Man City and the way they sell their young players

M

MVBoro

Well-known member
I know a lot of people don’t like City but the way they run their recruitment (buying and selling) must be amongst if not the best in elite football.
They seem to have sold a ton of young players in the last few years for pretty decent money. Rather than like other clubs (most notably Chelsea), they don’t send them out on loads of loans, but make a pretty quick judgement on whether they have a chance of progressing to the first team. If not, they sell them when they are still very young, and insert both sell on and buy back clauses, to cover themselves to some extent.
Their multi club structure certainly works for them, but the others have a long way to go to catch up.
 
I think as much as people like to hate Man City for all sorts of reasons, some of them fairly, they are a very well run club. The fact they were laying the groundwork for Guardiola coming in about 3 years ahead of time and are now reaping the rewards is testament enough to that, never mind all the stuff below the first team setup that they've put in place. I read an interesting thing a while ago from someone I know who follows youth football fairly close that talked about their youth system that I found interesting:

Their academy coaching model is pretty interesting because it is entirely 433 Barcelona/Cruyff/Guardiola principles worked on over and over and over again and that plus their unrivalled capacity to recruit up to U16 means they're dominant across the age groups. All their teams score the same types of goal and have the same patterns of play and at time it seems a bit robotic, a bit of a clone factory (Kian Breckin plays just like De Bruyne, it's jarring) but I think it tends to give limited mileage as to the sort of level the graduates can eventually reach, and it doesn't seem to affect whether Guardiola gives them a chance. Foden is a unicorn, Palmer is probably more representative of what the pathway looks like.
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I'm surprised Harwood-Bellis hasn't gone yet since he did well last year and with the U21s this summer.
 
Yeah, they’re brilliantly run. Recruitment at the elite level is so scattergun (look at Man United and Chelsea) but City are laser focused on long term targets, get exactly the right players without even overpaying that much and rarely get it wrong. Haaland for £60m sums them up.

The way they got Pep is like a model of how to run a big club. They brought in his whole back room team / directors of football etc from Barcelona 3 years in advance and built a squad he could work with. That’s how you get an elite manager, not by throwing money at them.

The success helps and of course the money, but they’re not even the biggest spenders or payers (3rd highest wage bill atm, and 8th in net spend over last 5 years, Arsenal are top).
 
If Chelsea had Foden as a kid they would have loaned him out for 5 seasons, ruined him, then quietly let him go. Him and 45 other players.

Man City just look like they do things the right way. Nurture the good talent they have, loan some out, sell when they need to. Looks an excellent run academy/business model, and it's not just about the Arab money in the club.

Interesting what happens when Pep goes.
 
Good thread this, makes a refreshing change from whenever Man City are mentioned some Farmfoods Red pops up whining about their “unfair advantage”

They’re making a small return on their investment it’s a start.
 
In some ways Southampton are reeping the beneitts too, buying 4 or 5 kids from Chelsea and Man City, selling them for a profit, I think we might be looking at doing this too.
 
Man City have just sold Carlos Borges for 12m, and he never played a first team game for them, now that's good business. How can teams pay that amount of money for a player who has never played a first team game is beyond me. Surely there are players out there better for that price. I think it's the Man City factor that makes the prices be inflated. Absolutely ridiculous but good business for City. They have a very good business model.
 
They also pay (relative) large sums of money to get these kids on the first place though. It’s not as if they’re all plucked from the streets of Manchester. Admittedly the sums they ultimately get for them is quite staggering. It’s certainly a business model that works.
 
The Foden point made above is a good one though.

For all of the turnover in kids for profit, they give the exceptional talent a route to first team football still.

Foden, Lewis, Palmer, Scott Carson
 
Jimmy_Salmon said:
They also pay (relative) large sums of money to get these kids on the first place though. It’s not as if they’re all plucked from the streets of Manchester. Admittedly the sums they ultimately get for them is quite staggering. It’s certainly a business model that works.
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They signed Morgan Rogers for £4m+ when he was 16 years old.
 
h_m_boro said:
If Chelsea had Foden as a kid they would have loaned him out for 5 seasons, ruined him, then quietly let him go. Him and 45 other players.

Man City just look like they do things the right way. Nurture the good talent they have, loan some out, sell when they need to. Looks an excellent run academy/business model, and it's not just about the Arab money in the club.

Interesting what happens when Pep goes.
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Yes look at Loftus-Cheek, Chalobah and the two we had on loan, Josh McEachran and Lewis Baker.
 
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