There is a feeling that Manchester City, backed by the financial heft of the entire Abu Dhabi royal family, have basically bought success off the shelf. It hasn’t always been that way for the Cityzens, because it wasn’t until Pep Guardiola took charge that they became the consistently unstoppable force of English football. While Pep has spent more than £1 billion on transfer fees in his time at the club, it’s interesting to note that Manchester City’s academy has now surpassed the £500 million mark in terms of player sales.
By our math, City are the first club in the world to have generated £500 million or more from selling their academy graduates – just pipping Benfica to the post, who have yielded around £480 million from cashing in on their starlets over the years. And the man who took the Premier League champions through that landmark ceiling? That would be Yan Couto, with Borussia Dortmund opting to make his loan move a permanent switch at a cost of £25 million.
While it would be fair to suggest that a lot of Manchester City’s success has come via the deep pockets of their owners, that’s not to say that they haven’t got some way to balancing the books by developing a highly-successful conveyor belt of talent from their academy.
Elite Development
One of the unique things about Manchester City is the club’s structure, and particularly the pathway the players must go through before they experience first team football. Typically, a club will have an academy set-up. And any players that shine in the oldest age group may get the call up to train with the first team. It’s a journey that dates back more than a century of professional football.
But City do things slightly differently. In between the first team and the academy sits another layer, known as their Elite Development Squad. Also known as EDS, this is City’s reserve team, to use old-fashioned parlance, albeit with a more youthful edge given that it’s staffed almost exclusively by players that have graduated from the academy.
Premier League Graduates
They play in Division 1 of Premier League 2, if that makes sense, and won the league three seasons on the spin from 2020/21 to 2022/23. The EDS has played a part in developing coaches too, as well as players, with Enzo Maresca guiding the Elite Development Squad to Premier League 2 glory in 2021. He has since gone on to manage Leicester City, winning the Championship, before moving on to Chelsea.
It’s amazing to see how many players in that Class of ’21 have since gone on to play Premier League football – be it at City or pastures new. Taylor Harwood-Bellis is a first-team regular at Southampton, while Romeo Lavia has impressed when fit at Southampton and Chelsea.
Lavia isn’t the only graduate from the EDS that Maresca knows well: Cole Palmer, who has set the world alight, played under the Italian during that title-winning season with the youngsters. He’s since scored in a European Championship final, been crowned England’s Player of the Year and the Premier League’s Young Player of the Season in 2023/24.
Many of his fellow graduates from the Class of ’21 are doing well, too. Morgan Rodgers has exploded into life with some impressive displays for Aston Villa, while Liam Delap has blasted four goals in seven Premier League starts for Ipswich Town.
Overseas Graduates
Others have decided to head overseas. Felix Nmecha was on the bench for Borussia Dortmund against Real Madrid in the 2024 Champions League final, where he was joined by another Manchester City graduate in Jamie Bynoe-Gittens, while starting on the right wing that night for the Germans was another EDS star in Jadon Sancho.
Angelino, Brahim Diaz, Aleix Garcia, Jeremie Frimpong, James Trafford – the list of graduates that have played at the highest level goes on and on. But what’s interesting about the Elite Development Squad is just how few of its players have gone on to play regularly for Manchester City’s first team.
In fact, if you were being brutally honest, you’d say that the only player from the EDS system to make a go of it at City has been Phil Foden – a stellar example, of course, but lonely in his journey from the development ranks to the light blue shirt of City’s first team. Mind you, judging by the performances of Rico Lewis, it could very well soon be two.
Making It Pay
Maybe City see the Elite Development Squad for what it is: a trustworthy cash cow, which helps to fund the club’s purchase of more experienced players from elsewhere to go straight into the first team. As formulas go, it’s certainly been a successful one – with the proof clear for all to see. But buying clubs can benefit too. They know that these EDS players have been earmarked by some outstanding judges as potential stars of the future, and their education from City’s stellar band of youth coaches is second to none.
It’s almost like when Frankel sires another brood of young thoroughbreds; there’s a chance that some of them will go on to achieve extraordinary things in horse racing. Palmer is, at the time of writing, the most expensive graduate of the Elite Development Squad, with Chelsea forking out £42.5 million for his services. The irony, perhaps, is that he would be worth at least double that now.
Grads with Transfer Fees Over £20 Million
But as many as seven of his fellow grads have transferred to new clubs for transfer fees in excess of £20 million. Couto is actually the next highest courtesy of his £28.5 million fee, with Kelechi Iheanacho (£25 million to Leicester), Romeo Lavia (£22.5 million to Southampton) and Brahim Diaz – a £22 million sale that has already gone on to win the Champions League with Real Madrid – the next cabs off the rank.
Angelino (£21.3 million to RB Leipzig), Jadon Sancho (£21.2 million to Borussia Dortmund) and Liam Delap (£20 million to Ipswich Town) offer added proof to confirm that Manchester City’s youth pathway is one of the most successful in world football.
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