Academy players (left to right) Rio Ngumoha, Ryan McAidoo, Max Dowman, Reggie Watson and JJ Gabriel are some of the most highly coveted in the countryJames DuckerThu, December 4, 2025 at 6:02 AM UTC·15 min readOne Premier League academy scout is discussing the lengths to which rival clubs will go to these days to keep talent-spotters away from parents for fear of their best young players being spirited away.
Visit any Premier League Under-16 match this weekend and shortly before kick-off you are liable to see hordes of academy scouts, lanyards around necks, being ushered to a makeshift pen, sometimes by one of the corner flags but almost always far from where the rest of the spectators are housed.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementOccasionally, they may be trusted to make their own way there but usually they are escorted to their station. To the uninitiated, it might resemble some kind of walk of shame.
“I felt like a chicken being corralled into a coop the first time it happened!” explained the scout, affording himself a wry laugh. “Now I don’t bat an eyelid. It’s pretty much standard practice.”
In truth, some will count themselves lucky to be in at all. The escalating tensions within youth circles have seen cases of Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United scouts all being denied access to academy games. But the fear and paranoia across much of the Premier League academy landscape amid the ever-intensifying battle for the brightest young talent does not end there.
Child protection rules are cited as a factor in the refusal of some clubs to distribute team-sheets at youth matches, which tends to elicit a rolling of the eyes from their European counterparts, where it is the norm.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementStill, that feels positively tame compared to some of the more protectionist measures clubs are occasionally adopting, anything in a perceived bid to throw others off the scent of their academy talents.
“There have been instances where some of the teams have not even put numbers on the back of shirts when they’re playing games to try to make it as hard as possible for rival clubs to identify their players,” one agent said.
It did not used to be this way but that was before the potent cocktail of Brexit and the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) sent the value of home-grown players into orbit.
Old understandings that school-age players would not be poached have evaporated and, in its place, a frenzied free-for-all is unfolding at a time when the level of English talent continues to explode and clubs know those youngsters – and their parents – are prepared to shop around for the promise of a fast-track pathway and/or guaranteed payday.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementLiverpool snaring a 16-year-old Rio Ngumoha from Chelsea last year, much to the West London club’s dismay, was precisely the kind of transfer that fuels mistrust and strains relations. But, through gritted teeth and growing necessity, Premier League rivals are trading each other’s youngsters at ages, prices, volumes and speeds that would have been unthinkable not too long ago.
“The youth market is like the Wild West now,” one Premier League director of football told Telegraph Sport, a phrase repeated by many of the recruitment chiefs, academy scouts, agents and executives who were spoken to for this article.
One of the main consequences of Brexit in 2020 was that it stopped English clubs from being able to sign players under the age of 18 from overseas. In other words, if Manchester United want to sign a 16-year-old Alejandro Garnacho from Atlético Madrid now, they would be barred from doing so. Similarly, Arsenal would not have been able to bring in a 16-year-old Cesc Fàbregas from Barcelona under the current rules.
“You’ve got to remember that there wasn’t much need in the past for the leading clubs in England to go after each other’s best academy players because they could instead pick off some of the top talent from overseas and at the same time avoid p------ off a major domestic rival,” one figure who works in academy recruitment at a Premier League club said.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“They would sign players from further down the pyramid but that would often be welcome because it was a vital source of revenue for lower-league clubs. But Brexit effectively cut off a rich supply route of young talent and when that happens you’re inevitably going to look for ways to fill that void.”
‘Premium around young English talent offsets risk’
Initially, it triggered an increased demand for English players in the 16 to 17 age bracket but now the raging battleground is for 14 to 16-year-olds. “But for Brexit, I don’t think this would be happening,” one sporting director at a Premier League club said. “In the early stages it was ‘Okay, it’s going to push the 16s market up’. But now clubs are taking more risk and paying more for players at 14.”
At the same time, PSR has also inflated the value of home-grown players. Academy graduates who get sold on represent pure profit on balance sheets and, with that in mind, clubs are opting to dig for talent at ever-younger ages.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“Clubs are looking at transfer fees and wages shooting up all the time at senior level and saying: ‘Our academies are more important than ever as a revenue driver’,” one senior Premier League academy recruitment figure said.
“There’s more risk in the sense a 14-year-old is not as far down the track but it’s still a lot cheaper than signing an 18-year-old British teenager who could cost you tens of millions, and the gains down the line are potentially huge.
“We all want to produce the next Bukayo Saka or Phil Foden but a few million pounds commitment in fees and wages on a 14-year-old over multiple years is good business if that player ends up playing some first-team games and is then sold for £30m. That’s £30m of pure profit.
“Clearly there’s always that risk of an investment backfiring but there’s such a premium around young English talent that it offsets some of that risk.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThere is the danger of a transfer going to a tribunal if clubs cannot agree on a fee, as has been the case over Ngumoha and Trey Nyoni’s switch from Leicester to Liverpool, for example. Equally, it is not uncommon for selling clubs to threaten to take a case to tribunal to ramp up the price. But the compensation tariffs stipulated by the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) are invariably not considered prohibitive enough to deter opportunistic clubs and the biggest ones are often willing to pay two or three times above the listed compensation figures, and sometimes more, to avoid messy, drawn-out sagas.
Rule 362 governing EPPP states that any Under-14 to Under-16 transfer between Category 1 academies is subject to an £80,000 payment for every year a player has been with the training club. “So say that was five years, meaning £400,000 in compensation, that’s still a lot less than the price some of these boys are now trading at,” one agent said.
Not that some within the game can understand the levels of secrecy and paranoia. “They keep the scouts away from the parents at the games but then those same scouts will be chatting to the parents in the car park – it’s ridiculous,” one source said. “At the same time, the scouts on the ground speak to each other, they’re all talking about who their bosses are interested in. And the best players you’re going to see playing for England and the other national teams where the set-up is a lot more relaxed anyway.”
The reality is that a transfer merry-go-round is in full flight and shows no signs of slowing as clubs jostle for position. Manchester City took 17-year-old winger Ryan McAidoo from Chelsea, who in turn signed 14-year-old attacking midfielder Isaac McGillvary, the son of the former England and Great Britain rugby league player Jermaine McGillvary, from City.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementKaylum Moss, a 14-year-old midfielder, has recently left Liverpool for City. Arsenal saw off competition from Newcastle to land winger Kyran Thompson from West Ham. Reggie Watson, one of the brightest talents in Crystal Palace’s academy and the son of the club’s former midfielder Ben, joined Chelsea, who have been in a protracted battle to get forward Camden Schaper out of Blackburn Rovers. Manchester United brought in 16-year-old defender Harley Emsden-James from Southampton in the summer. The list goes on.
Watson, who was highly rated at Crystal Palace, made the switch to Chelsea’s academy last year - Getty Images/Joris VerwijstPlayers and their parents are becoming increasingly wise to this rapidly altering landscape and the leading clubs, in turn, are facing more challenges than ever to keep hold of their best talent. Whereas once the leverage enjoyed by the likes of Jadon Sancho and Jude Bellingham, who both moved at 17 to Borussia Dortmund three years apart and had a disorderly queue of clubs lining up to sign them, felt like it was the preserve of the fortunate few, now a whole generation of leading academy players are exerting a similar power. The days of a 15-year-old being satisfied with a place in the Under-16s are fading. The offer of professional contracts are now frequently going hand in hand with a scholarship.
In another significant development, players at the end of their Under-14 year have the option to “serve notice” to leave, deregister with their club and move freely. Certainly in the cases of the very best players, that has left even the biggest clubs mobilising to pull out all the stops to ensure they do not fall into the hands of bitter rivals. Some feel this is where the dirty tricks and offer of inducements are often at risk of coming into play. “No one likes it when you produce a player and he’s really happy and then all of a sudden he writes a letter requesting to move,” one club executive said. “You know what’s gone on.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementManchester United had to fight very hard to keep JJ Gabriel, the jewel in their academy crown, away from the clutches of rivals this summer. The forward, who only turned 15 in October, was quickly parachuted into the Under-18s this season, where he has since been scoring for fun under the care of the club’s former Champions League-winning midfielder Darren Fletcher, who took over the role in July.
Gabriel has already trained with the first team and the United manager Ruben Amorim is watching his progress closely. He was spotted in the Old Trafford directors’ box for a 1-0 defeat by Everton last month and few would be surprised if he makes the senior matchday squad before too long. “They’ve been rolling out the red carpet for him,” said one well-placed source.
It seems no coincidence that an increasing number of the brightest talents are being given what are known in the game as “tactical debuts”. There is recognition of the need to give those players tangible sight of a first-team pathway, often sooner than ever before, conscious that if they do not, someone else will. Ngumoha had trained with the first team but was not afforded a senior debut for Chelsea, who then had the misfortune of seeing a player they had nurtured from the age of eight scoring Liverpool’s dramatic stoppage-time winner against Newcastle on his Premier League bow in August.
Ngumoha’s Liverpool debut could not have gone any better at St James’ Park at the start of the season - Reuters/Scott HeppellChelsea have since changed tack with another academy graduate, Reggie Walsh, who was given his first-team debut in the Europa Conference League by Enzo Maresca at the end of last season. McAidoo has already been included in City’s senior squad this season as an unused substitute in the 5-1 win over Burnley in September and four days later another rising City starlet Divine Mukasa was on the bench for a Champions League tie against Monaco.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementMax Dowman is the kind of generational talent Arsenal are likely to build a team around for years to come and the midfielder was just 15 years and 234 days when he made his first team under Mikel Arteta in August as a second-half substitute in a 5-0 romp of Leeds. Arteta could not do the same for then 16-year-old striker Chido Obi, who felt his interests would be better served at Manchester United, whom he joined 14 months ago. On the subject of tactical debuts, Arsenal even made history late last month when their much talked about 13-year-old attacking midfielder Luis Munoz became the youngest player ever to feature in the Uefa Youth League as a substitute in the Under-19 team’s 4-2 win over Bayern Munich.
Players who have dual passports are often in even greater demand because that opens the door to overseas buyers and removes the Brexit red tape. Such “flight risks” are increasingly commonplace in a multi-cultural society like Britain, which now has a whole army of second-generation Africans and players of other nationalities swelling a talent pool that has mushroomed since EPPP was launched in 2012, partly in response to England’s sorry showing at the 2010 World Cup, with stunning results.
Not that the attention being afforded some youngsters, who may have yet to take their GCSEs but already have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, is necessarily a good thing. “It’s impossible, given the hype some of them are getting, for it not to go to their heads at such a young age,” one agent said. “Some of the lads at the biggest clubs are becoming household names at 15 among their demographic and that cannot be helpful mentally. What happens when they get released down the line?”
A plethora of accounts have surfaced on TikTok, X and Instagram in which fleeting clips of emerging talents are pored over and sensationalised. No matter that they may in fact have had a bad game that day. In other instances, young academy graduates are enlisting videographers to film daily training routines. More disconcertingly still, some of these top Under-16 players have their own Instagram accounts curated by parents chronicling their whole career. Clubs, in turn, find themselves between a rock and a hard place: reluctant to swim against the tide but wary of players getting too much too soon.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAcademy staff touted by clubs and agencies
The trading is not limited to players. The battle for the best academy staff is also intense. Manchester City, who have forged one of the most formidable academy reputations, have seen a host of academy scouts leave for the likes of Liverpool and United in recent years but in some cases it has worked to their advantage. For all the tensions across the academy spectrum, the relationship between arguably the two power players, City and Chelsea, is known to be good, partly due to the crossover in staff. Glenn van der Kraan joined Chelsea as academy technical director from City in October last year. Chelsea’s co-director of recruitment and talent Joe Shields spent nine years at City and knows his successor, Samuel Fagbemi, well.
Agencies, eager to tap into the specialist inside knowledge and contacts books of the best academy staff, are also getting in on the act. Luke Fedorenko, who was head of academy recruitment at Manchester United, is joining the Unique Sports Group agency. Jerome Thomas, previously academy scouting manager at Brighton who also worked in recruitment at Watford, Everton and Chelsea, joined the YMU agency as talent ID co-ordinator last year.
Jim Fraser, who was instrumental in helping to build a youth structure at Chelsea that produced the likes of Reece James, Mason Mount, Conor Gallagher and Trevoh Chalobah, has partnered with Varsity Nine. The former Everton striker James Vaughan was the Merseyside club’s head of academy recruitment and player pathways until he joined Raheem Sterling’s agency, 16NinetyTwo Sports Management, as director of football in June.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAt present, agents are prohibited under Fifa rules from representing players under the age of 16. But the big agencies are understood to have been lobbying the Football Association in the hope of having that age lowered to 14 in light of the major developments in academy recruitment.
“Clubs are openly trading 14 and 15-year-olds for big fees, the agents are there in the background but they’re not allowed to operate officially,” one source said. “It’s like the system hasn’t caught up with these huge changes in the youth market. Why not police it better by allowing agents to represent children at a younger age?”
Any deal involving a player under the age of 18 who gets signed by a Premier League club is vetted by the league’s five-step process, which was established to safeguard players and clubs. The Premier League say it is one of the most comprehensive and protective frameworks in Europe and gives them a range of powers, including the ability to request phone records. But some senior figures inside clubs feel the age with which players move is only going to keep getting lower – and will bring with it fresh headaches.
“It’s 14s and 15s now but it will go to 12s and 13s and then it will go lower again,” one said. “It’s a huge problem for the Premier League to manage all this because people will always find a way to get around the rules. What we have got to do is make sure we keep reviewing the rules.”
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