Another Side of Football.

You're absolutely right that it depends on what criteria you're judging it by, which is the crux of why I wanted to try and see if there was an easy way to compare against other academies.

One might say it isn't productive because we don't have graduates in our first team, but that's partially because we sold two of them in the summer! Are Norwich, Leeds, Sheffield United, West Brom full of home-grown stars? Is the Premiership full of players who learned their trade at Championship teams that leave us for dust?

The point I'm making is, if there's evidence that a significant number of other academies are churning out top players at a better rate than us then I would be very interested to hear that and it would make me wonder what might be causing that. I'd expect the top producers in the country to be the likes of Man Utd, Arsenal and Liverpool, with Man City possibly starting to join them, but it's probably fair to say that we're not in their bracket, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were comfortably nestled a little way under that, above a handful of Premiership sides and better than average in the Championship. Without the stats to back it up though, it's purely speculative.

 

Its quite easy to understand why academies produce more first team/top level players than others … Intent.

https://thesefootballtimes.co/2015/04/14/the-southampton-fc-academy-way/

A little reading above. In virtually any list you will find Southampton not only of the best in England but also Europe.

Bristol City have never had the intent of Southampton or West Ham or even Crewe. The intent waxes and wanes depending on who is in charge and what is happening at board level while at other clubs it can be an intrinsic long term part of the philosophy of the FC.

Youth development from Danny Wilson and John Laycock to years later Steve Lansdown and Lee Johnson has been differing things .. Centre of excellence, five pillars, no pillars, Cat 2 consistent it has not been quite like many clubs but at the best Youth development is a principle.