In football’s race to the top, signing players that are world class right now is the goal of the haves and the dream of the have nots. That pursuit of instant gratification in the beautiful game has led to some clubs neglecting their academies – they cannot afford to hope that elite talents are to be produced when they can remove all risk and go and sign proven superstars instead.
But there’s still a place for the humble academy in world football – particularly in those countries that don’t have a huge amount of money sloshing about. The conveyor belts of talent in Brazil, Portugal and Scandinavia continue to produce the next generation of stars, while ensuring that the host club remains financially viable.
Endrick, the 18-year-old signed by Real Madrid in the summer of 2024, could be the next world-class Brazilian to come out of their seemingly never-ending store cupboard of stars. Palmeiras were, this time, the club responsible for producing the fleet-footed forward. France, also known for its prolific exporting of young sensations, has another £50 million sale in its ledger following Leny Yoro’s switch from Lille to Manchester United.
Maybe cash-rich clubs will now take their academies seriously once more given that the sale of homegrown youngsters counts as 100% gain to financial fair play calculations – any club struggling to meet the rules can simply sell an academy graduate or two to help balance the books. So, which clubs are the premier producers of next gen talent, and does that ability to create and sell elite youngsters manifest itself in success out on the pitch?
The Talent Factories of World Football
How would we measure the success of a football club’s academy? Is it the numbers of players they produce that go on to have professional careers, the transfer fees that their players command or the number of trophies their graduates win? If we wanted to start with the most basic measure of an academies worth, we might look at the numbers of players they have produced that have gone on to be sold to another professional club in a recognised league.
The data isn’t easy to come by – some sales aren’t even reported, some aren’t reported accurately, but by amalgamating the data collected by a number of different sources in the period of 2014-2023, we can get a clearer look at the number of academy graduates sold in that timeframe.
Number of Academy Graduates Sold (2014-2023)
Anyone that follows world football perhaps won’t be surprised to see Ajax Amsterdam at the head of this list. They have produced an inordinate number of world-class academy graduates over the years – Johan Cruyff, Marco van Basten, Ronald and Frank de Boer, Frank Rijkaard and Dennis Bergkamp are just a few notable names.
But Ajax are vulnerable to predators from Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues, who have recognised that the Eredivisie has neither the pulling power nor the financial muscle to keep young starlets in the Netherlands for too long – hence Ajax’s status as the premier seller of top talent. Quite why the Ajax academy is so successful is hard to quantify, although the fact that they pump so many resources into finding the best young talents to bring into the youth programme – allied to world-leading facilities and technique-led coaching – certainly helps.
Some leagues around the globe are known as ‘talent producers’, whereas others might be classified as ‘finishing schools’ – where young stars go to fulfil their potential at the highest level. It comes as no surprise that nations that liberally produce outstanding players feature highly on our list above: Portugal (Sporting, Benfica), France (Lyon). and Argentina (River Plate) chief amongst them. But even then, some finishing school clubs have also done well in producing next generation stars: Inter Milan, Real Madrid and Chelsea perhaps making surprise additions to the rankings.
You might also consider that Barcelona’s famed La Masia academy is low on the list, but remember, this is a ranking of the number of players sold – so many Barca graduates actually stick around at the club and try/succeed in forging a successful career in Catalonia. Don’t forget, they played a La Liga game against Levante in 2012 they fielded a starting eleven made up entirely of La Masia graduates.
Making It Pay
The object for some football academies is to create a conveyor belt of talent that sees young players given a pathway into their club’s first team. But at others, the assignment is to simply create youngsters that can be sold for a monetary gain – with those funds then reinvested both into the academy but also in signing older talents that can shine right now, rather than further down the line when they’ve matured.
Below we look at the academies that made the most money, in terms of transfer fees generated through the sale of their graduates, between 2014-2023. Although they don’t feature inside the top-10 academies listed, it should be flagged just how extraordinary a producer of top young talent Brazilian clubs have been over the years.
Three of their clubs – Flamengo, Palmeiras and Sao Paulo – all ranked inside the top-30 for highest cumulative transfer fees received from the sale of academy graduates, and that’s despite Brazil not being awash with funds to pump into their youth programmes. Pound for pound, Brazil remains one of the most stellar producers of young players in world football – which makes the travails of their national team all the more shocking. Otherwise, this is the list of the most financially successful academies in world football between 2014 and 2023:
Most Financially Successful World Football Academies (2014-2023)
Benfica’s academy was the most financially successful for the period of 2014-2023, and in reality, it wasn’t even close – the Portuguese outfit generating in excess of £100 million more than any other club. That can be contributed to one player alone: Joao Felix, having come through the youth ranks at Benfica, moving to Atletico Madrid for an eye-popping £113 million during the 2019/20 season. Curiously, Atleti have loaned Felix out to Chelsea and Barcelona – essentially for free – in two of his four seasons with the club. Not exactly money well spent then, although Benfica no doubt couldn’t give a hoot.
Manchester City have been a benefactor to Benfica’s youth academy over the years – and a beneficiary too. They have plundered the Portuguese club for Ederson and Ruben Dias since 2017 for a cumulative tally of close to £100 million; with a stack of silverware, including a Champions League win, for City with the duo they would no doubt describe it as money well spent.
PSG have looked to emulate City’s Benfican splurge by capturing both Goncalo Guedes and Goncalo Ramos since 2016, with a cumulative £80 million spent. Guedes has since left the club, while Ramos notched 14 goals in his maiden season with the Parisians in 2023/24.
Another big-name sale emanated from the Benfica academy in 2016/17. Renato Sanches, the highly-touted midfielder, joined Bayern Munich for £30 million. He, like Felix, has also failed to live up to his potential so far, but his development was another feather in the cap of the youth system at the Portuguese outfit.
It’s amazing to think that in selling the six players mentioned above, Benfica have been able to reinvest significantly in their first-team squad, while having finances left over to fund ground maintenance work and maintain the standards of their academy. It just goes to show that if you’re willing to invest the time and resources into producing the stars of tomorrow, it only takes one big sale or two to boost the account exponentially.
Creating Champions
If we are evaluating the relative success of football club academies, another measure we can look at is the number of winners they produce – that is, the quantity of graduates who go on to win the sport’s biggest prizes. In that sense, Barcelona’s La Masia ranks highly – aided, of course, by the club’s success in La Liga and Champions League, as well as the silverware-laden couple of decades enjoyed by the Spanish national team.
Top Barcelona Graduates

That said, it’s pretty much a single generation of Masia graduates that has contributed, with nine Barcelona youth teamers that were at the prestigious facility at the turn of the new millennium, give or take, all going on to win one or more of the World Cup, European Championship or the Champions League:
- Sergio Busquets
- Cesc Fàbregas
- Andrés Iniesta
- Pedro
- Carlos Puyol
- Pepe Reina
- Victor Valdés
- Xavi
And then there’s Lionel Messi. Of a similar generation to those named above, the Argentine moved to Barcelona at the age of 13 in the year 2000 – after progressing through the ranks to the first team, Messi would win ten La Liga titles and four Champions Leagues with the Catalan club, before twice winning Ligue 1 with PSG. Perhaps the coup de grace of Messi’s career came in 2022, when he lifted the World Cup trophy with his Argentina teammates, adding that missing major international tournament that his incredible CV so deserved.
Bayern Munich’s academy project deserves praise too, creating a grand total of eight World Cup winners over the years. Players like Toni Kroos (seven domestic titles with Bayern and Real Madrid, six Champions Leagues), Philipp Lahm (eight Bundesliga titles and a Champions League) and Thomas Muller (12 Bundesliga titles, two Champions Leagues) have gone on to win some of football’s grandest prizes; in some cases multiple times over.
Top Monaco Graduates

Others can’t quite lay a glove on the brilliance of the Barcelona and Bayern academies, but some have given it a good go. How about this list of graduates from the Monaco youth system:
- Thierry Henry
- Kylian Mbappé
- Lillian Thuram
- Emmanuel Petit
- David Trezeguet
Talent, and silverware, is not exactly in short supply amongst that cohort. As far as English football is concerned, there have been numerous talent factories over the years. But, all told, few academies can hold a candle to that of Chelsea. A diverse array of players – from John Terry and Jimmy Greaves to Ray Wilkins and Peter Osgood – have passed through the doors at the Cobham facility, winning silverware at both club and international level.
The likes of Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori and Tammy Abraham have been sold for good money in recent years, while Marc Guehi and Conor Gallagher have gone on to represent England at the European Championship.
During the 2022/23 season, Chelsea’s academy produced more Premier League minutes than any other system – between them and Arsenal, graduates of those respective youth systems played more than 21,000 EPL minutes combined. At the quarter-final stage of the Champions League in 2023/24, Arsenal had more academy graduates competing in that phase of the competition than any other English side. So, are Chelsea and Arsenal the last bastions of youth academy investment in English football?
Making It Count
If we consider youth academies in the context of financial gains for teams, they can evidently be a successful enterprise for those clubs that are able to produce emerging stars and then sell them on for a handsome price. But how does academy success translate to glory on the pitch? Some clubs, of course, are very keen to keep their graduates for as long as possible – numerous times over the past 30 years or so have Barcelona, for example, integrated youngsters into their first-team squads.
Otherwise, the money generated from selling academy graduates can be reinvested into tried-and-tested players. Either way, having a successful youth system should ultimately lead to better results on the pitch, right? Well, let’s circle back to the academies that we identified as the best in football over the past decade. We’ve namechecked Benfica, whose youth team system has generated more than £400 million since 2014.
Have they reinvested the funds wisely? Perhaps: they’ve won the Portuguese Primeira Liga title five times since the start of the 2014/15 campaign, as well as reaching three Champions League quarter-finals. As far as the club’s expectations are concerned, that’s pretty much on point.
Of the other three clubs that generated more than £300 million in academy player sales from 2014 to 2023, their fortunes could not be any more different. Real Madrid, as you may know, are one of the most decorated club teams in world football. They’ve won the Spanish La Liga four times since 2014, which they may consider to be something of an underachievement. However, the Galacticos’ record in the Champions League – five wins since the start of 2015/16 – really is extraordinary. They earned their colloquial nickname through their big spending; but don’t forget how much money Real have made cultivating the next generation of stars too.
As for Ajax and Lyon, the picture is less rosy. For Ajax, the 2023/24 campaign was their worst since the 1999/2000 season – a fifth-place finish in the Dutch Eredivisie far below the standards expected. They also failed to make it out of their Europa League group, but as a general rule that has been an anomaly. Otherwise, Ajax’s canny buying and selling of their players has taken them to a Champions League semi-final, Europa League final and four Eredivisie titles since 2014 – a performance, certainly on the continent, that is perhaps better than anticipated.
Lyon, meanwhile, have historically been one of the stronger teams in France in recent years. Like Ajax, they have fallen on hard times of late – finishing no better than sixth between 2021/22 and 2023/24, despite racking up a quartet of top-three finishes in the seven years prior. What’s fascinating about Lyon is that their weakened finishes in Ligue 1 are directly correlated to their net spend. They recorded a net gain in every single season from 2018/19 up to and including 2023/24, raking in millions from the sale of youth team graduates, such as Malo Gusto and Bradley Barcola.
But they haven’t reinvested that revenue – evidenced by their positive net spend returns since 2018, which explains why they are losing ground to others in Ligue 1. And that proves the bottom line: even if you have a successful youth academy operation, you still need to be reinvesting the financial gains generated into players that can perform well today – not just tomorrow.