What is a football academy?
Here at UK Football Academy Finder, we are often asked fairly fundamental and straightforward questions about football academies, so in this blog and the next couple, we will look at all you need to know about them. Most young footballers dream of joining a club’s academy, and indeed the majority of the players that you watch each week on Match of the Day have come through the academy system of various professional clubs.
Buying a professional footballer is incredibly expensive even to a top club. As a result, every pro club wants to bring on young players, who will play for their youth teams and then later the reserves, and who might one day, like Phil Foden, break into the first team. The place where a club trains their young players is called the club’s academy.
Working in these academies are some brilliant coaches, many of whom are themselves ex-professional footballers, who have done their badges, and are now charged with the responsibility of bringing on dedicated, talented, young footballers as they mature and work their way through the academy system. So, what are the various stages of the typical pro club academy?
Generally speaking, an academy is divided up into four different phases, which correspond to different age groups.
First, you have the Pre-Academy, where really young players from 6 or 7 upwards, get an opportunity to improve their basic skills, up to the under 8’s.
Next, you have the Foundation Phase, which takes players on their journey from under 9’s up to under 11’s.
Then you have the Youth Development Phase, which goes from the under 12’s to the under 15’s.
Then you have the Professional Development Phase which starts at the under 16’s age group, and always goes up to under 18’s, sometimes up to under 21’s, or even under 23’s depending on the size of the club.
So, that’s all pretty straightforward, provided you know how they work out what age group a player belongs to, and to find out how you work that out, please look out for our next blog on this….