Are academy systems today developing the most rounded goalkeepers?
The statistic is no secret. An overwhelmingly small percentage of players in the professional academy system will go on to make a Premier League debut. Even fewer will make a prolonged run of appearances for that team. Most will either drop out of the system or filter down the pyramid, into the EFL and to non-league. Many will have successful careers, but perhaps not at the club that first signed them at 11 or 12 years of age.
In 2022, The I Paper published statistics taken from the Premier League’s own database that revealed that 97% of former elite academy players now aged 21 to 26 years old failed to make a single Premier League appearance. The figures obtained were derived from analysis — of players born from 1 September 1995 to 31 August 2000 (4,109 players in total) who were registered at Category One academies.
Of the 4,109 former academy footballers, 70% were not even handed a professional contract at a Premier League or English Football League club. And only 1 in 10 has gone on to make more than 20 league appearances in the top four tiers of English football.
Whilst official figures are not obtainable for goalkeepers alone, it is no secret that the goalkeepers that make up a part of that 3% of professional Premier League debutants have to be of a specific mould. Rife debate in the goalkeeper community - and wider game - continues around whether goalkeepers who are confident technically and tactically in possession are more valuable, so to speak, than the more traditional shot-stopping mould.
Temisan Williams, Founder of The Coach Accelerator Community, has coached for Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, and Fulham academies. In his time in elite youth coaching, over 700 academy players have benefitted from his mentorship.
In late 2024, Williams posed an interesting question on LinkedIn, drawing a flurry of engagement on the topic of why so few Premier League academy goalkeepers were coming through for extended runs in the first team.
In the 2024/25 Premier League season so far, only one goalkeeper has made more than five appearances for the club they signed their first professional English football contract with: Liverpool’s Caomhin Kelleher (eight appearances).
Jordan Pickford, Alex McCarthy, Robert Sanchez, and Mark Travers are the only other goalkeepers who’ve made appearances in the Premier League this season who made their first extended run of first team top flight appearances with the club they spent the vast part of their academy journey with (their ‘parent’ club).
In Pickford’s case, Sunderland (31 Premier League appearances), McCarthy with Reading (13 Premier League appearances total), Sanchez with Brighton (87 Premier League appearances) and Travers with Bournemouth (20 Premier League appearances). Aaron Ramsdale was 19 when he joined Bournemouth, and made 37 appearances in the 2019/20 season but spent most of his youth years at Sheffield United. Most of those names went out on loan before they made their Premier League debut - and this list spans over ten top flight seasons.
Emiliano Martinez was 18 when he was formally signed as an Arsenal player, and made 15 total top flight appearances for the Gunners, but his time at the Emirates was interspersed with six separate loan moves.
Speaking to Goalkeeper.com, Williams explained that his observations stemmed from his work at Category One academies and the evolution of the types of goalkeepers he found he was coaching more regularly.
“I felt it was really highlighted when I was at Arsenal, and I was looking at all the goalkeepers who were progressing through to U18s and reserves, but I didn't see them on the bench much. Some may have got the odd appearance in the league cup, for example, but no one who could really establish themselves in the position.
"So it got me thinking, who's really the last goalkeeper who I can remember who's had this longevous number one stint at Arsenal? Doing a bit of research, it was Wojciech Szczęsny, and seeing how long ago that was for him actually establishing himself and playing 100 plus games for the club, it got me speaking a lot more to our goalkeeper coaches and other coaching counterparts. And even they struggled to think, who has come through parent clubs for extended first team runs?
“It flagged a concern that for goalkeepers who are coming through the Premier League academies, are they really going to get opportunities to play for the first team and establish themselves in the first team?”
Which begs the question, why?
Williams rightly highlights a low mistake tolerance for goalkeepers of any age. Clubs arguably don’t want to - or can’t afford - to take those risks, with decision makers potentially exposed if things go wrong.
“The affordance of making mistakes with goalkeepers is extremely low - lower than any other position. A young striker could come on, and you’re not expecting them to score on their debut, or even potentially in the next two or three games. Same thing with a winger or fullback. As long as, as a fullback, you know, you've defended well against your winger, you'll probably get another opportunity. For younger goalkeepers trying to get through, I think the threshold of making mistakes is extremely low”, he opines.
This is a concept that Daniel Tumelty-Bevan, Head of Academy Goalkeeping at Birmingham City, feels translates not just within the top flight but to the game across the pyramid.
Speaking to Goalkeeper.com at the Blues’ training ground, Tumelty-Bevan noted that “the will to win is obviously massive. Each team, whether it's EFL, whether it's Premier League, the aim is to win on a Saturday. Young players probably are going to make mistakes. That’s not a secret or surprise. All goalkeepers make mistakes. Ederson has been in the news recently, whether he should come out for a team for Ortega. But we might watch hundreds of goalkeepers across the weekend, and if the error is in a 4-1 win then there is no spotlight shone on it. When it goes wrong or the spotlight is on, as it will be for young players, the magnifying glass effect happens.
“When you put in a young player, I think it's difficult to then automatically give them the trust and brush away an error. That's not to say that we put them in and we accept we lose - that's never going to be the game - but there’s got to be a bridge between young potential to a performing goalkeeper in the first team. They have to have that trust and consistency to stay in the team, but they can’t get those things unless they are given trust and opportunity by being given a chance in the first place.”
Williams highlighted that the demands of academy football - and the priority it places on certain characteristics in goalkeepers - may not best be setting goalkeepers up to give them the most rounded basis to succeed in match environments in the careers they’ll most likely go on to have. Naturally, it is not the responsibility of a particular academy to develop goalkeepers that are suited to playing for other clubs. But it is perhaps not so much the way programmes are structured on the training pitch but what goalkeepers are frequently (or infrequently) exposed to in elite level academy football that may limit the situations they can handle best throughout their careers.
The point was summarised best by one commenter on Williams’ original post: are we developing goalkeepers to play academy football, or to play first team league football? The step up is notable, not just psychologically but physically.
Two areas Williams highlighted as potential areas of concern were goalkeepers’ ability to deal with aerial balls and long-range distribution. Academy goalkeepers are undoubtedly able to do both in isolated contexts, but the reality of being crowded by four six foot-plus strikers on a cut up pitch with two thousand fans, close to the pitch, dishing out abuse is a different beast.
Furthermore, where goalkeepers are physically and tactically conditioned to play short passes for the 90 minutes, but are later exposed to playing long balls for the entirety of the match, Williams has noticed a potential for a lower standard - and higher injury profile - in goalkeepers who are trying to adjust to this demand.
“Of course the fundamentals have changed to an extent now”, says Williams. “So you're now sometimes seeing goalkeepers playing as the left sided centre back when you're in possession, and allowing one of the other centre backs an opportunity to create an overload in midfield.
"The core element around shot stopping, moving around your goal, protecting a goal, will always remain a constant, but in terms of the way that they experience that through the academy, of course, is variable depending on the academy where you are, from Category four through to Premier League academies. It would be good to see comparisons in terms of the top level, because I'm noticing that - and I don't have a definite statistic for this - but it feels as though there's more goalkeeping mistakes than before, especially with handling or what you'd consider more routine saves.”
Lee Evans now works with Tumelty-Bevan in Birmingham’s Academy goalkeeper programme, and was formerly First Team Goalkeeper Coach at Kidderminster Harriers.
“You just have to look at Jordan Pickford’s journey - and others in the England programme. I think the majority have had exposure to National League or lower league football, which is relentless. You've got to be physically robust. The constraints of playing Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday, Tuesday…it's really unforgiving. So I think you just get the sound of learning from that” he explains.
Crucially, “there's no such thing as a bad loan”.
“Even if you don't like the way you’ve performed, you are still getting something from it, maybe further down the line in your career. You’ll probably look back to that moment at step two or three and think it’s really helped shape you further on in your career. I always remember when I was with a previous club, we had a goalkeeper who came from an academy, and was really natural in possession, was really impressive when everything was short, but just didn’t have the tools to go long and play the way we needed them to. That wasn’t a one time occurrence.”
The world of professional football can be a bubble. In very few other professions would you be expected to go from an internship to Chief Executive over the course of a career with one specific company. Yet, with the intimacy of the academy system and the role that coaches and clubs play in young people’s lives from the age of only nine or ten in some cases, the length of that pathway arguably makes it more of an expectation that players go through to make first team appearances.
“Our jobs as academies, as coaches, as practitioners with young people is to get the best for the young people” explains Tumelty-Bevan.
“In an ideal world, goalkeepers go through all the age groups to the first team, but the industry dictates that is really, really unlikely. The industry dictates that based on financial value, organisational competition everywhere, and many other factors. It's all geared up to get the best of the best, which is a really really small percentage. As coaches working with young people, we want to get the best for each individual. The best for a certain individual might be a League Two career, a Championship career, a non-league career with an educational sideline, or something else.
He continues: “I think knowing each individual pathway and nailing each individual pathway for what the individual needs is massively important. Maybe we should look at success as personal success for the player. From a club perspective our margin of success is tiny. You might see young English goalkeepers getting more appearances in the Football League than the Premier League, but I’d be interested to know now, how many games have they played in the Football League before they break into the Premier League?
“But again, we have to look at it personally. Even if they play in the Premier League after making a large number of appearances in another division, only play in a particular division after leaving their parent club that suits the standard they can attain, or leave a Premier League club and make 300 appearances in League One or League Two, I’d still define that as a success.”
