we should also ask, what is our environment doing to help this child develop those characteristics?

That is stewardship.

The football outcome and the human outcome

There is an obvious danger in using Haaland as the example because he represents an almost impossibly successful football outcome. Most children entering academies will not become Premier League footballers. Some will play professionally elsewhere, some semi-professionally and many will leave the professional pathway altogether. They will become teachers, electricians, business owners, coaches, parents and volunteers at grassroots football clubs.

That doesn’t weaken the argument. It strengthens it.

If an academy genuinely believes that developing the person forms part of its responsibility, human development cannot be something whose value depends upon eventually producing a professional footballer. The football outcomes will vary enormously, but the human outcome applies to everybody.

A player who leaves an academy at 16 having developed confidence, responsibility, empathy, independence, meaningful relationships and a secure sense of his own worth has not left empty-handed simply because professional football did not follow. Those things travel with him. The pathway may end, but the person continues.

That is one of the reasons I use the language of stewardship in Beyond the Pathway. For however long a child remains within an academy, the club becomes one of that child’s developmental environments. Coaches and staff become influential adults. Teammates become friendship groups. Football influences routines, identity, confidence, relationships and experiences.

That creates a responsibility extending beyond improving somebody’s first touch. If we accept stewardship, success cannot simply be measured by how much football talent emerges at the other end. We also have to care about what happens to the person travelling through it.

And that requires intentionality. We would never simply hope that a child accidentally develops technically. We coach it, create environments for it, revisit it, model it, reflect upon it and invest enormous expertise in it. Why should human development deserve less intentionality?

The outcome at the other end

That brings me back to Haaland.

At Bryne, one of the adults involved in his formative football years has spoken explicitly about wanting the children he coached to do well in life as much as football and about the importance of the values they carried with them. Later, one of Haaland’s Norway youth coaches remembered a young player who took the time to write and thank the people who had helped him.

At Manchester City, Guardiola encountered the established elite footballer and almost immediately found himself talking publicly about Haaland’s humility, his education and the way he treated young players. Years later, Guardiola was still talking about his humility and kindness.

Between those points sits one of the most extraordinary football development stories of his generation: Bryne, Molde, Salzburg, Borussia Dortmund, Manchester City, international football, records, trophies and global celebrity.

I cannot tell you which parts of that journey produced the behaviours I have witnessed, nor can I claim that those behaviours provide a complete picture of the man. But I find the continuity fascinating.

A child entered a football environment in Bryne in which the adults around him believed that the person mattered alongside the footballer. Many years later, I have watched the global superstar that child became fold his warm-up top before handing it to a member of staff, help put footballs away and make time for children around the first-team environment. I have watched Guardiola notice similar things, and I have read the recollections of people who worked with Haaland earlier in his development who describe gratitude and humility.

Then, at a World Cup, with his body exhausted and his country’s tournament having just ended, he acknowledged supporters and was reportedly the last Norway player to leave the stadium after spending time with families and fans.

On one occasion, I experienced the impact of one of those small interactions personally. My son was just another young lad standing at the side of an indoor pitch with his arm in a sling. Erling Haaland noticed him and, years later, we still remember that he did.

Perhaps that is where the measurement question becomes most difficult and most important.

Academies are becoming increasingly good at determining whether their football development worked. We can count appearances, professional contracts, international caps, transfer values and first-team graduates. Those are legitimate measures of an elite football development programme.

But if we say that we also develop better people, we should have the courage to ask what evidence of that development looks like once those children become adults. Not only when they succeed, either. We should care just as much about the person who leaves at 12, 16 or 18 as the one who eventually walks into the first-team dressing room.

The player who reaches the very top does, however, give us a particularly interesting test. What remains when the status changes? Does respect remain when deference is no longer required? Does gratitude survive when almost everything is provided for you? Do you recognise the contribution of people whose names will never appear alongside yours? Do you help when somebody else is employed to do the job? Do you notice the child for whom ten seconds of your time might become a lifelong memory? And when football delivers its inevitable disappointments, do those behaviours survive then too?

We spend enormous amounts of time identifying the behaviours that might make an eight-year-old become an elite footballer. We should spend just as much time thinking intentionally about the behaviours we would hope that same eight-year-old still demonstrates if, one day, he becomes one of the most famous footballers in the world.

Because perhaps the question at the end of a development pathway should never simply be whether we developed the player we hoped that child might become. There is another outcome that matters just as much:

What kind of person did he become along the way?

That, ultimately, is part of what Beyond the Pathway means to me. Developing better footballers and developing better people should never have been competing ambitions.

The very best development environments should aspire to do both.

Be Fast! Be First! Be Right! I first encountered those words through Trevor Todd during my time working within Manchester City’s Talent Identification environment.

But “encountered” probably understates it. We lived and breathed it.

The philosophy was part of the everyday language of the environment. We were reminded of it constantly. Trev even carried it in the footer of his emails. It wasn’t a slogan occasionally pulled out for a presentation; it became part of how we thought about the job and the standards we were expected to deliver.

And Trev would add another line:

Always Dream Bigger!

Those words have stayed with me too.

Be Fast! Be First! Be Right! isn’t my philosophy. I learned it from Trev, lived and breathed it, and was part of an environment in which it delivered.

But experience should evolve thinking. A philosophy that has delivered doesn’t need to be discarded, but neither should it necessarily be frozen in time. You can respect its origins, understand why it worked and continue asking how experience, evidence and new thinking might allow you to build upon it.

Over the years, through practice, formal Talent ID education, academic research and the work that eventually became Beyond the Pathway, I have continued to reflect on what those three deceptively simple instructions actually require — not only of an individual scout, but of an entire Talent ID strategy.

What follows is my evolution of that thinking.

Perhaps, in its own small way, an attempt to Always Dream Bigger.

Be Fast. Be First. Be Right. Belong.

How can you be fast, first and right?

When I first heard the philosophy, Be Fast made sense. Talent identification is competitive and, when potential emerges, you need to recognise it quickly. Be First made sense too. Identifying potential before somebody else does can create an obvious advantage.

But Be Right?

That was the part I initially found daunting.

How can you possibly be fast, first and right when assessing young children? At pre-academy ages, you might be observing a six, seven or eight-year-old whose eventual footballing destination will not become clear for another decade.

Between that first observation and the player they might eventually become sit growth and maturation, coaching, family circumstances, confidence, motivation, injury, opportunity, relationships, environment and thousands of developmental experiences nobody standing beside a grassroots pitch can predict.

For a while, I struggled with how those three expectations could coexist.

Then it clicked.

Know your level.

That realisation became fundamental to how I think about Talent ID.

Know your level — and really know it

Talent ID is sometimes discussed as though the scout’s job is simply to go out and find “good players”.

For me, that isn’t enough.

There is no universal definition of good enough. The more meaningful question is:

Does this player have the potential to thrive at the level I am recruiting for?

The reference point for a Category 3 Academy will differ from Category 2 and Category 1. But even two Category 1 Academies may be looking for different things because their football philosophies, player characteristics, existing player populations, development models and pathway opportunities may differ.

Knowing your level therefore means much more than understanding the category above the Academy door.

If I am responsible for recommending an U8 player, I should already have a detailed understanding of the U8 players — and the relevant wider pre-academy players in other groups — within my own environment.

How can I confidently recommend a player for an age group if I don’t know the players already operating within it?

I need to understand where the level currently sits, the characteristics already within the group, what individual players do particularly well, where their developmental needs lie and what potential exists within the population already inside the pathway.

Only then does my external observation have meaningful context.

That thinking has developed for me into four foundations for Talent ID decision-making:

Know your level. Know your players. Know your characteristics. Know your environment.

They are interconnected. Knowing your level without knowing the players already operating within it is difficult. Knowing your players without understanding the characteristics your club values provides little strategic context. And all those judgements have to be made with an understanding of the environment and pathway into which you may be bringing the child.

Moving beyond the machine-gun approach

This is also where what I call the machine-gun approach to Talent ID begins to disappear.

Fire enough bullets and eventually one will hit the target.

Recommend enough players, bring enough children through the door and statistically some will progress. Years later, point to the successful player as evidence that the Talent ID was right.

But volume can disguise the quality of decision-making.

The objective shouldn’t simply be to recommend more players. It should be to make better-informed recommendations about the right players.

If I recommend a player, I should be capable of explaining why. What am I seeing? Which characteristics interest me? How do those characteristics relate to what our club values? How does the player compare with the population already within our environment? Am I seeing potential or simply current performance? What don’t I know yet? Is our environment the appropriate next developmental opportunity?

If I cannot answer those questions, what exactly is my recommendation based upon?

That doesn’t remove subjectivity from Talent ID. Nor should we pretend it does. Human judgement remains fundamental.

But judgement should be informed, contextual and explainable.

For me, that is the difference between simply spotting players and understanding Talent ID.

Potential over performance

Knowing your level has to sit alongside clarity about the player characteristics your club values.

Different clubs will prioritise different things because they have different football philosophies and different ideas about what a player might eventually need to operate successfully within their environment.

That clarity creates a common reference point without trying to turn scouts into identical decision-making machines. It also allows us to move beyond the question, “Do I like this player?”, towards something more useful:

“What am I seeing that suggests this player has characteristics capable of translating to our level?”

At the youngest ages, however, another distinction is fundamental to my thinking:

Potential over performance.

Young players develop at different rates. Physical maturation, experience, confidence and opportunity can significantly influence what we see on a particular day.

The child dominating a grassroots match today may not necessarily possess the greatest long-term potential. Equally, the player having relatively little influence on today’s game shouldn’t automatically be dismissed.

Talent ID requires us to look beyond what the player is today and consider what they might become tomorrow.

That isn’t fortune telling. It is informed judgement under uncertainty.

And that distinction changed how I came to understand Be Right.

Being right does not mean predicting the future

Being right cannot mean accurately predicting the career of an eight-year-old. Nobody can know definitively where that child will be in ten years.

Instead, the question I would ask is:

Given what I can see today, what I know about our level, the characteristics our club values and my understanding of potential, is this the right developmental opportunity for this player now?

That final word is critical.

Now.

Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes it will be no. And sometimes a perfectly legitimate Talent ID decision is:

Not yet.

A player can interest you without the appropriate response automatically being to bring them into your pathway.

Six months later, the answer may legitimately be different. The child may have developed technically, matured physically or emotionally, grown in confidence or simply benefited from remaining within their existing environment for a little longer.

That doesn’t necessarily make the original judgement wrong. The player developed and the context changed.

It is also why I don’t interpret Be First as simply meaning sign the player before another club does.

You can be first to recognise potential, understand what you are seeing and still conclude that now isn’t the appropriate time to act. The confidence to say “not yet” can be every bit as important as the confidence to recommend.

For me:

Be Fast is about recognising relevant potential efficiently.

Be First is about having the coverage, relationships, knowledge and intelligence to understand that potential early.

Be Right is about making the appropriate developmental decision for that player, at that level, within that environment — now.

What happens when we look back?

One of the privileges of having worked within a Talent ID system and then watching players develop over many years is that eventually you can look backwards at the outcomes.

Manchester City provides some particularly interesting examples.

As we enter the 2026/27 season, the first-team picture we have been discussing includes six Academy products: Phil Foden, Rico Lewis, Nico O’Reilly, Kaden Braithwaite, Floyd Samba and Ryan McAidoo. Five of those six — Foden, Lewis, O’Reilly, Braithwaite and Samba — have journeys stretching back to the earliest stages of City’s development system, the pre-academy.

With the manager publicly discussing a 23-player squad, six Academy products would represent 26.1%, while those five early-pathway players alone would represent 21.7%.

But first-team players retained by Manchester City represent only one form of outcome.

Look beyond City’s first team and other developmental journeys become equally interesting. Cole Palmer entered City’s system at the pre-academy and progressed through the pathway. Shea Charles began within City’s early development environment before progressing through the Academy, captaining the EDS and reaching the senior team, with his journey ultimately taking him back into the Premier League with Fulham. Reigan Heskey entered the pre-academy, progressed through the age groups, reached City’s U21s and senior team and moved permanently to the Bundesliga with 1. FC Köln this summer.

Different players. Different journeys. Different destinations.

And that is precisely the point.

The person identifying Shea Charles as a young child didn’t need to predict Fulham. Nobody identifying Reigan Heskey at pre-academy age needed to predict Köln. Nor did anybody observing Cole Palmer need to predict the precise route his senior career would eventually take.

That wasn’t the Talent ID decision.

The decision was whether the characteristics and potential they could see justified the next developmental opportunity within that environment at that time.

What happened afterwards was development.

No individual player’s career can prove that a Talent ID strategy works. Too many variables contribute to development to make that causal claim. But when similar early identification decisions repeatedly result, across cohorts and over time, in players progressing into senior professional football — both at the originating club and elsewhere — the longitudinal pattern becomes increasingly significant.

It also challenges how we define Talent ID success.

The measure cannot simply be: How many became first-team players here?

We should also be interested in players who establish professional careers elsewhere, the levels they ultimately reach, the developmental opportunities created along the way and the quality of the decisions made throughout their journey.

Talent ID isn’t about predicting the destination. It is about making the right next developmental decision.

Strategy is only as good as the people delivering it

There is another lesson from that environment which has become increasingly important to how I think about Talent ID strategy.

Strategies don’t identify players. People do.

My professional career approaching three decades has spanned law, leadership, strategic communications and public policy, alongside my years within academy football. That has exposed me to different leaders, organisational cultures and working environments.

Against that much broader backdrop, Trev remains the best leader I have worked under.

What made him exceptional was not simply the Talent ID philosophy. It was the team he created and what it felt like to be part of it.

There was an energy and enthusiasm that came simply from pulling on the club tracksuit. You wanted to be there, you wanted to contribute and you wanted to deliver — not because somebody was constantly checking whether you were doing your job, but because you felt part of something that mattered.

Above all, everyone cared.

We cared about the environment, about each other, about the children and their families, and about delivering.

That care created its own standards. Trust didn’t mean an absence of accountability; if anything, it increased it. When you genuinely feel part of a team, when your contribution matters and when the people around you matter, you don’t want to let them down.

Looking back through the lens of my subsequent research, I now have a word for what Trev created.

Belonging.

That belonging generated energy, enthusiasm, responsibility and a collective hunger to deliver. The philosophy provided clarity about what we were trying to achieve; Trev’s leadership created an environment in which people cared deeply about delivering it.

That matters to anybody responsible for leading Talent ID. You can have excellent processes, sophisticated data, extensive coverage and beautifully written player profiles, but if the people responsible for exercising judgement don’t feel trusted, valued and connected to the purpose, something fundamental is missing.

I experienced belonging before I studied it

Years later, belonging became central to my own thinking for a different reason.

During the 2022/23 season, I undertook The FA Level 3 in Advanced Principles of Talent Identification in Football, led by Ed Cope. One of the modules introduced me more formally to belonging, alongside reading and ideas that would become increasingly influential in my work.

The drives to and from St George’s Park also gave me something that can be surprisingly difficult to find in football: time and headspace to think.

My starting point was practical and firmly rooted in Talent ID.

We could work incredibly hard to Be Fast, Be First and Be Right, identify potential early and create an opportunity for that child within our environment. But recruitment creates another strategic challenge:

Once you have identified potential, how do you retain it?

That became the starting point of my research.

Could belonging operate as a retention mechanism at pre-academy ages? If a child and their family developed a stronger connection with the club, its people and its environment, might that strengthen their relationship with the Academy and help retain the potential we had worked so hard to identify?

The work that eventually became Beyond the Pathway began with that relatively focused question around pre-academy retention before developing into a much broader exploration of belonging, culture, stewardship and human development.

Retention was the doorway.

It wasn’t the destination.

Belonging cannot begin at retention

The deeper I went into belonging, the more my original question changed.

I began applying the concept in practice, researching it more deeply and eventually making it the focus of my academic thesis. I explored frameworks through which Academies might think more intentionally about belonging and developed my thinking around emotional resonance — the emotional significance that people, relationships, places and experiences can acquire for a young person.

Rather than simply asking whether belonging might help us retain potential, I became interested in whether belonging could form part of the conditions through which potential is able to flourish.

Could feeling known, valued and connected influence how comfortably a child expresses themselves? Could relationships affect confidence and willingness to take developmental risks? Could belonging help young people navigate setbacks? What role do parents, coaches, teammates, identity, culture and environment play in the developmental experience?

Those questions eventually took me well beyond retention and contributed to what became Beyond the Pathway.

And they led me to an important conclusion for Talent ID strategy:

Retention may be one place where we observe the effect of belonging. It is far too late to start creating it.

If belonging matters, it has to be cultivated intentionally from the very beginning of the relationship and continue throughout the player’s journey.

That means belonging matters at Identify, because the scout may represent a child and family’s first meaningful interaction with the club. It matters at Recruit, as relationships begin to form and the family starts to understand the environment. It matters throughout Develop, through the experiences, relationships and sense of identity that shape how a young person feels within the Academy. It matters at Sign, as the relationship and commitment evolve, and it matters at Retain, through continued development, connection and progression.

It also matters at the other end of the journey.

Final transition is still part of the experience.

Whether a young person progresses into senior football, moves to another club or leaves the pathway altogether, how an organisation handles that transition says something about the environment they belonged to.

Designing belonging intentionally

This is where my Talent ID thinking now connects directly with the Five-Pillar Belonging Framework developed in Beyond the Pathway:

Identity & Symbolism — creating meaning and shared identity.

Relationships & Trust — building the emotional foundations of belonging.

Clear Pathways — reducing uncertainty and strengthening confidence.

Shared Experiences — creating memories and emotional attachment.

Consistency & Continuity — providing the stability through which trust can flourish.

These are not interventions to introduce when a player becomes a retention risk. They are conditions to cultivate intentionally throughout the pathway.

That distinction matters.

My evolution of the original philosophy therefore isn’t best understood as a linear sequence in which we Be Fast, then Be First, then Be Right and finally Belong.

Instead, I see Be Fast, Be First and Be Right as principles informing Talent ID decision-making across a pathway of:

IDENTIFY → RECRUIT → DEVELOP → SIGN → RETAIN

while BELONG intentionally underpins that entire journey:

from first contact to final transition.

The book makes the same broader distinction: frameworks alone do not create belonging; people and everyday behaviours turn those structures into lived experiences.

And that brings me back to Trev.

I went looking for belonging academically because I wanted to understand whether it could help us retain young talent. It took me years to recognise that I had already experienced its power within the team responsible for identifying that talent.

An evolution, not a replacement

I wouldn’t replace Be Fast! Be First! Be Right!

I lived and breathed it. I was part of the environment in which it operated, and with the benefit of time we can observe many of the developmental outcomes that followed.

It was tried, tested and delivered.

My question is the one high-performance environments should continually ask:

Where is the next marginal gain?

For me, that has become:

BE FAST. BE FIRST. BE RIGHT. BELONG.

BE FAST
Recognise relevant potential efficiently by knowing your level and your players.

BE FIRST
Build the coverage, relationships and intelligence that allow you to identify and understand potential early.

BE RIGHT
Prioritise potential over performance and make an informed, contextual judgement about the appropriate next developmental opportunity — now.

BELONG
Intentionally create the conditions through which connection, development and human potential can flourish — from first contact to final transition.

Belong isn’t an attempt to correct the original philosophy. It is my evolution of something I know delivered because I was part of delivering it.

There is also a symmetry to it that I hadn’t appreciated when my research began.

Trev created belonging among the people responsible for executing the Talent ID strategy.

My subsequent work asked how we might create belonging more intentionally for the young people and families experiencing the pathway.

That is the marginal gain that interests me.

Talent ID is not a numbers game

If there is one thing I would want a scout to take from this framework, it is that Talent ID should demand more of us than spotting somebody who looks good on a Saturday or Sunday morning.

Know your level. Know your players. Know your characteristics. Know your environment.

Then ask the difficult questions. What am I actually seeing? Is it performance or potential? How does it compare with what already exists within our environment? What don’t I yet know? Is this the right developmental opportunity for this player? And is it right now?

Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes no. Sometimes not yet.

All three can represent good Talent ID decisions.

For those responsible for leading Talent ID, the challenge is broader. Build the strategy, coverage and intelligence that allow people to Be Fast. Give scouts sufficient knowledge of their level, players and characteristics to Be First in understanding relevant potential. Create the clarity, trust and accountability that enable people to exercise their judgement and Be Right.

Then recognise that bringing a young person into the pathway is not the end of recruitment. It creates another responsibility: to build an environment in which that person has the opportunity to develop and flourish.

That is where Belong sits.

Not at the end of the pathway, but throughout it.

From first contact to final transition.

Talent ID is not a numbers game. It is about making the right next developmental decision — and then creating an environment worthy of the potential we have identified.

Be Fast. Be First. Be Right. Belong.

An evolution of a philosophy I lived and breathed, shaped by everything I have learned since.

And the ambition behind it:

Always Dream Bigger!

There was one part of the inaugural Premier League Future Academy Leaders programme that, if I am candid, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to: EDI — equality, diversity and inclusion.

Not because I disagreed with any of it. Far from it. I simply expected it to be rather dry. I had also been fortunate in life. I had a privileged upbringing and had never knowingly experienced prejudice or discrimination because of who I was. I considered myself open-minded, fair and respectful of others, so perhaps subconsciously I didn’t expect the session to challenge me particularly deeply.

It did.

I remember feeling quite naive as I listened to people talk about the reality of prejudice in their everyday lives. I was genuinely shocked by some of what I heard. These weren’t historical examples or abstract scenarios constructed for a training course. They were people’s lived experiences — things they had encountered simply going about their lives that I had never experienced and, consequently, had never really been required to think about.

That stayed with me. With hindsight, there is an important lesson in the fact that I wasn’t particularly looking for that learning in the first place.

Sometimes the learning we don’t think we need is the learning we need most.

Good intentions aren’t the same as understanding

There is an uncomfortable but important distinction here. Someone can be a decent person and still have blind spots. Someone can genuinely believe in equality while having limited understanding of an experience completely outside their own. Someone can care enormously about children while interpreting their behaviour through the lens of their own upbringing, culture and experiences.

My lack of awareness wasn’t caused by hostility towards anybody. In many respects, it was the opposite problem: my own life had never required me to understand.

There will inevitably be people working in football whose experience is similar to mine, and that matters particularly in academy football because adults aren’t simply delivering football sessions. They are constantly interpreting children.

A coach makes judgements about confidence, attitude, communication, learning and responses to challenge. A scout interprets personality, behaviour and family engagement alongside football ability. Player-care staff build relationships with children and parents. Medical practitioners support young people through injury and uncertainty. Academy leaders determine what gets discussed, prioritised, developed and rewarded.

Every one of those interactions takes place between people whose lives may be very different. Race, religion, culture, disability, neurodiversity, socioeconomic circumstances, family structures, identity, language and previous experiences can all shape how somebody experiences an environment. The adult brings their own lived experience into that interaction too.

Sometimes what we think we are observing may therefore tell us as much about our own frame of reference as it does about the child in front of us.

Football already understands professional competence

This is where I keep returning to one word throughout much of my thinking about academy football:

Intentionality.

Football is extraordinarily intentional about many of the things it considers important. We don’t simply decide that somebody seems knowledgeable about football and allow them to coach at the highest levels of youth development. Coaching has qualification pathways. Talent identification has professional qualifications and role requirements. Safeguarding is treated as a responsibility requiring education rather than something we assume people understand because they happen to be decent human beings.

The same principle runs throughout EPPP. Once something is regarded as important to the quality of the academy environment, football has demonstrated an ability to define expectations, develop expertise, establish frameworks and evaluate practice.

That is intentionality: deciding something matters and then building the capability to do it well.

Which raises a question I increasingly find myself asking:

What should an adult entrusted with developing children be expected to understand about the different human beings they are developing?

This isn’t an argument that football ignores EDI

It is important to be absolutely clear about this. The Premier League deserves considerable credit for the work it has undertaken around equality, diversity and inclusion.

The South Asian Action Plan is a particularly relevant example. Developed with Kick It Out to address the under-representation of British South Asian players within academy football, it has sought to understand barriers, create opportunities, engage communities and improve representation. Importantly for this discussion, the programme has also included EDI education for Talent ID and recruitment professionals.

By April 2025, more than 3,000 children and 400 grassroots coaches had engaged with the programme through 24 Premier League and EFL clubs.

There is intentionality elsewhere too. The Premier League introduced an Anti-Racist Coaching workshop for academy staff, designed to develop culturally aware environments through inclusive practice. At Wolves, one of the clubs involved, participation extended beyond coaches to physios, analysts, scouts and player-care staff — an important recognition that a child’s academy experience is shaped by considerably more people than the person delivering the football session.

So my question isn’t whether the Premier League takes EDI seriously. The evidence says that it does.

The question I’m interested in is slightly different: how deeply and consistently does that literacy penetrate the everyday developmental environment experienced by children?

From organisational EDI to practitioner literacy

I don’t think the answer is necessarily another certificate. Indeed, if we’re not careful, that could miss the point entirely. Complete an online module, answer some multiple-choice questions, download the certificate and put it on the personnel file. Compliance achieved; understanding unchanged.

What interests me much more is practitioner literacy.

Can a scout recognise that their interpretation of confidence, communication or parental engagement might contain cultural assumptions? Can a coach understand why children may experience exactly the same environment differently? Can practitioners recognise when expectations around behaviour reflect their own experience rather than some universal definition of what a “good academy player” should look like?

And do the adults around young players understand enough about race, religion, disability, neurodiversity, socioeconomic difference, identity and family circumstances to become curious when something falls outside their own experience, rather than immediately judging it?

That last point feels particularly important because my experience on Future Academy Leaders taught me something very simple: not having experienced prejudice doesn’t equip you to understand what it feels like to experience it.

Listening helps. Education helps. Relationships help. Exposure to experiences beyond our own helps. Most importantly, curiosity helps.

Those things can be developed intentionally.

Why EDI didn’t become a major part of Beyond the Pathway

EDI featured within my research and thinking while writing Beyond the Pathway, but I ultimately chose not to make it a standalone part of the book. That wasn’t because I considered it unimportant; quite the opposite.

Equality, diversity and inclusion is an enormous field in its own right. I didn’t want to pretend I could adequately address its breadth within a book primarily concerned with belonging, human development, organisational culture, stewardship and the purpose of academy football.

Instead, I became increasingly interested in something closely connected to it: lived experience.

An organisation can possess excellent policies and still be experienced differently by different people. It can publish compelling values while somebody within it feels that they don’t belong. It can demonstrate a genuine commitment to inclusion at organisational level while everyday interactions inadvertently communicate something very different.

That is one reason belonging became so central to my thinking. Not as a substitute for EDI, but because belonging takes us from organisational intention towards an intensely human question:

What does this environment actually feel like to the person experiencing it?

That moves the conversation from policy into practice, and from organisational intention into everyday behaviour.

Belonging cannot require sameness

Organisations naturally develop norms: this is how we do things here. In healthy cultures those norms can create identity, consistency and shared purpose. But there is a danger if belonging becomes conditional upon conforming to them.

If the price of belonging is behaving, communicating, thinking or presenting yourself exactly like everybody else, we haven’t really created belonging. We have created conformity.

The developmental challenge therefore isn’t simply to bring children from different backgrounds through the academy door. It is to create an environment capable of understanding them once they arrive.

That requires adults with sufficient developmental and cultural literacy to recognise difference without automatically interpreting difference as deficiency. It also requires organisations curious enough to ask whether different people actually experience their culture in the way leaders intend.

The intentionality test

This takes me back to the question I keep asking about academy football.

When something matters to performance, we become extraordinarily intentional. We establish frameworks, create qualifications, collect data, employ specialists, develop staff, benchmark, audit and review. We ask what better looks like and then construct systems designed to get us closer to it.

Human development should provoke the same organisational instinct.

Not because children can be reduced to dashboards. Not because belonging can be given a definitive score. And certainly not because EDI can be solved through compulsory e-learning. It is because good intentions are not evidence of good experiences.

The Premier League’s work demonstrates that football can act intentionally in this space. The South Asian Action Plan, inclusive coaching initiatives, player education and anti-racism work provide examples of that intentionality in practice.

The question I am increasingly interested in is how far we take it.

Across academy football there are thousands of adults involved in children’s development. Coaches, scouts, analysts, medical practitioners, player-care staff, teachers, administrators and leaders. Between them sit thousands of relationships and countless apparently insignificant everyday interactions through which young people learn whether they are understood, respected, valued and whether they genuinely belong.

Perhaps, therefore, the question isn’t simply whether an organisation has an EDI strategy. It is whether we have decided what every adult working with our children should reasonably be expected to understand — and how intentionally we are helping them to understand it.

I went into that EDI session believing myself to be a fair-minded person who understood the importance of treating people properly. I came out recognising how much I didn’t know.

It didn’t make me an EDI expert. It did something arguably more useful: it made me more curious.

That curiosity sits at the heart of what I later described in Beyond the Pathway as developmental literacy. If academy football is serious when it says it develops people as well as players, then understanding the people in front of us cannot be left to good intentions alone.

Because one of the central questions I pose in the book remains:

“If we say we develop people as well as players, how do we know?”

And increasingly, I think the same principle applies here.

If we say every child belongs, how intentionally are we preparing the adults around them to make that true?

What does success really look like for an elite football academy?

It is tempting to answer that question by counting first-team appearances. How many academy players make their debut? How many establish themselves? How many reach 50 or 100 appearances for the club that developed them?

Those are important measures, but they are not the only measures. The journey of Shea Charles offers a compelling alternative perspective.

Charles spent the overwhelming majority of his childhood and youth development within Manchester City’s system, progressing from the club’s pre-academy environment into the Academy at Under-9, through the age groups to the Elite Development Squad, captaining City’s Under-21s, becoming a senior international while still within the development pathway and eventually making his Premier League debut under Pep Guardiola.

His Manchester City first-team career amounted to just 27 minutes of Premier League football. Viewed through the narrowest possible lens, therefore, he did not “make it” at Manchester City.

But consider what happened next.

City sold him to Southampton for an initial £10.5 million, with the potential for the deal to rise to £15 million, while retaining further economic and strategic rights over the player. Three years later, Charles has been sold to Fulham in a deal reportedly worth up to £30 million, returning him to the Premier League at the age of 22.

In doing so, he has become the most expensive Northern Ireland footballer in history. Manchester City are also due to benefit financially from that second transfer through the sell-on clause negotiated when he left the Etihad.

So perhaps the better question isn’t whether Shea Charles made it at Manchester City. Perhaps it is:

What did Manchester City’s development system ultimately produce?

The answer is Northern Ireland’s most expensive footballer, a Premier League player and senior international captain.

That makes his story a fascinating case study in what player development, progression and academy return on investment can really look like.

From Manchester City’s Pre-Academy to the Academy

Charles is genuinely a product of Manchester City’s development system. This is an important distinction because he wasn’t recruited from another professional academy at 15 or 16, spent a couple of seasons at City and subsequently became described as an Academy graduate.

Charles was born in Manchester and was with Manchester City from around the age of seven. There is, however, an important technical distinction to make about those earliest years.

At seven, Charles was not yet a formally registered Academy player. He was part of City’s pre-academy and early development environment. Children cannot formally enter the Academy system until the Under-9 age group, so Charles’s pathway can properly be understood in two stages.

First came the pre-academy years: being identified by Manchester City, training within the club’s development environment and beginning to absorb its footballing philosophy before he was old enough to become an Academy player. Then, at Under-9, came the formal transition into Academy football.

That means Manchester City’s involvement in Charles’s development started even earlier than the formal Academy journey itself: from around seven years old through the pre-academy, from Under-9 through the Academy, and then onwards through Under-18 football, the Elite Development Squad, first-team training and ultimately the Premier League.

It is a development journey spanning the entirety of his footballing childhood.

The significance of that should not be overlooked. Academies are sometimes judged according to what happens during the final few years of development — scholarship, Under-18 football, the Elite Development Squad and ultimately the first team — but a player such as Charles represents something much longer.

Technical development, tactical education, physical and psychological development, different coaches, different phases, different teams, thousands of training hours and hundreds of matches all contributed to a developmental journey measured not in months but in more than a decade.

By July 2021, aged 17, that journey reached another significant milestone when Charles signed his first professional contract with Manchester City. The boy who had first entered City’s development environment at seven had become a professional footballer.

His development, however, was far from finished.

From Academy Player to Elite Development Squad Captain

The next phase of Charles’s development illustrates another important part of the pathway: he became a winner.

Charles was part of a hugely successful generation within Manchester City’s Academy. Having helped City’s Under-18s secure the Premier League North and national titles, he progressed into the Elite Development Squad and became an important figure in City’s remarkable sequence of Premier League 2 successes.

By 2022/23 he wasn’t simply playing for the EDS. He was captaining it.

Charles was elected captain ahead of the season and subsequently led City to a third consecutive Premier League 2 title, making 26 league appearances during the campaign. Captaining one of the leading development teams in European football at 18 and 19 years old tells us something beyond technical ability. City were developing responsibility, tactical understanding, resilience and leadership alongside footballing ability.

His positional development is interesting too. Although principally a defensive midfielder, Charles was also educated across centre-back, right-back and more advanced midfield positions. That versatility became an important part of his profile, while the footballing education he received at Manchester City would eventually carry considerable value in the transfer market.

Becoming a Senior International Before Becoming a City First-Team Player

There is another remarkable feature of Charles’s development. Before he had even made his Manchester City first-team debut, he was already playing senior international football.

Having represented Northern Ireland through the age groups, Charles received his first senior call-up in 2022 and made his senior international debut that June. He was still a teenager and had not yet played a minute of senior club football.

That is quite an unusual development position. Manchester City had produced a player considered ready to represent his country at senior international level before there was realistically space for him in City’s first team.

Therein lies one of the fundamental challenges facing elite academies. Producing a Premier League-quality footballer does not automatically mean producing a player who can immediately displace an established Manchester City first-team player.

For Charles, the position was particularly difficult. His preferred role was defensive midfield and Manchester City’s first-team options during his development included Fernandinho and Rodri. The standard wasn’t simply Premier League standard; it was world-class.

Charles himself has spoken about learning from those players after progressing into the first-team training environment. That proximity to elite performers is itself part of development.

Eventually, however, development requires something else: playing.

The 27 Minutes That Completed a 12-Year Journey

On 28 May 2023, Charles finally reached the end point traditionally associated with academy development. Manchester City travelled to Brentford on the final day of the Premier League season and, in the 63rd minute, Pep Guardiola introduced the 19-year-old Charles for his Premier League debut.

Twenty-seven minutes.

That would ultimately be the entirety of his competitive Manchester City first-team career.

This is where the interpretation of his story becomes important. If academy success is measured solely by first-team appearances for the parent club, Charles barely registers: one appearance and 27 minutes.

But that ignores virtually everything Manchester City had actually developed.

By the time Charles left the club, he was a senior Northern Ireland international, a Premier League 2-winning captain, a technically accomplished and tactically versatile midfielder and a player considered capable of senior professional football.

The question was no longer whether he needed more Academy development. He needed senior football.

Knowing When Development Needs to Continue Somewhere Else

This may be the most interesting decision Manchester City made during the entire Shea Charles journey.

They sold him.

There is sometimes an assumption that an academy demonstrates its commitment to a young player by keeping him. That isn’t necessarily true. At 19, another season of development football would undoubtedly have provided Charles with something, but 30 or 40 senior matches could provide something very different.

Manchester City could not guarantee those opportunities. Southampton could.

So in July 2023, Charles left Manchester City permanently. The reported financial terms were already significant, with Southampton paying an initial £10.5 million and performance-related additions capable of taking the transaction to £15 million.

For a player who had played 27 minutes of senior club football, that alone represented a considerable realisation of the value created through City’s development pathway.

But City did something else: they protected the future.

The deal reportedly included a sell-on clause, matching rights and a buy-back provision. That is important because it changes the nature of the transaction. Manchester City weren’t simply cashing in on an Academy player; they were monetising part of the value they had already created while retaining exposure to the value Charles might create in the future.

Crucially, Charles was also given the freedom to go somewhere he could play.

Southampton: From 27 Minutes to a Full Season of Senior Football

The difference was immediate.

Charles arrived at Southampton having accumulated just 27 minutes of senior club football. During his first season at St Mary’s he made 38 appearances in all competitions as Southampton attempted to return immediately to the Premier League following relegation.

Charles was therefore exposed not to carefully managed development football but to the demands of a 46-game Championship season and a promotion campaign. There were starts and substitute appearances, difficult games and mistakes, periods in the team and periods outside it.

That matters because development isn’t simply the accumulation of successful moments. It is also the accumulation of experiences.

By the conclusion of the season, Southampton had won promotion and Charles had gone from 27 senior club minutes to 38 competitive appearances. Manchester City’s development pathway had prepared him for senior football; Southampton was now providing the environment in which he could learn how to live in it.

Sheffield Wednesday: The Next Development Environment

The next decision was equally important. Rather than remain on the fringes following Southampton’s promotion to the Premier League, Charles joined Sheffield Wednesday on loan for the 2024/25 season.

Again, the priority was minutes and the environment mattered.

At Hillsborough, Charles played 44 matches. This time he wasn’t simply gaining experience; he became one of Sheffield Wednesday’s most important players and at the end of the campaign was named the club’s Player of the Year.

Consider the progression. At 19 he had 27 minutes of senior club football. At 20 he had experienced a Championship promotion campaign. At 21 he had accumulated another 44 appearances and become Player of the Year at Sheffield Wednesday.

Meanwhile, his international career continued to develop. In November 2024, Charles captained Northern Ireland and, at just 21, became the youngest player ever to captain his country.

The leadership qualities evident when Manchester City entrusted him with the EDS captaincy were now manifesting themselves at senior international level.

The pathway was continuing. It simply wasn’t happening at the Etihad anymore.

Returning to Southampton a Different Player

Charles returned to Southampton with considerably more senior experience. The player who had originally left Manchester City with 27 senior club minutes now had two demanding Championship seasons behind him alongside an increasingly significant international career.

During 2025/26, his market value accelerated again. He made 38 appearances, scoring six goals and providing two assists, while his performances attracted Premier League interest.

Leeds United pursued him. Crystal Palace were linked. Fulham entered the race.

Southampton rejected offers as the value of an asset originally acquired from Manchester City for £10.5 million continued to increase. Eventually Fulham secured him in a deal reportedly worth £26 million initially, potentially rising to £30 million through add-ons.

Three years after Manchester City sold him, Shea Charles was returning to the Premier League.

Now he wasn’t a 19-year-old prospect with 27 senior minutes. He was a 22-year-old established senior professional, a full international and a national-team captain.

The significance of the fee also extends beyond Southampton or Manchester City. The Irish Football Association has confirmed that the Fulham move makes Shea Charles Northern Ireland’s most expensive footballer in history.

That is quite some destination for a journey that began in Manchester City’s pre-academy environment at seven years old.

And Manchester City Benefit Again

This is where the economics of elite player development become particularly interesting.

Manchester City did not simply receive the original transfer fee. When Charles moved to Southampton in 2023, City protected their position through a sell-on provision, with reports surrounding the 2026 transfer consistently placing that sell-on percentage at 15 per cent.

The precise contractual calculation is not publicly available, and that distinction matters. Some reporting describes City as entitled to 15 per cent of a subsequent transfer fee, while other reporting describes the provision as 15 per cent of Southampton’s profit on the player.

Without access to the transfer agreement itself, it would be wrong to present one interpretation as contractual fact. But either mechanism produces a significant second financial return for Manchester City.

If the reported clause applies to the whole subsequent transfer fee, City’s share of Fulham’s reported £26 million guaranteed consideration would be approximately £3.9 million. Should the full £30 million eventually become payable and fall within the clause, that figure would rise to £4.5 million.

If, alternatively, the 15 per cent applies only to Southampton’s profit, the calculation is lower. Using the reported £10.5 million initial Southampton purchase price as the simplest starting point, the £15.5 million difference on Fulham’s initial £26 million consideration would generate approximately £2.325 million for City.

If the Fulham transaction ultimately reaches £30 million, the equivalent simple calculation would produce approximately £2.925 million.

The actual contractual calculation could differ. It may, for example, account for add-ons paid by Southampton to City, particular transaction costs or specify precisely which components of Fulham’s consideration are included.

But the broader point does not change.

Manchester City are receiving another multimillion-pound return from a player who left the club three years ago.

The Economics of the Entire Journey

Step back and consider the complete picture.

Manchester City’s involvement in Charles’s development began when he was approximately seven. There was no transfer fee paid to another professional club to acquire a developed teenage player. Instead there was a long-term investment beginning in the pre-academy, continuing through formal Academy registration from Under-9 and encompassing years of coaching and competition, Under-18 football, Elite Development Squad football, first-team training and eventually a Premier League debut.

At 19, City converted part of the value created by that development into an immediate transfer receipt of £10.5 million guaranteed, with the Southampton transaction reportedly capable of rising to £15 million.

They simultaneously retained contractual exposure to his future development. Three years later, Charles’s transfer to Fulham has potentially generated a further multimillion-pound payment.

Depending upon the precise sell-on mechanism and achievement of the various add-ons, Manchester City’s cumulative receipts associated with Charles could therefore move well beyond the original £10.5 million and potentially towards the high teens.

It is important to describe that correctly. This isn’t literally £15 million or £19 million of “profit”. Manchester City spent considerable money developing Charles for more than a decade. Academies require coaches, facilities, medical provision, sports science, education, analysis, safeguarding, recruitment and countless other resources. There is a real development cost.

But there is no conventional transfer acquisition fee being amortised in the way there would be with a player bought from another professional club.

That makes the economic value generated by successful Academy development particularly powerful, and it is why the Shea Charles story is about far more than one transfer.

Development and Financial Return Are Not Competing Objectives

There can sometimes be discomfort when academy development and money are discussed together. Youth development should, rightly, be about the player, but that doesn’t mean financial return is somehow illegitimate.

In fact, the Charles journey demonstrates how the two objectives can align.

Manchester City developed him to a point where he was ready for senior football, but City could not realistically promise him the volume of senior football he needed. Southampton could. City therefore allowed the player to leave permanently rather than retaining him indefinitely within a pathway that might no longer have served his development.

Charles got opportunity. Southampton got a highly developed young footballer. Manchester City received substantial value for the development work undertaken over the previous decade-plus and retained a financial interest in what happened next.

That is not development being sacrificed for economics. It is development creating economics.

The £30 Million Question: Did Shea Charles “Make It”?

Which brings us back to the question with which we started.

Did Shea Charles make it at Manchester City?

If the test is 100 Manchester City first-team appearances, the answer is no. The same applies if the threshold is 50, or even ten.

He made one appearance lasting 27 minutes.

But perhaps that is the wrong test.

Manchester City’s relationship with Charles began when he was a seven-year-old boy within its pre-academy development environment. At Under-9, he formally entered the Academy and the club then helped develop him through virtually every stage of the pathway.

He became a national age-group player, an Academy champion, an EDS player and then EDS captain. He became a senior international and eventually a Manchester City first-team player.

When the appropriate next developmental environment was no longer Manchester City’s Academy, he moved into senior football. He became a Championship player, a promotion winner, a club Player of the Year, Northern Ireland’s youngest-ever captain and an established senior professional.

Now, at 22, he is Northern Ireland’s most expensive footballer in history, following a transfer potentially worth £30 million.

Manchester City also turned that development journey into potentially well over £10 million and possibly approaching £20 million in cumulative transfer-related receipts, depending upon the original and subsequent add-ons and the precise operation of the sell-on clause.

So did Shea Charles make it?

Absolutely. He just didn’t make his career at Manchester City.

Academy Success Cannot Be Measured by One Destination

That distinction matters because the overwhelming majority of children entering an elite academy will never become established first-team players at that club.

At Manchester City, the challenge is greater still. An Academy player isn’t simply trying to become good enough for professional football; he is potentially trying to become good enough to play for one of the strongest first teams in world football.

Those are very different thresholds.

If the only definition of successful development is producing a player capable of displacing world-class internationals, then even an extraordinary academy will appear to fail far more often than it succeeds.

But that isn’t what development should mean.

An elite academy should also be judged by whether it prepares young people to progress. For some, progression will mean Manchester City’s first team. For others, it will mean another Premier League club, the Championship, League One, League Two, European football or international football. For others still, the eventual destination will be something outside professional football altogether.

The destination will be different for every player.

The responsibility of development is to prepare them as well as possible for that destination.

From Player Development to Value Creation

There is also a wider strategic lesson. An Academy can create sporting value without the player becoming a first-team regular, and it can create considerable financial value at the same time.

The Charles transaction illustrates a sophisticated model: develop the player, progress him through the pathway, recognise when another environment offers something the current one cannot, allow him to move, realise part of the value already created, protect exposure to future value and then benefit if the player continues to develop.

That final point is particularly important.

A sell-on clause effectively allows the developing club to participate economically in development that happens after the player leaves. Manchester City had already spent more than a decade helping develop Shea Charles. Southampton then invested three further years in his senior development, including facilitating the loan to Sheffield Wednesday. Fulham are now purchasing the player those combined environments helped create.

The value chain is visible.

City’s 2023 negotiation ensured that the club which undertook the earliest and longest part of that development journey remained economically connected to its eventual outcome.

More Than a Production Line

There is sometimes a tendency to describe successful academies as “production lines”. The phrase is understandable, but it risks making player development sound mechanical.

Children aren’t products, development isn’t linear and careers don’t follow predetermined routes.

Shea Charles’s journey demonstrates that perfectly. His pathway has encompassed pre-academy development, Academy football, a professional contract, Under-18 football, the Elite Development Squad, captaincy, international football, first-team training, a Premier League debut, permanent transfer, Championship football, promotion, a loan, Player of the Year recognition, international captaincy, another permanent transfer and Premier League football again.

Now add another milestone: Northern Ireland’s record transfer.

At several points, his development environment changed. But the pathway continued.

That may ultimately be one of the most important lessons from his story.

The success of an Academy pathway should not be determined solely by where the player finishes it. It should also be determined by what the pathway has prepared that player to become.

27 Minutes Tell Us Almost Nothing

If we looked only at Shea Charles’s Manchester City first-team statistics, we would see one appearance and 27 Premier League minutes.

That tells us almost nothing about the success of his development.

A more meaningful assessment would recognise that he was with Manchester City from approximately seven years old, formally entered the Academy from Under-9, spent more than a decade developing within City’s pathway, captained the EDS, became a senior international while still a City development player and subsequently became Northern Ireland’s youngest-ever captain.

The economics tell another part of the story. More than £10 million was generated when he first left City, a second multimillion-pound return has potentially been generated three years later and the player himself has now commanded a subsequent transfer worth up to £30 million.

At 22, he is back in the Premier League as Northern Ireland’s most expensive footballer in history.

Those numbers tell a very different story from 27 minutes.

Shea Charles may only have played 27 minutes of senior football for Manchester City, but Manchester City didn’t merely develop a player capable of playing 27 minutes for Manchester City.

They helped develop Northern Ireland’s most expensive footballer.

Perhaps that is a better way to understand what a successful elite Academy pathway can really achieve.

A Personal Footnote

There is a personal element to this story for me too. I had the privilege of watching Shea play for Manchester City’s Elite Development Squad over a number of years.

What we see now at senior level did not suddenly appear when he left Manchester City. You could see the quality, composure, tactical intelligence and maturity developing through those Academy years.

That is perhaps why his journey is such an interesting one to reflect upon. Those of us who spend time around Academy football inevitably see talented young players at different points in their development. We see snapshots of a journey without necessarily knowing where that journey will eventually take them.

In Shea Charles’s case, it has taken him from Manchester City’s pre-academy as a seven-year-old, through the Academy, to EDS captain, Premier League debutant, senior international, Northern Ireland captain and now the most expensive Northern Irish footballer of all time.

And he is still only 22.

Having watched part of that journey, I wish Shea every success at Fulham and in the next stage of his career. More importantly, I hope the journey continues, because perhaps the most exciting thing about this particular Academy success story is it is likely to be still some considerable way from being finished.

The Football Association’s FutureFit reforms take effect for the 2026/27 season and introduce significant changes to the playing formats through which children experience youth football.

The headline change is familiar: 3v3 becomes the entry format at Under 7, while 5v5 continues at Under 8 before children progress through larger formats as they get older.

The FA describes the changes as part of its wider Youth Development Framework and says that all changes to youth football across England will be introduced for the start of the 2026/27 season. Its FutureFit material expressly describes 3v3 as the U7 entry format.

Much of the debate surrounding those changes has focused on their developmental merits.

This article considers something different.

What do the new rules actually mean for the Pre-Academies operated by professional football clubs?

That question is more complicated than it might initially appear.

An examination of the Premier League Youth Development Rules, the FA Handbook and the FutureFit materials revealed an apparent tension between the documents. I therefore asked the FA’s FutureFit team directly to clarify how the regulatory framework is intended to operate.

Its response is illuminating.

It identifies the formal rule through which the new formats take effect. It also acknowledges an issue with the terminology used within the Premier League’s Youth Development Rules.

And, perhaps most interestingly, the Rules provide a much clearer answer to the position of children under six than the FutureFit publicity material alone might suggest.

The Professional Pre-Academy

The starting point is understanding what a Pre-Academy actually is.

Under the Premier League Youth Development Rules, a Development Centre is an establishment operated by a professional club for the coaching of children who are not yet Academy Players but who have the potential to become so.

Within that structure sits the Pre-Academy Training Centre.

The Premier League defines it as a Development Centre operated by a club to identify young players who have the potential to become registered Academy Players upon commencement of their Under 9 year.

That distinction matters.

Formal Academy registration begins at U9. The Pre-Academy therefore occupies the space immediately before registration: a developmental and talent-identification environment involving some of the youngest children within professional football.

The question is what football those children may actually play.

The Premier League’s Mandatory Requirement

For the 2025/26 season, the Premier League Rules provided that matches within the relevant Development Centre framework:

“must comply with The FA’s Laws of the Game for Small-Sided Football.”

For 2026/27, despite the introduction of FutureFit, the requirement has effectively been carried forward unchanged.

The significance of the word “must” should not be overlooked.

This is not guidance.

It is not expressed as a recommendation.

The Premier League has imposed a mandatory requirement that the relevant matches comply with the FA’s applicable Laws.

At first sight, that appears straightforward. If the FA changes its youth playing formats, professional clubs must follow them.

But examining the documents more closely revealed a problem.

Looking for 3v3 in the Obvious Place

If a Premier League Rule directs the reader to “The FA’s Laws of the Game for Small-Sided Football”, the obvious place to look is the FA Handbook.

The 2026/27 FA Handbook is being published section by section, with the updated Rules and Regulations generally effective from 1 July 2026. Its contents include both Section 30, dealing with the Standard Code of Rules for Mini-Soccer and Youth Football Competitions, and Section 34, entitled Small-Sided Football.

Section 34 therefore appeared to be the natural destination.

But it does not provide the expected answer.

Section 34 does not prescribe U7 as 3v3.

It does not establish FutureFit.

Indeed, the introductory provisions describe laws for 5, 6 and 7-a-side football and expressly distinguish those laws from Mini-Soccer.

Yet the Premier League’s rule directs Pre-Academy matches towards the FA’s “Laws of the Game for Small-Sided Football.”

That created an apparent regulatory tension.

FutureFit Says Something Different

Outside Section 34, the FA’s FutureFit material is unequivocal about the change it intends.

The FA says that from 2026/27:

3v3 will be the entry format for players at U7s.

It also states that the changes become mandatory for the 2026/27 season.

Detailed FA League Guidance then explains how 3v3 should operate.

That guidance provides for multiple small pitches, short games and maximum participation. It sets out a specific 3v3 code in which there are no goalkeepers or penalty areas, no substitutes and no conventional match officials.

The guidance also explains how leagues should administer fixtures, register teams and organise the transition from 3v3 at U7 to 5v5 at U8.

The practical intention is therefore clear.

The regulatory route was less obvious.

If FutureFit says U7 is 3v3, but Section 34 of the FA Handbook does not, how does the Premier League’s requirement to comply with the FA’s Small-Sided Football Laws operate?

I Asked the FA

To resolve that question, I contacted the FA’s dedicated FutureFit team and asked specifically whether the Premier League requirement means professional club Pre-Academies must adopt the FutureFit formats.

The FA’s response was particularly interesting.

It identified the Premier League’s reference to the “Laws of the Game for Small-Sided Football” as the underlying issue.

The FA told me that the reference:

“really should be changed to reference ‘The Mini-Soccer and Youth Futsal Handbook’.”

That clarification is significant.

It confirms that the difficulty in reconciling the Premier League Rule with Section 34 was not simply semantic.

The Premier League Rule is directing the reader towards terminology that the FA itself says should be updated.

The FA contrasted the Premier League wording with the Standard Code of Rules for Youth Competitions, where the regulatory drafting expressly differentiates between the ordinary Laws of the Game, the Mini-Soccer and Youth Futsal Handbook and the FA’s Guide to 9v9 Football.

In other words, the issue is not whether FutureFit exists.

The issue is that the cross-reference within the professional game’s Youth Development Rules does not appear to have kept pace with the architecture through which the FA now regulates children’s playing formats.

So Where Is FutureFit Actually Made Mandatory?

The FA also answered the second and perhaps most important question.

The legal basis is not Section 34.

It sits within Section 8 – Rules of the Association.

The relevant provisions apply to children who are not registered as Academy Players. That description is particularly important in the Pre-Academy context: by definition, the children attending these programmes have not yet become registered Academy Players.

The 2026/27 Rules expressly provide that matches involving those children must be played according to the correct version of the Laws appropriate to the specified format.

Then comes Rule C.158.

It prescribes the permitted formats by age.

For a child aged six, the eligible age group is Under 7 and the maximum permitted format is 3v3.

For a child aged seven, the Under 8 maximum is 5v5.

The table then continues the revised FutureFit progression through the older age groups.

That is the missing regulatory link.

FutureFit is not dependent upon Section 34 somehow being interpreted to contain a 3v3 format that does not appear within it.

The age-and-format restrictions are embedded directly within the FA’s Rules of Association.

An Important Legal Nuance: “Maximum Permitted Format”

There is an important qualification.

Rule C.158 does not simply state:

U7 must play 3v3.

It provides that children shall not participate in a match between sides containing more than the stated number of players and describes 3v3 as the maximum permitted format for U7.

That distinction matters.

It means the regulatory proposition is more precisely expressed as:

An U7 child cannot play in a match exceeding 3v3.

The FA’s FutureFit policy establishes 3v3 as the U7 entry format, but Rule C.158 establishes the legal ceiling. The FA’s own guidance elsewhere similarly describes formats as maximum formats and acknowledges that smaller formats can be used.

For a professional Pre-Academy, therefore, the important point is not merely that FutureFit recommends 3v3.

The FA Rules themselves prevent an U7 child covered by those provisions from playing in a larger-sided match.

That is considerably stronger.

What Does That Mean for U7 Pre-Academy Games?

The answer now appears much clearer.

A child attending a professional club’s Pre-Academy is not yet a registered Academy Player.

The FA Rules expressly state that the provisions containing C.157 and C.158 apply to “any child not registered as an Academy Player.”

That appears to capture Pre-Academy children directly.

For U7, Rule C.158 establishes 3v3 as the maximum permitted format.

Accordingly, whatever uncertainty exists within the Premier League’s cross-reference, it is difficult to see a regulatory basis upon which a professional club could treat U7 Pre-Academy matches as exempt from the FA’s age-and-format restriction, absent some separate dispensation or provision.

The fact that a child is being coached by a professional club does not make that child an Academy Player before U9.

Indeed, that is the very reason the Pre-Academy category exists.

And U8?

The same analysis applies.

For U8, the maximum permitted format under C.158 is 5v5.

Therefore, the practical Pre-Academy pathway appears to be:

U7 – maximum 3v3

U8 – maximum 5v5

before the child becomes eligible to register formally as an Academy Player at U9.

The Premier League’s Youth Development Rules and the FA’s Rules therefore appear capable of being reconciled as to the substantive outcome.

The difficulty lies in the Premier League’s description of the FA rules with which its clubs must comply.

And the FA has now acknowledged that this reference should be changed.

Then Comes U6

This is perhaps the most interesting part of the framework.

FutureFit does not prescribe an U6 match format.

That initially creates an obvious question for professional clubs because Pre-Academy programmes can involve children before U7.

Why, if professional clubs operate with children of that age, is there no equivalent FutureFit format?

Rule C.157 provides the answer.

It states:

“A child below the age of six shall not play, and shall not be permitted or encouraged to play, in a match.”

That is much stronger than an absence of guidance.

It is an express prohibition.

There is no U6 FutureFit match format because, while below the age of six, a child cannot play in a match.

That does not mean a professional club cannot coach a child below six.

It does not appear to prevent training, play-based activities or participation in a Pre-Academy developmental environment.

But there is a clear legal distinction between training or developmental activity and a match.

For professional Pre-Academies operating with very young children, that distinction matters.

The Child Who Turns Six During the Season

There is a further nuance.

The Rules specifically contemplate children who turn six after 31 August.

Rule C.159 provides that children aged six on 31 August, together with those who turn six during the playing season, are classed as U7 players for that season.

Rule C.160 then imposes an additional restriction.

Although children can ordinarily “play up” one age group, a child who reaches six after 31 August may play only at U7 and cannot play at U8 during that season.

That creates an unusual position for professional Pre-Academies.

A child may be attending a club’s developmental programme while still five.

While five, Rule C.157 prevents that child from playing in a match.

Upon turning six, that prohibition falls away and the child enters the U7 regulatory category.

But the maximum match format then available is 3v3.

And that child cannot be moved into U8 5v5 during that season.

That is a highly relevant point for professional clubs whose Pre-Academy structures do not necessarily mirror conventional grassroots age-group structures.

Training Is Not Necessarily a Match

There is an important distinction to preserve.

None of this means that every football activity involving three U7 children against another three automatically has to resemble an organised grassroots league fixture.

Nor does Rule C.157 appear, on its face, to prohibit football coaching for children under six.

The critical regulatory concept is the match.

That creates a practical question for professional clubs:

Where is the boundary between a training game within a coaching session and a match for the purposes of the FA Rules?

For most ordinary grassroots football, the distinction may be obvious.

Within a professional Pre-Academy, it can be less so.

Clubs regularly create highly organised football environments involving different groups of children, opposition from other professional clubs, structured playing periods and coaching staff.

Whether a particular activity amounts to training, an internal game or a “match” is therefore more than a question of terminology.

If it is a match, the FA age and format restrictions engage.

The Goalkeeper Consequence

FutureFit also produces a particular consequence for goalkeeper development within Pre-Academies.

The FA’s 3v3 rules expressly provide:

“There are no goalkeepers and no penalty areas.”

That means the regulatory pathway appears to produce the following sequence:

Below six: no matches.

U7: matches permitted, but no larger than 3v3; the prescribed 3v3 format has no goalkeeper.

U8: 5v5 becomes the maximum permitted format and the conventional goalkeeper role enters the pathway.

U9: formal Academy registration becomes possible.

That has potentially significant consequences for goalkeeper identification.

It does not prevent professional clubs from coaching goalkeeping skills before U8.

But if the FutureFit match pathway is followed, there is effectively only one Pre-Academy season—U8—in which a child can be observed playing the conventional specialist goalkeeper role in matches before becoming eligible for Academy registration.

That is not an argument for or against FutureFit.

It is simply a consequence of the regulatory structure.

And it may require professional clubs to reconsider how they identify goalkeeper potential before U9.

A Grassroots Reform With Professional-Game Consequences

FutureFit has largely been communicated through the language of grassroots football.

The League Guidance, for example, is explicitly concerned with how leagues administer 3v3 fixtures, register teams, manage squads and organise matchdays.

But the FA Rules themselves are broader.

The relevant section expressly applies to any child not registered as an Academy Player.

That is why FutureFit cannot necessarily be regarded simply as a grassroots reform with no consequence for the professional game.

Pre-Academy players occupy precisely the regulatory territory between grassroots football and registered Academy football.

They may be training within some of the most sophisticated professional development environments in the country, but legally they have not yet crossed the threshold into Academy Player registration.

That makes the wording of the FA Rules particularly important.

The Premier League Rule Still Deserves Attention

The substantive position is therefore considerably clearer following the FA’s response.

But the drafting issue within the Premier League Youth Development Rules remains.

The Premier League requires mandatory compliance with the FA framework.

Yet the terminology used to identify that framework directs the reader towards “The FA’s Laws of the Game for Small-Sided Football.”

The FA itself has now said that this “really should be changed” to reference the Mini-Soccer and Youth Futsal Handbook.

That matters.

Rules governing children—particularly rules governing the earliest stages of the professional talent pathway—should be capable of being understood by clubs, coaches and parents without having to reconstruct the regulatory chain across several different publications.

The fact that the ultimate substantive answer can be found elsewhere does not remove the desirability of accurate cross-referencing within the Premier League Handbook.

So What Does FutureFit Mean for Professional Pre-Academies?

Putting the various provisions together, the position for 2026/27 appears to be:

For children below six: they may participate in appropriate coaching and developmental activity, but Rule C.157 expressly prohibits them from playing, or being permitted or encouraged to play, in a match.

Once a child reaches six: the child falls within the U7 framework. Under Rule C.158, 3v3 is the maximum permitted match format.

At U8: 5v5 is the maximum permitted match format.

For a child who turns six after 31 August: once six, that child is treated as U7 for the season and cannot “play up” into U8.

For goalkeepers: the prescribed U7 3v3 format contains no goalkeeper, meaning U8 becomes the first conventional Pre-Academy match environment containing that specialist position.

There remains a separate practical question around precisely how the FA’s FutureFit match guidance applies to professional Pre-Academy environments, particularly where activities do not resemble conventional league fixtures.

That may warrant further clarification.

But the underlying age-and-format restrictions themselves are now much easier to identify.

Regulatory Clarity Matters

There is a broader lesson here.

FutureFit changes far more than the number of children standing on a football pitch.

It changes the regulatory environment in which the youngest children experience organised football.

For grassroots clubs, much of that transition is being managed through leagues and County FAs.

For professional Pre-Academies, the position is more unusual.

They operate under Premier League Youth Development Rules while working with children who, before U9, remain outside the formal Academy Player registration framework and therefore fall within FA rules expressly governing children who are not Academy Players.

That interaction deserves to be clearly articulated.

The FA’s response provides considerable clarity. It identifies Rules C.157 and C.158 as critical provisions and, importantly, acknowledges that the Premier League’s reference to the FA’s Small-Sided Football Laws should instead point towards the appropriate Mini-Soccer framework.

That clarification resolves much of the apparent contradiction.

But it also demonstrates why the question was worth asking.

When governing rules incorporate another body’s rules by reference, the terminology and cross-references matter.

When those rules concern children as young as five and six, they matter even more.

FutureFit may have been developed principally as a reform of youth football.

From 2026/27, however, its regulatory consequences reach directly into the Pre-Academies of professional football clubs.

And that means clubs need clarity not simply about the philosophy behind the new formats, but about what children can actually play, at what age, and under which rules.

What James Trafford’s journey tells us about how elite academies create value

James Trafford is set to complete a move to Leeds United for around £40 million, making him the most expensive goalkeepers in British football. Much of the discussion will understandably centre on whether Leeds have secured an outstanding young goalkeeper, whether Manchester City have negotiated another excellent deal and what the transfer means for both clubs in purely footballing terms.

Yet the fee itself is only the final chapter in a much longer story. Long before Trafford became an England international or attracted the largest transfer fees ever paid for a goalkeeper, he was simply a young boy growing up in Cumbria, playing football on the family farm, attending inexpensive community coaching sessions and enjoying grassroots football with Cockermouth AFC. By the time Manchester City recruited him from Carlisle United at the age of twelve, years of development had already taken place.

Recognising that does not diminish Manchester City’s achievement. In fact, it highlights the remarkable work that elite academies undertake. Their role is not to create footballers from nothing but to identify exceptional potential, inherit it and then maximise it through years of sustained investment.

Too often, academy football is viewed through the narrow lens of first-team appearances or transfer fees. Both are important measures of success, but neither explains how that success was achieved. Trafford’s journey provides a compelling reminder that player development is a long-term process involving multiple environments, each contributing something different before the next stage of the pathway begins.

Manchester City saw something in a twelve-year-old that justified a significant long-term commitment. That commitment extended far beyond coaching sessions. It included elite technical development, sports science, education, medical provision, performance analysis, psychological support and carefully managed loan experiences, each designed to expose Trafford to progressively greater challenges at exactly the right stage of his development. None of this happens by accident. It reflects years of planning, expertise and investment without any guarantee that the player will ultimately reach the Premier League.

That uncertainty is often overlooked when discussing academy football. Thousands of young players enter elite academies every year. Only a small proportion will establish long professional careers, while fewer still will represent their country or command transfer fees of this magnitude. Every academy therefore operates by investing in potential rather than certainty. Trafford’s career demonstrates what can happen when talent identification, coaching, opportunity and individual commitment align over many years.

It is also worth remembering that Trafford’s pathway was anything but predictable. He has spoken openly about only becoming a goalkeeper after another goalkeeper was absent during a session at Carlisle United, giving him an unexpected opportunity to play in goal. Before that, his football consisted of the experiences familiar to countless children across the country: kicking a ball against the side of the shed, playing with friends and attending local coaching sessions. Those experiences formed part of his development just as surely as the coaching he later received at Manchester City.

For me, this raises an interesting question about how we think about value creation within academy football. Financial value does not suddenly appear when a player reaches the first team or completes a transfer. Instead, it accumulates gradually as different environments add to a player’s development. Families build confidence and resilience. Grassroots clubs foster enjoyment and a love of the game. Local academies introduce structured coaching. Elite academies refine technical, tactical and psychological performance, while senior football tests those qualities under increasing pressure. Every stage inherits the work of the one before and contributes to the player who eventually emerges.

Manchester City’s academy illustrates this principle exceptionally well. The club’s success is not simply measured by producing first-team players but by consistently identifying high-potential young footballers and creating environments in which they can maximise that potential. Sometimes that results in players becoming established members of City’s own first team. In other cases, as with Trafford, it produces England internationals whose careers continue elsewhere while still generating significant value for the club that invested in their development.

That should not be viewed as a compromise. It is a demonstration of the academy achieving its purpose. Trafford leaves Manchester City not as a player who failed to make the grade but as one of England’s most highly regarded young goalkeepers, having benefited from over a decade of elite development. Manchester City, in turn, realise the financial return that allows continued investment in facilities, staff and the next generation of academy players. Leeds United acquire a goalkeeper entering what should be the prime years of his career. The player progresses, the selling club benefits and the buying club acquires proven quality. It is difficult to describe that outcome as anything other than a success for everyone involved.

There is, however, another lesson that Trafford’s story reinforces. The best academies understand that technical development alone is never enough. Their role is to develop people as well as players, recognising that confidence, resilience, decision-making, emotional maturity and character are every bit as important as distribution, positioning or shot-stopping. Those qualities ultimately underpin performance, and performance is what creates long-term sporting and financial value.

Perhaps that is why the discussion around transfer fees should be reframed. Rather than asking whether a player is worth £40 million, we might instead ask how £40 million of value was created in the first place. The answer is not found in a single coaching session, a single academy or a single transfer. It lies in years of deliberate investment, thoughtful coaching, carefully managed experiences and a player willing to embrace every opportunity presented to him.

James Trafford’s transfer is therefore about far more than a goalkeeper changing clubs. It is an illustration of how modern player development works when every part of the pathway functions as it should. A child arrives with potential, an academy recognises that potential and invests in it over many years, and the result is an England international whose development has benefited the player, the club and the wider game.

For me, that is the real story. The £40 million transfer is simply the visible outcome of years of invisible work. Great academies do not create value because players are eventually sold. They create value because they help young people maximise their potential, and when that happens, sporting success and commercial success often follow together.

Talent identification has always been one of football’s greatest challenges.

Every academy is trying to answer the same fundamental question: which young players have the greatest potential to succeed in the professional game?

While every club has its own history, identity and methodology, the purpose of academy recruitment remains remarkably consistent. Scouts are not selecting the best players for today. They are attempting to identify those with the greatest potential for tomorrow.

Performance matters, of course. Outstanding performances often provide evidence of underlying potential. However, recruitment in elite academy football has never simply been about rewarding current performance. It has always been about predicting future development.

With that in mind, it is interesting to examine the player development philosophies of three of Europe’s leading academies: Real Madrid in Spain, Sporting CP in Portugal and Manchester City in England.

Although they operate in different football cultures and have developed their own approaches, their philosophies reveal a striking degree of alignment. More importantly, they provide valuable insight into how elite academies increasingly define potential.

Talent Develops in Different Ways

Perhaps the most immediately striking philosophy comes from Real Madrid.

Rather than presenting a single ideal player profile, their framework recognises several different developmental journeys. They identify differential players, early developers, late developers and hidden talents, placing one word at the centre of the model: variety.

That choice of language is significant.

It reflects an understanding that talent rarely follows a uniform path. Some young players demonstrate exceptional ability from an early age. Others develop more gradually, with physical, technical or psychological qualities emerging later. Some remain hidden simply because they have not yet encountered the right environment or opportunity to demonstrate their potential.

This is an important reminder that academy recruitment is not about finding one type of player. It is about recognising that excellence can emerge through multiple developmental pathways.

It also reflects an appreciation of one of youth football’s greatest challenges. Children mature at different rates. Early physical development can sometimes mask long-term potential, while later developers may initially be overlooked despite possessing outstanding technical or cognitive qualities.

Recognising those different developmental journeys requires patience, experience and an appreciation that today’s strongest performer may not necessarily become tomorrow’s best player.

Understanding How Players Solve Football Problems

Sporting CP approaches talent identification from a different perspective.

Their player profile focuses less on measurable outputs and more on how players interact with the game itself.

The characteristics they identify include how a player moves, controls space, manipulates the ball, maintains rhythm, perceives information, reacts to changing situations, searches for the game and expresses themselves within it.

What is particularly interesting is what is absent.

There is little emphasis on goals scored, physical dominance or statistical outputs. Instead, the emphasis is placed on behaviours that reveal football intelligence.

Rather than simply asking what a player does, Sporting appear to ask how they do it.

How quickly do they recognise situations?

How effectively do they adapt?

How naturally do they solve problems?

These qualities are considerably more difficult to observe than goals or assists, yet they may prove far more predictive of long-term success. Modern football increasingly rewards players capable of processing information quickly, adapting to constantly changing situations and making effective decisions under pressure.

In that context, technical execution cannot be separated from perception, awareness and decision-making.

Developing the Person as Well as the Player

Manchester City’s framework extends the conversation even further.

Alongside technical ability, tactical intelligence and athletic fundamentals sit a series of characteristics that extend beyond football itself.

Curiosity and learning mindset.

Resilience and pathway resilience.

Practice ethic.

Intrinsic motivation.

Positive social influence.

Family support.

Perhaps one of the most thought-provoking characteristics is the recognition of game influence beyond size, a simple phrase that acknowledges that physical maturity alone should never define future potential.

Collectively, these characteristics suggest that Manchester City view player development as inseparable from human development.

Technical ability remains essential, but whether that ability ultimately flourishes may depend just as much upon motivation, resilience, adaptability and the capacity to learn.

This reflects an increasingly holistic understanding of talent. Successful careers are rarely built upon technical qualities alone. They are shaped by how individuals respond to setbacks, embrace learning, manage challenge and continue developing over many years.

More Similar Than Different

While each academy expresses its philosophy differently, the similarities are arguably more striking than the differences.

Real Madrid reminds us that talent develops through multiple pathways.

Sporting CP focuses on understanding how players perceive, interpret and solve football problems.

Manchester City broadens the discussion to include the psychological and environmental characteristics that support long-term development.

Together, these philosophies suggest that elite academy recruitment is becoming increasingly multidimensional.

Technical quality remains fundamental.

Football intelligence matters.

Psychological characteristics matter.

Developmental diversity matters.

The environment surrounding the child matters.

None of these dimensions exist in isolation. Instead, they interact to create a richer understanding of potential than technical ability or match performance alone could ever provide.

From Performance to Potential

It would be wrong to suggest that performance is unimportant. On the contrary, performance often provides some of the strongest evidence of underlying potential.

However, the challenge for academy recruitment has always been distinguishing between current performance and future potential.

One player may dominate because they are physically more mature.

Another may influence games through superior decision-making despite being smaller or less physically developed.

A third may show only occasional flashes of quality but possess exceptional learning capacity and resilience that will accelerate future development.

The role of recruitment is not simply to identify who performs best today. It is to understand why that performance occurs and whether the underlying characteristics are likely to support continued progression over the coming years.

That is a far more demanding task.

The Wider Lesson

Perhaps the most interesting conclusion is not that three leading academies have different philosophies, but that they share so many underlying principles.

Across Spain, Portugal and England, there appears to be growing recognition that identifying future talent requires a broader understanding of development.

Potential is not defined solely by technical ability.

Nor is it defined solely by physical performance.

Instead, it emerges through the interaction of technical, tactical, psychological, social and developmental characteristics that evolve over time.

For coaches, scouts and academy leaders, that may be the most important message of all.

Presentation slides and recruitment frameworks provide useful guidance, but their true value lies in whether they shape everyday practice. The real test of any philosophy is not how clearly it is presented in a conference room, but how consistently it informs the conversations, observations and decisions made every week on training grounds and at selection meetings.

If the philosophies of Real Madrid, Sporting CP and Manchester City tell us anything, it is that elite academy recruitment is becoming less about identifying the best young player in front of us and more about understanding who possesses the greatest capacity to learn, adapt and develop over time.

Ultimately, that may be the most sophisticated definition of potential.