Birmingham City's academy has produced talents like Jordan James, Jude Bellingham, and Demarai Gray, but it hasn't yielded a league debut in the last two years. The club went above and beyond to regain Category One status for their academy last year – but now they have it, a crossroads has been reached.
There is no doubting the improvement in facilities at the Knighthead Performance Centre, formerly known as Wast Hills. BirminghamLive has visited the once dated site on multiple occasions in the last 12 months and the transformation is obvious. Players in the men’s academy and the women’s set-up want for nothing. They have state-of-the-art gyms, the latest sports science equipment, improved pitches and the right nutrition. It bore fruit for the women’s team who secured promotion to the Women’s Super League at the second attempt under head coach Amy Merricks.
But the men’s academy is still playing catch up. The jump to Category One has presented Blues’ under-21 and under-18 teams with one almighty gap to bridge. They now compete against the very best in the country and had to endure some chastening results throughout a season where insiders will readily admit that a young group were, at times, out of their depth.
Blues’ under-21s finished 27th out of 29 teams in Premier League 2, winning four of their 20 matches. The under-18s finished 14th out of 15 teams in the southern section of the U18 Premier League, losing 19 of their 28 matches and shipping 88 goals.
That is not to say there isn’t talent in Blues’ academy that could one day serve the first team – although it’s worth noting that no academy graduate has made a league debut in the last two seasons – but the whole set-up isn’t operating at Category One yet. It is one thing to invest in facilities, which Knighthead have, but it’s another to invest heavily on players for the academy when your overarching objective is to win promotion to the Premier League.
Every available penny for transfers has been ploughed into the first team to acquire senior players from Germany, Spain and Portugal, meaning the young talent on the club’s doorstep has been an afterthought. The best young players in the area are still finding their way to Aston Villa, West Bromwich Albion and Wolves.
Why? Pathway is part of the issue, but financial incentive is a factor too. In response to an article on the academy published by BirminghamLive last week, ex-Blues youngster Simon Rea – whose son Louie is in line to turn professional with the club this summer – provided a detailed account of the challenges facing the academy, and its coaches and players, since becoming Category One.
In summary, Rea said: “In general an academy has either got to offer a pathway or money. You can't offer neither and expect to thrive. It takes away all direction and motivation from the players and makes (it) almost impossible for the coaching staff to implement anything in the latter stages and especially hard for recruitment to implement anything. I've spent 14 years around this academy, five times a week and this is the first time the identity and core has disappeared and it has to get back into sync asap.”
Blues previously had a pathway. Jude Bellingham would have risen in any academy, but the likes of Jordan James, George Hall and Alfie Chang thrived because they were exposed to a first team environment and managed to swim rather than sink. Blues manager Chris Davies has been under so much pressure to secure promotions that he has understandably favoured experience over untried and untested kids.
The onus isn’t on Davies to drop standards, it’s on the club to create a structure where their best talent is given the chance to step up over a prolonged period of time. That is not necessarily a first team debut, but the opportunity to co-exist with first team players to discover whether they can thrive at that level.
Part of the problem is that the first team and academy still operate on different sites. How does anyone expect them to be completely aligned? The kids at Wast Hills are a 20-minute coach journey away from the Elite Performance and Innovation Centre in Henley-in-Arden, where the first team has been based for the last three years. Some were occasionally invited up to train with the first team last season, but none stayed long enough to call it their workplace.
Without an obvious pathway, the other big-hitters locally have thrown money at young talent. Villa have invested heavily in young players that may never play a game for their first team, but their money can be recouped by way of loans before a permanent sale that helps Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) calculations. Selling an academy player is pure profit on the books. They have followed the trend in the Premier League by paying teenagers large sums of money and Blues haven’t gone down that route yet.
Blues have offered seven of their best youngsters professional contracts, including defender Jack Quirk, under-18s skipper Dynaeo Martin-Moore and midfielder Rea. Attacker Aurelien Guernier has also been offered a contract but the 18-year-old is being shopped around Europe after a breakthrough season in the under-21s. Some will sign, but the suggestion that Guernier could entertain leaving a club where he has developed for 13 years is telling.
Youngsters would have been shown a pathway to the first team in the past and if that no longer exists, they need to see the money, otherwise Blues aren't going to make up ground on the teams in the West Midlands, let alone the best academies in the country.
