In the midst of Manchester City's FA Cup celebrations at Wembley Stadium last June, Phil Foden, Rico Lewis and Cole Palmer gathered for a photograph with the trophy, an image that was hailed within the club as an instant classic.
They did the same at the Ataturk Stadium in Istanbul a week later, posing with the Champions League trophy, this time joined by first-team sports scientist Chris Elderkin, who had worked with all three of them in their academy days.
Pictures like that are treasured within a club and within a team, which is why, if you go back to the 2021 Champions League final in Porto, you will find an image of seven of Chelsea's homegrown players (Tino Anjorin, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Mason Mount, Tammy Abraham, Reece James, Billy Gilmour and Andreas Christensen) posing together with the biggest prize in European club football.
It also mattered to the self-image of both clubs, accused at various times of “buying success” and overlooking players from their academy. Chelsea's has long been regarded among the best in Europe but there was frustration within English football — not least within the academy — that so little of their homegrown talent was allowed to flourish at first-team level until things changed under Frank Lampard and then Thomas Tuchel.
Lampard and Tuchel felt building around homegrown players was the way forward for a club whose academy was so widely admired. “It's a pleasure to have these boys and I strongly believe it's a huge part of the success, to have this mix between homegrown talents and top players,” Tuchel said in 2021.
Two years later, though, that picture from Porto has not aged well — at least not if you regarded it from Tuchel's perspective, rather than that of an accountant.
Anjorin: still a Chelsea player at the age of 21, but with just 20 minutes of Premier League football to his name and loaned this week to Portsmouth in League One.
Hudson-Odoi: expected to be sold to Nottingham Forest or Fulham on transfer deadline day, having failed to build on his early promise at Chelsea.
Mount: sold to Manchester United in July for an initial £55million ($70m) fee.
Abraham: sold to Roma in 2021, two months after that Champions League final, for £34million.
James: the exception, named club captain this summer.
Gilmour: sold to Brighton & Hove Albion in an initial £9million deal last summer.
Christensen: joined Barcelona on a free transfer last summer after his contract at Chelsea expired.
Numerous other Chelsea academy products have been sold: Fikayo Tomori to AC Milan for an initial £25million, Marc Guehi to Crystal Palace for an initial £18million, Tino Livramento to Southampton for an initial £4million, Ruben Loftus-Cheek to AC Milan for an initial £15million. Lewis Hall has joined Newcastle United on loan this summer and is expected to sign permanently next summer in an initial £28million deal. Bayern Munich have been in talks over a deal to sign Trevoh Chalobah before the transfer deadline and Conor Gallagher would have been sold had the right offer come for him.
Even before add-ons and sell-on clauses, plus numerous other smaller deals, are taken into account, it is getting on for £200million in transfer revenue for academy products over a two-year period.
Those at Chelsea's academy are entitled to take pride in that sum, even if there is frustration among some at the rush to sell some players whose progress at Stamford Bridge has effectively been blocked by the enormous outlay on so many young players from elsewhere over the past three transfer windows.
And those recruited from elsewhere now include Palmer, the latest in a long line of young midfielders and forwards Chelsea have signed, continuing a trend that seemed extreme at times under Roman Abramovich's ownership but has been taken to a new level since Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital took over at Stamford Bridge.
Just when Palmer appeared to have made a breakthrough under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, a goalscorer against Arsenal in the Community Shield, goalscorer and man of the match against Sevilla in the European Super Cup final, he appeared to lose patience, his head turned by Chelsea's interest, and is heading to London in a deal worth upwards of £40million.
Chelsea are nothing like the only ones who have proved adept at developing and then selling on homegrown talent.
For Manchester City, the sale of Palmer takes their profit on homegrown players to around £150million over the past three transfer windows. That includes some who were signed for small fees at a young age (such as Gavin Bazunu, now at Southampton, Romeo Lavia, now at Chelsea, and Carlos Borges, now at Ajax) as well as long-term academy products including goalkeeper James Trafford, who joined Burnley in an initial £15million deal after his starring role in England's European Under-21 Championship triumph this summer, midfielder Shea Charles, who has joined Southampton for £10.5million, and Tommy Doyle, who is set for a deadline-day move to Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Few inside Manchester City would have imagined at the start of the summer that Palmer would be among those sold; The Athletic reported in June that the club were open to a loan move that would give him more exposure to first-team football, but that they were not interested in a sale.
That changed as the summer progressed and Palmer began to make clear his desire for a move. Gradually, Manchester City warmed to the idea, not least because selling homegrown players has become so helpful in clubs' efforts to comply with Premier League and UEFA financial regulations.
“The reason the sale of academy players is so beneficial to a club from a financial fair play perspective is that the profit on the sale is taken immediately to the income statement,” explains Kieran Maguire, of the Price of Football podcast. “If you have an academy player, the book value of that player is zero because you haven't paid a transfer fee. Chelsea sold Mount for £55million, therefore on the income statement you have a profit of £55million.”
Two of the three biggest sales by Premier League clubs this summer have involved homegrown players: Declan Rice from West Ham United to Arsenal for £105million and Harry Kane from Tottenham Hotspur to Bayern Munich for a minimum of £85million. The deals for Mount and Palmer will be in the top 10.
That says something about the esteem in which homegrown talent is now held — far more than a decade ago, when barely 10 per cent of the transfer fees paid by Premier League players were for English players — but, beyond the cases of Rice and Kane, who were players pursuing a new challenge at a higher level, it also says something of the willingness to cash in on academy products.
From a business perspective, it works.
But from a football perspective, it feels wrong to develop so many talented players just to sell them. It is a question that can be easily shrugged off when the players are not up to the required standard, but the quality argument is harder to make at Chelsea when Tomori has impressed in a Scudetto-winning Milan team, Mount has joined Manchester United and both Livramento and Hall are now at Newcastle, whose recruitment record under their new ownership regime has appeared far more sensible and strategic than Chelsea's under theirs.
Developing first-team players looks harder at Manchester City, where the standards demanded by Guardiola are so high. But there has long been a feeling within the club that others would follow Foden: not just Lewis and Palmer but potentially Tommy Doyle, James McAtee and England Under-21 captain Taylor Harwood-Bellis.
Lewis' progress last season was hugely encouraging, but Palmer and Doyle have now been sold to Chelsea and Wolves and McAtee and Harwood-Bellis, who impressed on loan at Sheffield United and Burnley, would be forgiven for thinking, in light of Palmer's departure, that they find their futures lie elsewhere.
That has long been a fact of football life. Manchester United's fabled 'Class of '92' were a rare exception to the rule back then and it has become harder and harder for homegrown players to make the grade as the Premier League has become more globalised and technical standards have been raised.
But Manchester City and particularly Chelsea have academies that are the envy of so many other clubs across Europe, never mind the Premier League. Look not just at the sums they have generated through sales but at their success at youth level. As well as the Premier League title, Manchester City have won the Premier League 2 trophy (under-21 level) for the past three seasons. Chelsea won the FA Youth Cup seven times between 2010 and 2018, including five consecutive triumphs.
By 2021, Chelsea finally seemed to have cracked it by integrating some of those players into a first-team squad. But so many of those academy products are now playing at a high level away from Stamford Bridge — and the club, having spent almost £1billion over the past three transfer windows, are happy to claw some money back by selling their homegrown players, particularly as it goes down in the books as pure profit.
Does it matter? It depends who you ask — and when. A couple of years ago, basking in the warm afterglow of their Champions League success, Chelsea were espousing the virtues and long-term benefits of building around homegrown talent. Now, under new ownership, the model is largely about building around players signed between the ages of 17 and 22 and, it appears, viewing their academy products as highly saleable assets.
Colwill, who has been at Chelsea since he was eight, was among those in danger of being crowded out as the club bought four central defenders (Kalidou Koulibaly, Benoit Badiashile, Wesley Fofana and Axel Disasi) at a combined cost of more than £180million in their first three transfer windows under Boehly's leadership. That he has started their first three Premier League games of the season, having signed a new long-term contract, is an encouraging sign.
Developing players for your own first team is always stated as a mission for every academy, but particularly for the very best. It has become a far more realistic ambition for Premier League clubs over recent years as, after a barren period, English clubs have produced the likes of Kane, Rice, Jack Grealish, Marcus Rashford, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Bukayo Saka and Jude Bellingham as well as Foden, Mount, James and the rest — even Germany forward Jamal Musiala, who spent his formative years in Chelsea's academy before joining Bayern Munich at the age of 16.
The day after Manchester City were crowned champions of Europe in June, their chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak invited us to look beyond the first team's success under Guardiola and to marvel at an “incredible” academy which, he said, was producing “the best talent in England”.
Only Chelsea's academy could dispute that claim. Foden had become an integral part of Guardiola's plans, only two weeks past his 23rd birthday but already a veteran of 219 first-team appearances with five Premier League winner's medals to his name, and Lewis, 18, and Palmer, 21, had also been among the substitutes for the Champions League final in Istanbul — three players raised within 10 miles of the Etihad Stadium.
“I mean, look at Phil coming out of the academy,” Al-Mubarak said. “He is the most decorated player today, probably in English football at his age. Look at the minutes he's played and look at the evolution from 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. We've been very careful in supporting Phil to get him to where he is today. And we'll do the same with Rico, we'll do the same with Cole and we'll do the same with all the others.”
But that appears easier said than done. Young players want to play football — and to feel wanted and appreciated.
Palmer made 25 appearances in all competitions for Manchester City last season, but only seven them were starts (and of those seven, only two were in the Premier League). It was a surprise to hear Guardiola entertain the possibility of selling him after the Super Cup final, particularly having lost Ilkay Gundogan to Barcelona and sold Riyad Mahrez to Al Ahli, but the signings of Jeremy Doku from Rennes and (imminently) Matheus Nunes from Wolves left the short-term picture unchanged and the long-term picture more complicated.
It is an intriguing move for Palmer, though. Whether he is earmarked to play in the forward line or an advanced midfield role at Chelsea, the sheer number of players the club have signed in those attacking areas means competition will be intense. With Carney Chukwuemeka, Raheem Sterling, Christopher Nkunku, Noni Madueke and so many other players to compete with (and no doubt more to follow over future transfer windows), he might encounter some of the same frustrations he faced at Manchester City.
The difference at Chelsea is that Palmer will be a player signed for big money, rather than one developed in the academy. That brings a certain added pressure from outside, but in many cases, it also perhaps brings a certain status within a club.
That has always been the case. What has changed in English football, perhaps, is the eagerness to see the resale value in young homegrown players. Not just among those who were always destined to drop down to a lower level, but among those who, through their late teens and into their twenties, are regarded among the best prospects in the country.
Even having got so much right (at long last) in youth development over the recent years, it feels like English football is not getting the balance quite right. The value of a self-sustaining academy is obvious, but it is impossible to laud Chelsea's revenue from selling homegrown players on one hand when, having rightly trumpeted the quality of their youth development programme, they have spent almost £1billion on players — many of them very young players — reared elsewhere.
When Manchester City unveiled their new £200million academy complex in 2014, club officials and coaches lined up to state the objective was not just to keep winning the Premier League and, in time, the Champions League but, ultimately, to do so with a core of homegrown players. Patrick Vieira, who was coaching the club's elite development squad at the time, said it could take “four, five, six” years to turn that objective into a reality, but that was the aim — as it should be for every club.
In fact, it is taking longer than that, just as it took far longer than anyone at Chelsea anticipated before the club eventually — and perhaps, as it is turning out, fleetingly — decided to commit to building around a core of homegrown players.
Nearly a decade on, Foden is firmly established as a first-team player at Manchester City and Lewis is well ahead of schedule with 15 Premier League appearances to his name already, but that core is yet to emerge and the departures at the age of 21 of Palmer (after three Premier League starts) and Doyle (zero) must be slightly sobering for staff at the academy.
Manchester City's financial department will be delighted of course, but that dream of an all-conquering team built around a homegrown core, something Guardiola and the rest of the club's hierarchy have referenced privately and publicly over the past decade, looks just a little more distant than it did on that glorious night in Istanbul. Foden, for now, remains exceptional in more ways than one — just like James remains the exception from Chelsea's Champions League-winning class of 2021 — a homegrown talent deemed priceless at a time when the temptation to cash in appears so hard to resist.
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