Academy productivity
The share of your first team's minutes played by players you trained.
Exhibit 1
Definition
Not how many players reach a professional contract somewhere — that number flatters everybody. The share of your own first team's minutes played by players you trained, against clubs of your size.
Definition
Club-trained means three or more years at the club between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. It is the standard definition and it is deliberately stricter than “came through the academy”, which every club defines in the way that suits it.
Exhibit 2
Club-trained minutes
Method
Bottom of its own comparison set, and not marginally. Two of the five spend less on their academy than this club does.
Exhibit 3
The four measures
| Measure | This club | Benchmark | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minutes share | 6% | Peer median 14% | The headline number, and the one a board has usually never seen. |
| Integration rate | 18% | Peer median 31% | First-team debutants as a share of professional graduates. Low here means the pathway ends at the door of the first team, not below it. |
| Ten-year return | €4.1m | Cost €11.8m | Transfer proceeds from academy products over ten years against ten years of academy cost. A deficit is not automatically a failure — but it has to be a decision. |
| Cost per graduate minute | €310 | Peer median €96 | The uncomfortable one. Three times what comparable clubs pay for the same thing. |
Exhibit 4
Produce to play, or produce to sell
- 1Produce to playThe academy exists to supply the first team. Judged on minutes share and integration rate; a sale is a by-product and sometimes a failure.
- 2Produce to sellThe academy exists to generate transfer income. Judged on proceeds and on how early players leave; minutes share is irrelevant and chasing it is a mistake.
- 3Doing one and measuring the otherExtremely common and always expensive. This club is structured to sell and is judged internally on minutes, so everybody in the building is failing at something they were never resourced to do.