If you’re able to find a concrete figure I’d love to see it. Your mileage is going to vary across academy types and with different clubs within Category One. Chelsea and City have the most expensive academies in the country by far that run at an estimated cost of £8m a year. I’m certain that ours is *significantly* less than that and we also receive grants for it from the Premier League and the FA.
In the days of “The Orchard Homes Academy” cost was estimated at about £1m a year. If ours is, say £4m (still feels too high of an estimate to me, just given our comparative player and staff numbers, plus Chelsea and City will have “youth” on much larger contracts than we do) then just having Tella emerge is a break even because you’re now in possession of an asset worth more than the cost of running the facility. If we had signed Tella from the Championship last year, his contract and fee would likely have been much higher.
The clubs who made the choice to bin their academy were a handful of lower league clubs and Brentford. Normally I’d say that anything Brentford does should be something we all consider. However it only made sense because the cost of them upgrading into a Cat 1 academy was massive at that time and they had just been promoted to the Championship. If they weren’t Cat 1, then they could have lost any developed players for six figure sums without even a fight due to EPPP.
The income isn’t just our direct sales and the opportunity cost of not having to sign a young forward/winger. Every player who has come through to be a professional is worth money to the club for the remainder of their career. If, for example, Callum Slattery gets signed to another team for a fee, Southampton gets a percentage. Even without a sell on agreed. We get cash just from having funded his early development in solidarity payments.
