Academy productivity: the only metric that matters

Every academy can produce a number that flatters it. Players signed to professional contracts, players in national youth squads, players who went on to play somewhere. All true, all irrelevant to the club paying for it, because none of them ask the question the board is actually asking: what did we get?

The measure that answers it is the share of your first team's minutes played by club-trained players — three or more years at the club between fifteen and twenty-one, which is the standard definition and stricter than the one most clubs use about themselves. It is benchmarkable, it is hard to argue with, and it is usually a considerable shock the first time a board sees it next to five comparable clubs.

A low number is not automatically a failure. An academy run explicitly to sell should have a low minutes share and a high return, and that is a coherent strategy. What is not coherent — and what I find in most audits — is a club structured to sell, judged internally on minutes, and therefore staffed entirely by people failing at a job nobody resourced them to do.