For more than a decade Chelsea’s academy has been peerless. Reece James, Andreas Christensen, Mason Mount and Tammy Abraham are just four of the 20-plus senior internationals to have graduated since 2012.
Chelsea have won six of the past 12 FA Youth Cups and two Uefa Youth Leagues. Six members of the current England men’s squad – Levi Colwill, Marc Guehi, Fikayo Tomori, Conor Gallagher, Declan Rice and Eddie Nketiah – spent significant portions of their youths at Cobham. This is an elite academy producing elite talent.
Yet as with so many things, Chelsea’s new ownership already appear to have fundamentally jeopardised one of the club’s greatest assets.
They have been belligerent in their plan to hoard some of the finest young talent in world football, but in doing so they may well be spurning the diamonds they already possess.
Signing a precocious Manchester City academy talent like Cole Palmer for £42.5m is all well and good, but not when it is paid for by the sales of their own highly-rated academy talents like Lewis Hall. Callum Hudson-Odoi has joined Nottingham Forest and the club was also willing to sanction the sale of Ian Maatsen.
Chelsea have signed 11 first-team players this summer, all of whom are 25 or under, and they now have 30 players on contracts of five years or more.
This heavily restricts potential pathways into certain positions for academy products.
Two of the last three winners of Chelsea’s “Academy Player of the Season” award, Hall and Tino Livramento, now play for Newcastle.
The likes of James and Levi Colwill have become seemingly immovable figures in the first team, but they are rapidly becoming exceptions to a gruesome rule.
The U21 squad is being steadily dominated by new recruits too. This summer alone, six 18-year-olds have joined, following five 17-19-year-olds last summer.
Meanwhile, 18 academy products aged between 18-21 who never played a Premier League minute were either released or sold this summer. Most had been at Cobham more than five years, some 12 or 13. True homegrown talents are being forced out.
“If you’re talking about right now, our age groups are full of ability, there are some top players coming through,” Parth Gupta, co-founder of fan channel and podcast The Chelsea Spot, explains.
“We’re still fine for quality, still winning trophies from U13s to U18s. But now you’re going to start seeing players leaving Cobham a lot earlier on, because of what I call ‘the push’.
“Signings get pushed ahead of academy products whether that’s fair or not, and our own players will want to start moving to clubs like Newcastle or Brighton, where they then benefit from ‘the push’.
“There’s also a feeling around Cobham that players are being used for FFP – players may feel it’s better to settle somewhere there’s a better path to the first team. If it continues the way it has over the last 12 months, you’re going to see some top prospects leaving.”
FFP have become the three most important letters at Chelsea this summer, with academy products playing a crucial, if unsavoury, role in combatting financial regulations.
As Cobham-produced players represent pure profit in accounting terms, with no signing fee to balance against the income, Chelsea have made a conscious effort to sell academy products and counteract their £450m summer expenditure. Mount, Lewis Hall, Ethan Ampadu and Ruben Loftus-Cheek all left for healthy fees, with Hall’s permanent departure delayed until next summer to begin the 2024-25 accounting project early.
There have long been whispers of Chelsea effectively using their academy as a cash cow, developing players with the sole intention of selling them the moment they reach first-team readiness, as has happened with Hall and Maatsen.
As sports psychotherapist Gary Bloom argues, this may directly lead to starlets choosing not to join Cobham.
“Players need to see a clear pathway for first team football, and if they don’t they can get very discouraged,” he tells i. “There’s nothing more demotivating than knowing you’re only going to play in dead men’s shoes. Some won’t even manage that.”
Since Todd Boehly took over, Chelsea’s academy has implemented their own Vision 2030. Underpinned by five key principles, including a quarter of first-team players being academy-developed and producing more players across the professional game than any other academy, it is highly ambitious.
“Vision 2030 shows how highly they rate Cobham, but after our actions of the last 12 months, I’m not exactly sure how we’re really heading towards those targets,” Gupta explains.
“There’s a different between valuing your players and valuing them enough to not buy other players with similar profiles and abilities.”
It is currently unclear how Chelsea will use RC Strasbourg, a Ligue 1 side they purchased as part of a wider planned multi-club model, to develop talent. Currently only one Blues player is on loan there, but whether they send academy products or young signings there in the long-term will reveal their true priorities. If it is the latter, that would have serious implications for the once-great academy.
By treating Cobham with an avaricious disdain and buying most of the finest talents of one age group, Boehly may well deprive Chelsea of the ability to develop home-grown greats in the future. Across all ages or squads, greed is the club’s biggest threat.
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