Chelsea’s goal for every player in their academy is a profitable transfer, so they can buy players they view as “usable” while maintaining compliance with Financial Fair Play. The young Blues know this better than anyone.
Admittedly, I did not know who Juan Familia-Castillo was until this week. The 19-year old Dutchman joined Chelsea’s academy from Ajax three years ago. Since then he has come to the clear realization that if he ever wanted to play for Chelsea’s first team he would have needed to play his academy football anywhere else. The one way to almost ensure you never play for the senior Blues is to play your youth football at Cobham.
Familia-Castillo is not the first young player to recognize this, state it and follow the facts out the door. Jonathan Panzo and Harvey St. Clair left the club last summer rather than sign on for an indefinite number of loans with no hope of wearing Blue beyond the occasional preseason stint.
However, Familia-Castillo did the best job yet of identifying and unequivocally stating the plight of academy players. On a podcast interview he said:
"Because of what I’ve seen and gained over the past few years, I don’t think I’ll break through at Chelsea. If you come in as a youth player, you’ll always stay that way. If a club buys you, they really see you as a player of the first. That does not mean that you are not good enough, but it does not suit the club. – via Football Oranje"
This is the class warfare at Chelsea FC. Take any two players in their early 20s: one came up through the academy and the club bought the other with a baseline level of senior experience. If they are of equal quality, the latter is the club’s preference. We can all probably think of a few examples where the academy-trained player is better, but the club still chooses to loan him and keep the transfer. Or they loan both, making the club look even more foolish.
It’s not that Chelsea do not recognize the talent and ability of their academy-trained players. They simply see that talent and ability in the context of the market, not their own first-team.
Those players were earmarked for loans and an eventual sale. They were never at Cobham to someday play at Stamford Bridge. The loan army is not about first-team experience en route to the Chelsea XI. The loan army is just fattening the bird before Christmas.
Given the financial value of those players, the large number of players involved and the ease with which Chelsea can buy a player who – self-fulfilling prophecy at work – is viewed as less of a risk because he has the experience the Cobham grads don’t have, the club have little reason to shift their view of “our own.”
Former academy coach and current Derby County assistant manager Jody Morris’ Twitter feed is a regular glimpse into the exasperation coursing through the academy. Morris voices his frustrations to different levels of clarity when commenting on Chelsea’s handling of their current or former youth. It is not much of a leap to say he partly took Frank Lampard’s offer because he was taking so little satisfaction from how the club was dealing with the players he developed.
If Morris knows it and says it, and Juan Familia-Castillo knows it and says it, everyone else at Cobham knows it, even if they’re not saying it.
The players at Chelsea’s academy watch Chelsea’s first team games. They listen to Maurizio Sarri. They talk to Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Callum Hudson-Odoi, various Hutchisons and McEachrans and Chalobahs.
They also watch other teams. The young Blues watch Manchester United, Borussia Dortmund and (gasp) Tottenham Hotspur. They listen to Ole Gunnar Solksjaer, Lucien Favre and Mauricio Pochettino. They listen to the words and they watch the actions. Then they compare what they see and hear from those clubs to what they see and hear at home.
And then they line up moves to Monaco or Venezia, or join in a Dutch football podcast.
Chelsea are barely bothering to maintain the fiction that the academy exists to develop players for Chelsea’s first team. The academy is there to produce first-team players, sure, including players who can play throughout Europe’s top five leagues. Just not at Stamford Bridge.