Inside Huddersfield Town’s 11-point plan to create academy superstars

The development of academy talent into first-team players is one of football’s biggest industries and the great unknown. In the second of a series embedded within Huddersfield Town, I try to explain how the process works in 11 steps… Successful academy graduates are gold dust for every football club. In the Premier League they are the “pure profit” gamechangers but also the alternative to the rampant spending: Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka, Reece James, Kobbie Mainoo, Rio Ngumoha. In the EFL, they can be more crucial still. One sale can secure the entire future of the club. Take Ollie Watkins at Exeter City – sold for £1.8m to Brentford, £4m on the sell-on clause when he moved to Aston Villa, further payment when he joined Al-Hilal this summer. With annual losses in the EFL rising all the time, creating a pathway for academy talent to shine is the best way to generate extra revenue. The great complication: how do you blend the demand for success on the pitch in the present with the desire to develop young players in the team and have patience with their non-linear development? In the second in my series behind the scenes at Huddersfield Town, I wanted to know how clubs wrestle with this conundrum, what processes they have in place for ensuring young talent is developed, assessed and retained and how different roles within a club work together to create pathways. I have broken it down into 11 principles… Long-termism has to rule Martin Drury was appointed head coach in May having served as assistant manager (Photo: Getty)Huddersfield Town have not been quiet for a while at first-team level. Over the last decade they have been promoted to the Premier League, stayed there, been relegated, lost a play-off final, been relegated again and then twice missed out on the play-offs. There have been 12 different managers. It is a lot of change. Change complicates pathways for young players, if you are not careful. Managers know they need to win now. Every season feels defining. Supporters are impatient. These are all potential barriers to academy players being given opportunities. Sporting director Chris Markham says that the club have deliberately moved to address those concerns this summer. The club is more process than outcome-focused, which roughly translates as focusing more on the wider view and trusting in an identity and longer-term vision. Jon Worthington is crucial to this. Worthington has done most jobs at Huddersfield Town – academy graduate, player, physio, academy coach, B team coach, interim manager. This summer his role as head of the academy was changed to director of player development. It is a statement. Worthington now oversees the whole process, responsible for delivering on a longer-term vision that has pathways at its heart. He is the centre of the ecosystem for academy players: recruitment, development, assessment, retention. There is nobody on the planet better suited to the exact role and that is how you give yourself the best shot. You need local buy-in We all know how supporting a football club works. We are desperate for local players to get a chance in the first team because we love them the most. But then we also reserve the right to expect success and moan when players make mistakes and seasons go awry. It creates a difficult – maybe even impossible – balance for clubs and realistically includes some give and take: you hand out opportunities when you can. One thing that absolutely helps is self-fulfillment. If your club has successfully developed academy players into first-team regulars or sold them on for significant financial gain, it creates emotional investment from supporters and extra appetite and patience for other young players coming through. There is a catch-22 element to that – someone has to be the first of a cohort to get a chance in the first place – but you take the point. Huddersfield Town believe that they possess something that might help that mood: hyperlocalism. The manager was born in Huddersfield. The sporting director was born in Huddersfield. The chief operating officer was born in Huddersfield. The director of player development was born eight miles away, but they will not hold that against him. Football clubs seek USPs and this can be one. ‘Highest level’ is the mantra The aim for everyone is to get players into the first team from the academy, for that first team to function highly and for those players to contribute in a way that makes them first choice because of how they perform, not who they are. Nobody is a charity case and nobody is advocating for overpromotion. That does not help. However, there is a complicating factor that I had not thought of: what if your first team is not the highest level? That cannot be a reason for capping potential. Let Worthington explain: “Our model is to get players to be successful in our first team, but ultimately we’re trying to produce players to play at the highest level, which is Championship and above. That’s what every player that comes into our programme should be aspiring to. “The first team are not in the league that we want them to be in and so we’re not trying to aspire to produce League One players. We want to produce top players, but we want them to play in our first team first and that to be the springboard for them.” The individual development plan Academy graduate Jay Sway continues to impress since breaking into the first team (Photo: Getty) Obvious thing to say: every academy member is different and so, if you are trying to maximise potential, no training and development plan should be the same either. Each player, from Under-16s up to the most senior member of the first team, has an individual development plan that changes regularly. The focus may be on strength, stamina, recovery, nutrition, leadership and more. At younger age groups (where children are still in full-time education), this involves coaching evenings where coaches work on a one-to-one or one-to-two or three from Under-9s up to Under-16s. Players are carouselled, moving around to different activities focusing on different exercises, gym work, positional specifics or work with specialists that come in (a sprint coach, perhaps). The intention is to curate everything around each individual as much as possible. By the time players are in the 16-21 phase, they have a process and environment that they have known from pre-academy upwards. Monitoring and assessing This is the most important bit, really, what Worthington labels as “a catalogue of meetings, discussions and end-of-cycle assessments” where players are presented. People across the age groups are informed of players who have been identified. Individual development plans can be changed to match needs. Some players will be classed as “emerging talent players”, but the club makes the point that this is never set in stone. All academy players are on different journeys and develop at different speeds. It is not what they are now, it is what they are going to be and what they need within their development to get there. There will usually be between two and four players in each age group who stand out (again, they can change). There will be specific meetings about those players where they work out when best to move players up or down age groups for matches. That’s not as simple as playing the best two 17-year-olds in the Under-21s. You might drop a player down to focus on a certain skill in a match (eg a right winger taking on a left-back on the touchline or a central defender stepping out with the ball), or promote to face a certain standard of opponent. Workload management plays into the same discussions. You are trying to place individuals in scenarios that challenge them. A trend must spread across the club It might sound obvious, but the point of a long-term vision is that if the first team has a set identity then the rest of the club can be moulded in that vision and covers the coaching appointments, the delivery of the programme and recruitment. “We coach concepts and duels which embrace one-on-one situations and out-of-possession actions – being able to take the ball off people and being aggressive in those moments,” Worthington says. “We train like that from under-9s all the way through. There’s an intensity to the coaches and demands – in a positive way – of what we expect from the players. I think that aligns with a Yorkshire and Huddersfield Town football club ethos and what we’re trying to be.” Use your ‘other’ matches wisely… Chelsea’s Levi Colwill earned his stripes at the Accu Stadium before returning to Stamford Bridge (Photo: Getty) With the pressure raised upon league fixtures, the other matches of an EFL season are usually the best chance to give opportunities and they will often provoke the most wider discussion between staff about selection. “A number of our pre-season games were deliberately against really competitive teams, against men’s teams, when we included a lot of young players,” head coach Martin Drury says. “We’ve then had the cup games, where we’ve included a lot of young players and those players that have been involved with us have added real value to us.” The EFL Trophy is an oft-criticised competition, but Drury is a huge fan for the same reason. “I love the fact some Premier League clubs’ Under-21s teams enter it, it’s a great opportunity for every club to use it for different reasons. Some might be using it to get a win, some to get young players on the pitch, some to get players back from injury.” …and take the wins when they come During Town’s latest game in the EFL Trophy, Drury brought on 17-year-old academy forward Jamie Spencer for his first-team debut. Spencer’s first touch was to control the ball in the penalty area and his second touch was a goal. It doesn’t usually work like that so take those wins when they come and use them as poster boy moments for everyone in the academy. “It was a top day for the collective staff,” Worthington says. “It takes you back to three years ago when we recruited 100 players over the summer and he was one of those players that we brought into that 9-16 team programme. “But also, I think it helps in terms of buying in what we’re doing. He was identified as an emerging talent player very early on and I think the support and work of the staff around that have led to it. It’s just the start, but it was a nice moment.” Managing the loan system Within football’s hierarchical system, there is clearly scope for young players to drop down divisions to get experience. In fact, and slightly ironically, it has become one of the roadblocks for academy players in the EFL. Some clubs are preferring to loan from Premier League U21 and U18 squads rather than give existing academy players minutes. Regularly, Worthington and Markham meet to discuss succession – when each player will be ready and what they need in terms of level, exposure and style of play. Evidently, those conversations start long before the transfer window opens. This is no exact science given any loan depends upon an external party. This summer, Huddersfield sold Tom Iorpenda to Swansea City after a highly successful loan at Notts County because his contract was expiring in June 2027. That is a scenario the club are looking to avoid in future. “Before they go on loan we need to be savvy with them,” Markham says. “We’re already talking to our under-16s now about their scholarship and their pro deals. The ones that the academy identify as being emerging talent players – we want to make sure that we have a specific pathway for them here and also that they have security as well.” Don’t fear the poaching One question I ask Worthington is around the poaching of talent. The Elite Player Performance Plan allows for Category 1 academies to recruit nationally, but even locally to Huddersfield Town there are five Premier League clubs within a 90 minute drive. Is the club not worried that you can do everything and then lose a player – for relatively low compensation – to a bigger club? “I don’t worry about that because I believe in our programme,” he says. Maybe he’s simply ignoring what he ultimately can’t entirely control. Maybe he’s just being a company man. Or maybe he’s just right. “I believe in the relationships that we’ve got with the players and parents. I believe that the parents see what we’re doing and ultimately they see there are pathways: seven seasons, 42 debuts, 50% of those players have gone on and played over 50 appearances within the league. “That shows there’s a pathway for players and I think we’re really open with the parents in terms of what we’re trying to do and what that looks like. So I don’t think we can get concerned. We’ve just got to believe that we’ve got a really strong programme and players want to be here and feel that they’re progressing.” Read more On The Road: My day as Huddersfield Town’s mascot – from DBS checks to unbearable heat The big interview: I spent a day with the American billionaire obsessed with Huddersfield Town And remember to deal with the human being This is the best way to end. You see a lot of negative headlines about football club academies and it is true that aftercare could always be better that some children at some clubs do suffer bad experiences. But what I find most fascinating is how many tools football clubs have to offer support away from the physical or technical aspects of the game. There are specific psychosocial exercises and sessions where academy players talk about openness, being open to feedback, self-regulation and managing emotions, dealing with disappointment, leadership values, motivation, drive, ownership of your journey with a multidisciplinary team around them (although there is always an onus on players to find their own way too). A lot of the support is around experience and exposure, not just to certain scenarios but to success and failure. The first-team environment can be daunting and one of the great truths of elite sport is that competitors perform at their best when they are content and comfortable emotionally. Staff need to pick up on responses, even micro reactions. That is what Worthington is most keen to reinforce and speaks most to parents about: the values being instilled will stand players well at Huddersfield Town or elsewhere, but also outside of football given that is the reality. You are hoping to find first-team players. But you are building people.