Spurs, a long-awaited academy generation and the hope for more nights 'made in Tottenham'

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Ange Postecoglou called it “a night made in Tottenham”.

Last month, Tottenham Hotspur’s 3-0 win at home against Elfsborg sealed a top-eight Europa League finish and confirmed their spot in the round of 16. They needed 70 minutes to score but it ended up being a routine victory, registering 80 per cent possession against a Swedish side technically in their pre-season. More significantly, Tottenham finished with four academy graduates on the pitch, including three of the goalscorers.

Goalkeeper Brandon Austin filled in with Guglielmo Vicario injured and Antonin Kinsky not registered for the European squad. Dane Scarlett scored four minutes after coming on, then Damola Ajayi doubled the lead on 81 minutes, three minutes after his arrival. Mikey Moore put the icing on the Tottenham cake in stoppage time.

“We were enjoying it. You should enjoy it,” said Postecoglou. “People can say, ‘Look at the opposition’, but it’s a European night, you’ve (got) young Tottenham boys out there. It’s a special night for the club.”


Dane Scarlett celebrates his first goal against Elfsborg, his first for Spurs (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

A special night in a difficult season. Tottenham are 12th in the Premier League — they have not finished in the bottom half since 2008. They recently won consecutive league games (1-0 vs Manchester United and 2-0 vs Brentford) for only the second time this term, and it was their first instance of back-to-back clean sheets since October 2023.

They followed up those wins by beating Ipswich Town 4-1 on Saturday but recent form is papering cracks. Postecoglou, a man of his playing principles, has repeatedly defended his team’s performances in an injury-hit season. “We’ve been doing this since the middle of November,” he said this month.

“I don’t know how else to explain it. This team is trying its hardest to play under the most extreme two and a half months, asking 18-year-olds, 17-year-olds and senior players, with no rest, to play Thursday-Sunday.

“If you think that is not a factor in how this team is performing then there’s nothing else I can say. There’s got to be a better appreciation for what a very small group of players have been doing.”

It begs the question: why is the squad “very small”? These are the moments when having an academy-to-first-team pathway is essential, to provide depth and rotation options. To help satisfy profit and sustainability regulations (PSR), it is increasingly important for clubs to generate a profit from academy-trained players. Developing talent is a means to acquire the funds (or balance the books) to fuel recruitment strategies.

Five of the Premier League’s conventional ‘Big Six’ sides are the top teams for minutes given to ‘club-trained’ players this campaign. Club-trained is defined as being at the club for at least three years between the ages of 15 and 21. Tottenham, who have only given 1.2 per cent of minutes to academy graduates, are the exception.

Playing academy graduates does not guarantee success. Manchester United are having a worse season than Tottenham. Manchester City have more defeats than wins since the start of November and the FA Cup is their last realistic chance of a trophy this season. However, look at any of the ‘Big Six’ clubs’ success stories — from Chelsea’s Champions League, Manchester United’s FA Cup, City’s Premier League titles, Arsenal’s evolution and this season’s runaway Liverpool team — and they owe to their academy in some form.

Tottenham and Postecoglou are not opposed to playing youngsters. The average age of their starting XI in this season’s Premier League is the joint-third youngest (25.9, with Bournemouth). They have actively recruited youth: Lucas Bergvall, Archie Gray, Wilson Odobert and Yang Min-hyeok were teenagers bought under Postecoglou, who has also developed Brennan Johnson (23 years old), Destiny Odogie, Pape Matar Sarr (both 22) and other young players.

Tottenham Hotspur squad 2024 25 1

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It is a shift and overcorrection from the older teams used by Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte in an (ultimately fruitless) effort to earn silverware. Tottenham were losing Champions League finalists in 2019 and sensed they could win something.

Academy-to-first team pathways tend to be closed loops. Young players are more likely to join clubs with a clear route to the first team — and players stay there after breaking in.

Only six players born in 1990 or later have come through the Tottenham academy and made 100-plus Premier League appearances (at Tottenham or elsewhere): Harry Kane, Adam Smith, Harry Winks, Kyle Walker-Peters, Steven Caulker and Andros Townsend. Oliver Skipp, on 93 Premier League games and now at Leicester City, is close to making that six. Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal have 14, 15 and 13 graduates born since 1990 with over a century of Premier League appearances.

When Ryan Mason was Spurs’ caretaker head coach in the spring of 2023, after Mourinho departed, he said, “Of course I see the value in the academy and having homegrown players — but at the same time, players have to be good enough. They have to earn that opportunity. It’s not an easy route to the top, especially at a club of this size.”

He was speaking from experience, having broken through under Pochettino in 2014 after loan spells at five clubs. Mason is archetypal of the players who have made the jump from academy to first team at Tottenham: a diminutive, technically proficient central midfielder. It is the type of player coaches tend to love and help control games, but is rarely a matchwinner. Skipp, Winks, Tom Carroll, Alex Pritchard and Jamie O’Hara are further examples.

Of course, the glittering graduate is Kane. The north London boy joined aged 11 after being released by Arsenal. Like Mason, he needed multiple loans in English football’s lower divisions before breaking into Spurs’ senior side. He scored more than 200 Premier League goals for Tottenham, then fetched €100million (£86.4m; $110m at the time) when he joined Bayern Munich in August 2023. The mural by the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium proudly describes him as “one of our own”.

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A mural of Harry Kane outside Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (Chloe Knott/Getty Images)

Academies, though, are not to solely be judged on their singular generational talent — Phil Foden (Manchester City), Marcus Rashford (Manchester United), Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool), Bukayo Saka (Arsenal) — but rather the consistency with which young players break into the first team and become established starters or fulfil squad roles.

There have been too many examples of players leaving Tottenham’s older academy age groups and forging careers elsewhere: Noni Madueke once captained Tottenham’s under-16s, left at 18 for PSV, then earned the Dutch side £28.5million when he joined Chelsea four years later.

Likewise, Walker-Peters. He is a versatile full-back who was man of the match on his Premier League debut (a 2-0 win at Newcastle United) in 2017, and became the second-youngest player to assist three goals in a Premier League game in December 2018. Walker-Peters only made 12 league appearances for Tottenham, then joined Southampton permanently (for £12m) after a loan spell for the second half of 2019-20, and is closing in on 200 club appearances.

Marcus Edwards is another. Pochettino once said he had stylistic resemblances to Lionel Messi. Tottenham earned nearly €8m when he joined Vitoria Guimaraes in 2019, having made one first-team appearance. He has since played Europa League and Champions League football with Sporting CP, winning the Portuguese title last year. He joined Championship club Burnley on loan in January.

There is an argument that the talent has just not been there. London is one of football’s hotbeds. Arsenal and Chelsea have enjoyed age-group success and maintained a pathway to the first team in recent years. West Ham United’s academy has a formidable reputation, while even former Premier League teams Watford (Jadon Sancho) and Charlton (Ademola Lookman, Joe Gomez and Ezri Konsa, all from their 1997-born generation) have recent academy success stories.

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Noni Madueke started at Spurs, but left at 16 (Darren Walsh/Getty Images)

Queens Park Rangers (2022-23), Arsenal (2018-19), Chelsea (three times) and Watford (2024-25) have all knocked Tottenham out of the FA Youth Cup since 2017. They have not reached the semi-finals of the competition — the under-18 equivalent of the FA Cup — since Chelsea beat them 9-2 over two legs in 2017.

Their 4-2 FA Youth Cup defeat at Vicarage Road last week was symptomatic of first-team problems. Tottenham conceded twice in eight first-half minutes to go 2-0 down and shot themselves in the foot with red cards either side of half-time. They still tried to play with a high line and the left-back rolled inside during build-up. A video of Watford under-18 assistant Lloyd Doyley played before kick-off, and he made the point that these games are a test for youngsters as they bring “family, cameras and expectation”, which are not always there in their league games.

Importantly, Tottenham’s youth teams have been successful in recent seasons. The under-21s finished top of the Premier League 2 last term. In the 2022-23 season, the under-17s and under-18s won the Premier League Cup — they beat Aston Villa (3-1) and Nottingham Forest (5-1) in their respective finals, at their opponents’ stadiums.

That group of Tottenham under-21s is scattered (and that age group this season is 22nd out of 26 teams). Jude Soonsup-Bell and Yago Santiago left permanently for Spain’s second tier, joining Cordoba and Elche. Brooklyn Lyons-Foster went to HJK in Finland and Nile John is with Feirense in Portugal’s second division. Again, that can be viewed as players not seeing a pathway and not being prepared to wait, or the talent not being of sufficient quality.

Meanwhile, defender Alfie Dorrington (Aberdeen) and forwards Jamie Donley (Leyton Orient) and Will Lankshear (West Bromwich Albion) are on loan spells. Donley is playing well in League One, scoring six goals and five assists in 25 appearances and forcing an own goal with a halfway-line strike against Manchester City in the FA Cup. Lankshear was the top scorer (18) and player of the year in the Premier League 2 last term. A powerful runner in behind, he started the campaign with the first team, notably scoring the opener before being sent off away to Galatasaray in a Europa League match.

As Mason and Kane’s routes to the first teams show, development is rarely linear. It requires patience. Success at the academy level is not a guaranteed predictor of first-team performance. Successful youth teams do not necessarily produce outstanding individual players, but it is a marker of improvement.

The biggest challenge is for Tottenham’s academy players to perform at — and maintain — the physical levels that Postecoglou’s system demands. According to the Footovision graphic below, Tottenham are sprinting in and out of possession more than any other Premier League team.

Research shows physical output is significantly greater at first-team versus academy level, but that gap is even greater at Tottenham. Postecoglou said recently that academy players have been required to make up numbers in first-team training sessions. Adaptation to increased loading does not happen all at once — it takes time and careful management.

Moore, who can play out wide or as a No 10, jumped straight from the under-18s to the first team this summer. The 17-year-old missed two months at the end of 2024 (due to a virus, not a muscular injury), which prompted Postecoglou to say, “We’re going to take our time” with his development. “We will protect him, and we’ll be guided by how he feels,” the head coach added. Speaking to The Athletic in May 2024, one coach who worked with Moore said, “He’s the first (academy) player for a long time who has a good chance of breaking into the first team.”

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The benefit for Tottenham is that Wayne Burnett and Stuart Lewis — their under-21 and under-18 head coaches — have been in place since the summers of 2017 and 2021. Simon Davies, part of Manchester United’s famous 1992 academy generation, joined the club in 2022 (as head of coaching methodology) and has been academy director since June 2023. That stability is essential to support players progressing through age groups.

Part of the reason Tottenham spent £45million to build the Hotspur Way training ground in 2012 was to boost the academy. Their vision was “to be one of the world’s leading football clubs renowned for a long tradition of developing young talent that plays football the ‘Tottenham Hotspur’ way”. The training ground was to be the “elite environment that attracts, retains and develops top quality players, providing an ongoing supply of academy graduates to the first-team squad”.

Over a decade later, their return on investment is underwhelming — but this generation looks more promising than the ones that preceded it. Postecoglou needs more nights “made in Tottenham” and he might have them soon.

(Top photo: Andrew Milligan/Getty Images)





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Alexandra Williams
Alexandra Williams
Alexandra Williams is a writer and editor. Angeles. She writes about politics, art, and culture for LinkDaddy News.

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