The Alternative Models Framework.
Eight development models English academies should be studying, each broken down with the structural decision, what it produced and the principle that transfers regardless of budget.
Academy directors, technical directors, coaching education founders and independent consultants in professional football development.
Contents
The Architecture Audit
This document sets out eight models: eight structural decisions made by clubs operating at different scales and in different football cultures. None of them is a blueprint.
This document is a reference for practitioners who want to examine the structural choices in their own programme with more precision than the conventional frameworks provide. Each entry describes one thing a club did differently, what it produced and what the principle looks like when you strip away the budget and the context.
The Architecture Audit from the email course applies here.
Three questions run underneath every entry:
Read the model closest to your current challenge first.
Academy Directors
AZ Alkmaar · FC Midtjylland · Brighton and Brentford · Right to Dream · Benfica ·
Red Bull Network
AZ Alkmaar
Most academies assess players against the same criteria regardless of position. A technically strong performance earns credit whether the player is a goalkeeper, a central midfielder or a wide forward. AZ Alkmaar rejected that approach. From U9 upwards, every player in their system is assessed against benchmarks designed specifically for their position, built in collaboration with Dutch academic institutions and updated as the research base develops.
A central midfielder at AZ is assessed against the specific cognitive and technical behaviours research identifies as predictive for a central midfielder at elite level: decision-making speed under fatigue, positional awareness in transition, passing accuracy under pressure in tight spaces.
Psychological profiling feeds directly into session design and player benchmarks. The curriculum was designed with Dutch academic institutions from the ground up. Sessions are shaped by what the research identifies as producing development, with coaching tradition held to the same evidence.
AZ operate one of the smallest first-team budgets in the Eredivisie top six. Between 2019 and 2024, they generated more than £150 million in transfer revenue from academy graduates, with Teun Koopmeiners sold to Atalanta, Calvin Stengs to Nice and Myron Boadu to Monaco among the headline figures.
Around 50% of AZ first-team minutes in recent seasons have been played by academy graduates. In 2022–23, AZ under-19s won the UEFA Youth League, the first Dutch club to achieve it, including a 3–0 win over Barcelona and a 4–0 win over Real Madrid.
When your measurement is position-specific, so too does your coaching. The feedback your players receive is precise enough to change behaviour.
Pick one position your programme develops most. Write down what technically excellent looks like for that position at U14, at U16 and at U18 in your system. Then check your current assessment criteria against what you have written. How much overlap is there?
If you asked your U12 lead coach and your U18 lead coach to describe what a technically excellent player in that position looks like, independently and without preparation, would their answers describe the same player?
FC Midtjylland
European academy recruitment runs on reputation. Scouts travel to known clubs in known leagues, identify players with established profiles and assess them against criteria that reflect what elite football has always valued. FC Midtjylland asked whether that assumption holds.
It does not. FC Midtjylland built their recruitment model under Matthew Benham's ownership, in partnership with Smartodds. The question at its centre is where talent is underpriced. In practice, Midtjylland's recruitment extends globally, with sustained investment in West Africa, specifically Nigeria and Ghana, where the club identified athleticism and technical quality that European scouts were systematically undervaluing.
The Guldminen school, operated in partnership with ISI, sits at the centre of Midtjylland's player development approach: a state-accredited institution combining the Danish national curriculum with daily football and handball training.
FC Midtjylland won four Danish Superliga titles between 2015 and 2024. They compete regularly in European group stages on a budget a fraction of the size of the clubs they face. Pione Sisto, an Ivorian-Danish forward identified through data scouting, was sold to Celta Vigo. Evander, a Brazilian recruit, was sold to Portland Timbers for approximately $10 million.
Recruitment is shaped by the question it asks. A search for reputation clusters in known markets. A search for underpriced talent leads somewhere else, where the return is structurally higher.
Where does your academy currently recruit? List the postcodes, the feeder clubs, the schools. Now ask: is that geography the result of a deliberate decision about where the best talent is for your programme or is it where you have always looked?
If a rival academy with the same budget asked the same question and came up with a different map, which one of you would be right?
Brighton and Brentford
English football clubs spend heavily on recruitment, on the assumption that the more you pay for known players, the better your squad. Brighton and Brentford built their competitive advantage from identifying value where other clubs were not looking.
Brighton, under owner Tony Bloom and a data science infrastructure built around evidence-based recruitment, generated approximately £340 million in net transfer profit between 2020 and 2024, the highest of any Premier League club over that period. The model deploys analytical models to markets other clubs underweight: the lower French divisions, the Belgian Pro League, the Portuguese Primeira Liga.
Brentford's model during their B-team era (2016 to 2022) applied the same logic at a different level. Following Matthew Benham's decision to close the youth academy and replace it with a B team, Brentford produced first-team graduates and generated transfer revenue from players other clubs had overlooked.
Brighton: Moises Caicedo signed for approximately £5 million, sold for £115 million. Marc Cucurella sold for approximately £62 million. Alexis Mac Allister bought for approximately £7 million, sold to Liverpool for approximately £35 million (rising to £55 million with add-ons). Net profit 2020–24: approximately £340 million.
Brentford B-team era: Ollie Watkins sold to Aston Villa for approximately £28 million. Said Benrahma to West Ham for approximately £22 million. Neal Maupay to Brighton for approximately £20 million.
All developed through a structure that cost a fraction of a Category 1 academy budget.
Recruitment framed as a search for mispriced value produces a structurally different outcome. The return is higher because the price paid reflects an information edge that Brighton and Brentford built systematically.
Where does your programme currently recruit? Examine the current evidence behind that decision: what data, what scouting process, what framework tells you the players you are identifying are undervalued relative to what they can become?
If you asked that question of your current squad, how many players were recruited because they were genuinely identified as mispriced and how many were recruited because they were recommended by someone your programme already trusted?
Right to Dream
English academy football operates on an implicit assumption about time: players are pulled from school to train, while education is treated as something that happens around development. Right to Dream was founded on the rejection of that assumption.
Tom Vernon founded Right to Dream in Accra, Ghana in 1999. His argument was specific: educated players make better decisions on and off the pitch. Players in the Right to Dream system receive a full secondary school education as a structural condition of participation.
Right to Dream acquired FC Nordsjaelland in Denmark in 2015, creating a direct professional pathway from the Ghana academy to top-flight European football. In December 2025, the Globe Soccer Award for Best Academy was presented to Right to Dream. The programme has been profiled by Harvard Business School as a case study in social enterprise and sustainable development.
Mohammed Kudus developed at Right to Dream before FC Nordsjaelland, then Ajax, then West Ham. Kamaldeen Sulemana and Ernest Nuamah followed the same pipeline into senior European football. Seven Right to Dream graduates represented their nations at the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
The Mansour Group has invested more than $180 million in the programme since acquiring it in 2021.
Education is part of player development. Right to Dream's results come from a structural decision about what a player needs to develop well.
The binary choice between football and education in your programme is a structural decision. What assumptions would have to change for you to run both simultaneously?
Right to Dream's pipeline runs from Ghana to Denmark to Europe and MLS. Your programme's pipeline is different, but the question it asks is the same: what does a young player need to develop? Are those things in competition with each other?
Benfica
Most English academies operate across multiple sites, with different age groups in different locations and coaches whose main point of contact is the monthly staff meeting. The coherence of the programme depends on how well the message travels across those gaps.
The Caixa Futebol Campus in Seixal covers 19 hectares. Every age group from U6 to the B team trains on the same site. The campus includes 9 football pitches, a school, residential accommodation, sports science laboratories and the facilities for Benfica B, their reserve team that competes in the Portuguese second division.
That co-location produces something documents and away days cannot: daily visibility of the full pathway. When phase leads share a building, they watch each other's sessions. The transition from academy to B team to first team carries no structural break. Every phase exists on the same site, observable by the phases on either side of it. Benfica do not introduce positional systems until U14 to U15.
Benfica have generated over £500 million in transfer revenue from academy graduates since 2015, the highest of any club worldwide by CIES Football Observatory estimates. Notable graduates include Joao Felix (sold to Atletico Madrid for approximately £126 million), Ruben Dias (sold to Manchester City for approximately £62 million) and Darwin Nunez (sold to Liverpool for approximately £85 million).
Co-location enforces the kind of consistency that documents cannot. English academies that spread operations across multiple sites create a coordination problem that no philosophy document solves.
How many of your coaches across different age groups have walked past each other's sessions in the last month, because they share a building and a training pitch?
If you asked your U14 lead coach today what your U18 players are working on technically, could they answer without making a call?
Red Bull Network
Most academies develop players for one club. The player learns one system, one style, one coaching environment. When they move to a bigger club, they start again. Red Bull operates a network of clubs under a single unified game model: RB Salzburg, RB Leipzig, New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Bragantino in Brazil, with FC Liefering functioning as a dedicated feeder club for Salzburg.
The same development philosophy, the same pressing triggers, the same positional structure and the same coaching vocabulary runs across every age group at every club in the network. A player developing at Salzburg and moving to Leipzig does not adapt to a new system. They step up within the same one. FC Liefering exists specifically to provide competitive senior football within the network structure before Salzburg graduates are ready for the first team.
Red Bull took over what became RB Leipzig in 2009, when the club was in the fifth tier of German football. Leipzig reached the Bundesliga in 2016–17, seven seasons later.
Dominik Szoboszlai moved from Salzburg to Leipzig to Liverpool, sold for approximately £60 million. Karim Adeyemi moved from Salzburg to Borussia Dortmund for approximately £30 million. Erling Haaland developed at Salzburg before Borussia Dortmund. The most contested element of the Red Bull model is its ownership structure. The structural argument is separable from that criticism.
When every age group at every level of the pathway understands the same game model, player transitions stop being disruptions and become progressions.
If you asked every coach in your programme to describe your game model independently, would their descriptions match word for word?
If the answer is no, the gap is structural. Alignment at that level requires the model to be embedded: written, shared and built into how sessions are designed and reviewed.
The Red Bull solution was to make the model the constant across four clubs on three continents. Your solution is simpler: a single written game model that every coach in your programme has read, understood and can apply.
Technical Directors and Independent Consultants
Ajax / De Toekomst · Athletic Bilbao / Lezama
Ajax / De Toekomst
Most academies assign positions early. A promising eight-year-old with good spatial awareness becomes a central midfielder. Ajax asked what happens if you do not do that. The Ajax academy philosophy, developed at De Toekomst (The Future) training complex which opened in 1996, is built on position-agnostic development in the early years. Players learn every role before they specialise.
The TIPS framework governs assessment across every age group: Technique, Insight, Personality and Speed. It applies before any positional assignment. A player's fundamental cognitive and technical capacities are developed first.
Approximately 30% of Eredivisie players at any given point have passed through De Toekomst at some stage in their development. Recent graduates include Frenkie de Jong, Matthijs de Ligt and Ryan Gravenberch.
This entry includes something the others do not: following Erik ten Hag's departure for Manchester United in 2022, Ajax cycled through multiple head coaches and endured a run of poor results.
A development philosophy requires people who carry it, protect it and apply it consistently over years. When too many of those people leave in quick succession, the continuity of application breaks and the philosophy survives only on paper.
Position-agnostic development is an argument for sequencing. Understand the game first; specialise within that understanding second.
Which positions do your coaches fully understand beyond their own role? Their understanding needs to reach the positions they coach adjacent to. It also needs to reach the positions players are moving into as they progress through your system.
If your central midfielders at U16 understood what your wingers and your defensive midfielders needed from them, would their decision-making look different?
Would your coaching of them look different?
Athletic Bilbao / Lezama
The default assumption in professional football recruitment is that wider is better. More markets, more scouting, more options. Athletic Bilbao operate on the opposite premise and have done so continuously since 1932. They field only players from the Basque Country. The policy is the club's founding principle, applied without compromise across more than ninety years of professional football.
The result is the longest unbroken record in Spanish football outside Real Madrid and Barcelona. Athletic Bilbao have been in La Liga continuously since 1932. They have never been relegated, with a recruitment pool that eliminates the overwhelming majority of professional footballers on the planet.
The Lezama complex, 13 kilometres from Bilbao, houses 15 youth teams from U12 to U19 including Bilbao Athletic. In 2021 the complex added new residential accommodation: 30 double rooms with customisable furnishings.
Athletic Bilbao's policy creates a regional development network that no other model in this document produces. Every grassroots club in the Basque Country knows that Athletic Bilbao is the ceiling available to their players. That knowledge drives investment in coaching quality, in facilities and in the technical development of young players across the entire region.
The constraint is the system. Because Athletic Bilbao cannot recruit outside the Basque Country, every structural decision they make is designed to extract maximum development from the talent that exists within it.
A constraint treated as a limit produces a smaller version of what a club without the constraint would build. A constraint treated as a design parameter produces something designed specifically for the conditions it operates in. Athletic Bilbao's ninety-year La Liga record is what the second approach looks like across time.
Your programme operates within constraints: budget, geography, category, staffing. The Athletic Bilbao question is whether those constraints are being treated as limits or as design parameters.
What would your programme look like if every structural decision you made was designed specifically for the constraints you have?
Glossary
Eight answers to the same structural question.
None of the models in this document is replicable in full. The Benfica campus costs more than most English Category 1 budgets. The Red Bull network requires multi-club ownership. Right to Dream's pipeline runs across two continents. What is replicable, in every case, is the structural question each model asked before it built anything.
The Architecture Audit ends where it started: with the choices already running in your programme. Some of them are deliberate. Some of them are inherited. The value of studying the models in this document is that they give you better questions to ask about what you are already running.
If one of these models has identified a structural choice in your programme that deserves a closer look, the place to start is with a question about what that choice is assuming and producing.
If you want to work through what that looks like for your specific programme, that is what I do.