Daniel Bedeau

Brentford shut their academy in 2016. They replaced it with a B team that produced over 500 first-team appearances and two players with 185 Premier League appearances between them. Ten years later they have just been awarded Category 1 academy status, the highest tier in English football. Most clubs conventionally run academies because it is expected of them but Brentford closed theirs because the numbers did not add up. According to reports, the academy was costing around £2 million a year while bigger clubs were signing their best young talent for compensation fees as low as £3,000 per player per year. They were basicallysubsidising other clubs' pipelines. So they stopped and built the B team instead and it worked. Mads Roerslev made 137 first-team appearances through that pathway. Yehor Yarmoliuk made 31 Premier League appearances in 2024-25 alone. However, the rules changed. Premier League promotion in 2021, Brexit, and a new mandate requiring all top-flight clubs to operate at minimum Category 3 by 2024-25 changed the calculation entirely. Of course they had to restart their academy. Here is what the categories actually mean. England's academy system under the Elite Player Performance Plan runs from Category 1 at the top to Category 4 at the bottom. FIFA has the same too. The Category a club is also determines how much time and money it is expected to spend in developing each player in it. Category 1 academies compete in Premier League 2, the elite U21 competition where they face the best young players at Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Liverpool every week. Category 2 clubs compete in the Professional Development League, one tier below. Category 3 and 4 clubs play in the EFL Youth Alliance at U18 level. The higher your category, the better the competition, the better the players you can recruit, and the higher the training compensation you receive when another club signs one of your graduates. And to be frank, the gap between categories is not just financial. It is measured in hours. According to the EPPP guidelines, Category 1 academies provide up to 16 hours of coaching contact time per week depending on age group. Category 2 academies offer between 8 and 12 hours. Category 3 drops to around 3 to 6 hours. Category 4, the level Brentford started at in 2022, operates at the most basic level with the fewest contact hours and the least infrastructure. The difference between a child developing at a Category 1 academy and one developing at Category 4 is not just the quality of the pitch they train on. It is thousands of hours of coaching, sports science, education support and professional guidance across their entire development. That is what Brentford have now built access to. Moreover, according to Leathes Prior Solicitors, each year a player spends at a Category 1 academy between U12 and U16 generates £40,000 in training compensation payable by any buying club. The same year at a Category 3 academy generates £12,500. At Category 4, where Brentford started in 2022, the figures are negligible. Category 1 means every player they develop is now significantly more expensive for any rival to acquire. Brentford rebuilt from Category 4 to Category 1 in four years, investing £30 million in facilities alone. According to the EPPP framework, that status requires a minimum operational budget of £2.5 million per year and at least 18 full-time staff. Both the academy and the B team now run side by side. One feeds the first team today. The other feeds it tomorrow. Brentford have just done something crazy. And crazy should be acknowledged. My name is Ajoje. I am a FIFA Licensed Agent and International Sports Lawyer. I write on the Law and Business of Football, a lot. Repost and Follow if you want to read more posts like this.