Chelsea’s youth policy has come under much scrutiny, but are the club turning a corner? Here is a comprehensive look into the Blues controversial academy.
When Roman Abramovich first took over Chelsea Football Club in 2003, he immediately threw a lot of money at the project. The first team spent upwards of £100 million and he also heaped money into a new training ground at Cobham.
Since then, Chelsea’s youth academy has become arguably the best in the world. Chelsea won the U21 Champions League equivalent in 2015 and 2016, the U18 Premier League in 2016/17 and have won six of the last eight FA Youth Cups. That’s just naming a few of their recent trophy hauls.
The club has failed to bring many of these youngsters into the first team, but is that about to change? We take an extensive look into the conflicts and issues amidst Chelsea’s academy and look to the future of both club and country.
Club and country
The Blues youngsters aren’t just successful domestically, Chelsea youth players make up more than a fifth of England’s youth squads. These England squads are some of the most successful in the world.
This summer they won the U20s World Cup and looked pretty good in the process. The U21s have won the Toulon Tournament (their World Cup equivalent) in both 2016 and 2017. The U19s also won the 2017 UEFA European U19 Championship. 21 of 98 England players selected this Summer were from Chelsea.
So why don’t Chelsea have any shiny new prospects moving up from the academy? People are quick to point to the fact that Chelsea are using their academy to sell players on for a profit and are using that profit to buy ready-made first team players.
But that can’t have been Chelsea and Abramovich’s motive when they started the project in 2006. Financial Fair Play didn’t exist then and Chelsea had no qualms about spending hundreds of millions every year on new players. What’s more, this investment in the first team ran parallel with the investment in youth.