Shortly after the club-record signing of Jack Grealish was announced last summer, Pep Guardiola explained how Manchester City could afford the signing without risking any Financial Fair Play awkwardness.
“When we could spend this amount of money, it’s because we sell for almost £60m,” Guardiola said. “We sell young players from the academy for £60m.” The maths was slightly awry (Lukas Nmecha, Angelino and Jack Harrison were sold for a shade over £35m), but Guardiola’s admission was not. Manchester City had established a unique strategy: an academy recruitment model that indirectly fuelled first-team improvement and also helped sign Erling Haaland.
Chelsea were the first English club to undertake a “loan farm” strategy. Their policy was to recruit a large number of children into their academy at a young age. Those who progressed through the club would then be made available for loan – usually to a handful of clubs with whom Chelsea had established a mutual understanding – to enhance their development.
The ultimate aim was to produce players for the first team, with those who weren’t quite up to that task sold for good money. The success stories are obvious: Mason Mount was loaned to Vitesse Arnhem and Derby County, Reece James to Wigan, Andreas Christensen to Borussia Mönchengladbach. So too are the sales: Nathan Ake, Dominic Solanke, Patrick van Aanholt, Tammy Abraham, Fikayo Tomori. All of those joined Chelsea at 16 or under.
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This is all made smooth by the City Football Group nexus of clubs that has Manchester City at its head. Replacing the unofficial arrangements Chelsea had – Vitesse or wherever a former player happened to be managing – is a formalised agreement through membership of the same financial family. Last season alone, City loaned four players to Troyes in Ligue 1; Lommel and Girona are other options. The purchase of Palermo means that CFG have clubs in four of Europe’s five major leagues.
Since 2018, Manchester City have sold 14 players (Angelino, Harrison, Nmecha, Pablo Maffeo, Arijanet Muric, Brahim Diaz, Angus Gunn, Jason Denayer, Bersant Celina, Olarenwaju Kayode, Pedro Porro, Gavin Bazuna, Romeo Lavia, Ko Itakura) for fees of roughly £120m. Those 14 players started six league games for Manchester City between them. Issa Kabore could be next; Nottingham Forest had a £17m bid rejected before looking elsewhere. Kabore has also never played for City but was on loan at Troyes last season and starred in the Africa Cup of Nations.
As with Chelsea, there will be criticism for the moral aspect of the model. Chelsea stood accused of industrialising – and even dehumanising – academy kids by using them as mere commodities. It always felt a little one-eyed; Chelsea were merely organising and formalising strategies that already existed. If your argument is against the commodifying of young footballers to pursue a capitalist vision, welcome to football in the 21st century.
You can decry it as another branch of football’s money tree. You can scoff at Guardiola’s insistence that selling three players last summer funded the purchase of Grealish. But you cannot doubt the success of the model and that success is only likely to increase. It works for them, it works for the clubs in their network and it works for those players who use their loan farm as a stepping stone to an elite career.
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