Academy Rankings 2024/25: Full table

The Rankings feature every Category One to Three Academy in England. We exclude Welsh clubs Cardiff City, Newport County, Swansea City and Wrexham, because we feel it is unfair to judge them on the number of England-qualified players they had produced.

The table includes the Category and Tier (league) of every club in 2024/25, as well as the ranking they achieved in 2023/24.

This is the second time the Rankings have studied players from the Premier League as well as the other big four European leagues – La Liga (Spain), Bundesliga (Germany), Serie A (Italy) and Ligue 1 (France).

You can read a full methodology beneath the table.

Methodology

Josh Schneider-Weiler: This is the sixth 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 2024/25 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, League Two and the National League. 

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 1,814 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. 

We have decided to omit the four 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 Cardiff City, Newport County, Swansea City and Wrexham, for obvious reasons.

For the second time, England-qualified players in the Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A and La Liga have been counted in these rankings. However, players in other European leagues were not counted.