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Correspondent Rob Dawson
Before the Abu Dhabi takeover in 2008 transformed Manchester City into a European superpower, things were very different for youngsters who grew up with dreams of playing in the first team.
Thomas Krucken is City’s youth academy director, but during a year in the early 2000s he brought in Sean Wright-Phillips, Kasper Schmeichel and Kieran Trippier. The 47-year-old has special memories of what life used to be like.
“Jim Cassell (City’s former academy director) asked me for a training session and I wanted to do something special,” Krucken told ESPN. “So I went to the pet store downtown and took some sticks from the cage and made this rowing ladder. It’s a little different now.”
Krucken spoke to ESPN from his office overlooking the pristine pitch of the City Football Academy (CFA), a short walk from the Etihad Stadium. The running session at Platt Lane Sports Complex in south-east Manchester is now over. City now offer young footballers the CFA’s state-of-the-art facilities and a local private school, St. Petersburg, which typically costs more than £14,000 per year. We can provide links with Bede’s College.
However, overall, the goal of training professional soccer players remains the same as it was 25 years ago.
“We had nothing,” Krucken said. “But we have developed players of Premier League quality. The facilities have changed and we now have everything we need to develop top players.”
Krucken, who returned to the club after serving as head of youth development at VfB Stuttgart, is now in charge of one of Europe’s greatest talent factories. Everyone knows about Phil Foden, who joined City at the age of four and is now English football’s player of the year, but the production line doesn’t end there.
City completed their first game of their pre-season tour of the United States against Celtic with nine academy graduates on the pitch. Four players, including Rico Lewis, Nico O’Reilly, James McAtee and Oscar Babb, were included in Pep Guardiola’s starting line-up for the Community Shield match against Manchester United last August.
Guardiola will raid the academy again on Wednesday when he selects his squad for the Carabao Cup tie at Tottenham Hotspur. Guardiola selected O’Reilly, McAtee and 16-year-old Kaden Braithwaite for the match against Watford last round, and has already signaled his intention to “play with a second team” against Spurs. Braithwaite made his debut after just one training session with the first team, a session held the day before the game.
The advantage for Guardiola of looking to an academy for new players is that City’s young players are taught the basics needed to play for his team from an early age, so the transition period can be relatively short.
“Through the academy you learn how a City player should play,” Bobb told ESPN in April. “It’s things like where to move. Obviously, when you get to the first team you’re at a different level. Pep realized that the new players might not know certain things or they might not have the mentality of Bernardo Silva. He accepted that. And he I think it’s really nice that he wants to teach me.
“People like Phil Foden and Rico Lewis have shown that it is possible.”
Bobb and McAtee impressed so much in the summer that the club decided against signing a replacement for Julián Álvarez, who left for Atletico Madrid in an £81 million deal. Bobb has since suffered a broken leg and will be sidelined until the new year, but McAtee is benefiting from Álvarez’s departure.
“He is an academy player.” Guardiola has spoken about McAtee’s prospects of playing first-team football this season. “He knows the whole process and how he moves in the pocket. When you look for players in small spaces to attack the final third, with goal awareness, it’s hard to find those types of players. McAtee has those qualities and that’s what he does. That’s it.” “The reason I told Txiki (Begiristain) at the beginning of the season that I didn’t want to loan him or sell him is because we need him.”
McAtee, 22, has made 12 senior appearances for City since making his debut as a teenager in 2021, but has spent the past two seasons on loan at Sheffield United. One is in the Championship and the other is in the Premier League. He scored his first senior goal in a 4-0 win over Slovan Bratislava in the Champions League earlier this month. With Alvarez leaving and Bob getting injured, he was given the opportunity to establish himself in the first-team squad. At least for now.
The reality for City’s young players is that at any time an expensive new player could arrive to fill your place in the squad. Lewis broke through during the 2022-23 season, playing at both full-back and midfield. The following summer, City spent a total of £161m on two midfielders (Mateo Kovacic and Mateusz Nunes) and a full-back (Josko Gvardiol).
“This is something you have to deal with,” Bobb said. “This is one of the reasons why I had some skepticism about coming here at 16, but it shows that you don’t just have to get good grades, you have to perform really well to get that opportunity. Among my closest friends, I remember some asking, I’m sure it would be very difficult to even get a whiff of first-team football, but for me just getting close to that was the opportunity of a lifetime.
1:45
Guardiola: Manchester City won’t be surprised when I leave
Pep Guardiola speaks about Txiki Begiristain’s departure from Manchester City and reflects on his future at the club.
“What can be misunderstood is that the manager or staff do not view players who are brought in for big transfer fees or come through the academy any differently. There are just two players and one who trains better or is a good fit. Team play. .”
Bobb and McAtee are hoping to become part of City’s present, but the academy staff are already looking ahead. One of Krucken’s philosophies is to create “athletes of the future.” In layman’s terms, this means anticipating what the game will look like in 10 years’ time and producing players with the right qualities so that in 2024 a 10-year-old will, in theory, be ready to play for City’s first team anyway. In 2034.
“The pace of the game has sped up,” says Krucken. “If you compare the game to what it was 20 years ago, it’s very different.” “This is our idea of creating the players of the future because we are confident that the pace of the game will continue to increase. We have to adapt to what the players will need in the future. That means thinking about what the under-10s will need now. “This is the academy’s task 10 years from now.”
Not everyone who comes through City’s academy over the next decade will play for the first team. The level required to break through for a club wanting to win the Champions League every year is very high and may be unattainable for some. But City have become adept at forcing underperforming players to move to other clubs, often at great cost. Sources have told ESPN that the club has signed deals for academy graduates totaling £276 million over the past five years. This summer, Taylor Harwood-Bellis joined Southampton for £20m and Liam Delap joined Ipswich Town for £15m. Cole Palmer moved to Chelsea for £42.5m in 2023.
This means that if City eventually decide to use the transfer window to replace Alvarez, they will have money to spend without having to walk the tightrope of the Premier League’s revenue and sustainability rules.
“Look at the generation from the academy a few years ago, like Jadon Sancho, Cole Palmer and Brahim Diaz,” Guardiola said. “A lot of the brightest players have come from there, so we’re really pleased with how the academy has worked in the past and we hope they can continue to do that for the club.”
Those players went on to make an impact elsewhere. Those still hoping to be part of City’s future will get their next chance to impress against Tottenham this week.
