Academy Rankings 2023/24: Full table
Written by
Josh Schneider-Weiler
September 8, 2024
This is the full 2023/24 Academy Productivity Rankings table, featuring 86 clubs and the full workings for the number of players they produced who featured in the Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two and National League last season.
The Rankings, sponsored by Eyeball, the ultimate digital platform for youth football, feature every Category One to Three Academy in England, with the exception of Welsh clubs Cardiff City and Swansea City, because we felt it was unfair to judge them according to the number of England-qualified players they had produced.
Two Category Four clubs have been added to the Rankings – Brentford and Huddersfield Town. Both clubs chose to downgrade their Academies (Brentford in 2016 and Huddersfield a year later), although the Bees have climbed back to Category Two for 2024/25 and the Terriers to Category Three.
As you can see from the table, we have listed the Category and Tier (league) of every club for 2023/24 season, as well as the ranking they achieved in 2021/22, which was the last edition of the TGG Academy Productivity Rankings. You can read a full methodology beneath the table.
Methodology
This is the fifth edition of Training Ground Guru’s Academy Productivity Rankings and I have followed the same methodology as in previous years.
A list was compiled of male English players (ie players eligible in the 2023/24 season to play for the England men’s national team) who played in at least one match for any team in the top five English leagues, based on data from the www.fbref.com website for the Premier League, Championship, League One and League Two. The website, www.Transfermarkt.com was used to compile players in the National League as these were not available on www.fbref.com for the National League season.
Information on the Academy, or Academies, attended by each English player who had made at least one league appearance was then collated and cross-referenced from information in Wikipedia, club biographies, news sources and www.Transfermarkt.co.uk. A total of 1,966 players qualified for this study under these criteria.
An Academy, Centre of Excellence or other club training structure was counted as having contributed to a player’s development if he was in attendance there at any point up to the age of 18.
As in previous editions, a weighting is applied according to the league in which the player appeared, with more points given if they played in the Premier League and so on.
If they played in more than one Academy (as many did) then the points are split evenly between them. There are players who may have been produced by these Academies who, for various reasons, may not be included in the research.
Players who are not listed as English on www.fbref.com were not included.
This year we have decided to omit Welsh clubs from the rankings, even though they are part of the Elite Player Performance Plan. This is because we are only counting English players and this is a tremendous disadvantage for teams like Swansea City and Cardiff City, for obvious reasons.
For the first time qualified players in the Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A and La Liga were counted in these rankings. However, players in other European leagues were not counted.
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