Access all areas in Man City’s world-leading academy: JACK GAUGHAN reveals the secrets of their success including AI, basketball and strict rules on phones, socks and boots

Manchester City’s academy auditorium, with its blue leather seats and walls depicting different stands of the Etihad Stadium, is just up some stairs from the gym.

The gym is effectively a shrine to Phil Foden – huge pictures, this is who you could be – and has a glass ceiling leading up to the second floor, where the Under 19s currently stand with the chatter of a school hallway.

They’re waiting to head into the small theatre, basically a large cinema room, to hear from their coach Ben Wilkinson 54 hours out from a UEFA Youth League tie on the outskirts of Amsterdam in which they batter AZ Alkmaar, miss a penalty, but lose when conceding their first shot on target in the 94th minute.

Wilkinson’s group, the youngest team in this year’s competition and the last remaining English representative, could have become the first City side to ever reach the last four.

Not to be but not for lack of preparation. Mail Sport takes a seat on the penultimate row for Monday’s meeting, out of the way and just down the line from centre half Jahmai Simpson-Pusey, with six appearances for Pep Guardiola this year and who likes to sit alone to absorb the messages.

And those messages are lightning. Wilkinson has had the international break to perfect this address with his analysts and the slideshow flashes by in under 10 minutes. Five quick clips of AZ’s attitude towards the press in the last round against Real Madrid, a comparison to how City dealt with similar against Feyenoord. Alkmaar will leave stuff on them, the players are warned. All of this bears out.

A note on how hostile the atmosphere might be. A word on the artificial pitch, which they are not overly worried about. Wilkinson’s assistant, Craig Mudd, finishes the meeting and demands ‘maximum intensity’ in a session focused on their out of possession work.

Wilkinson, the son of Howard, later tells us that over a training day they will communicate in this group setting, individually and on the pitch to cover all bases of how a player might learn.

‘We work off the same kind of press as the first team,’ he says in the canteen between meeting and training. ‘There will be certain tweaks but they know what they’re doing.’

It’s just gone 10am and Wilkinson’s already had a day of it. He’s been over to the first-team building, adjoined to the academy, to ascertain the availability of Simpson-Pusey’s defensive partner, Max Alleyne. Guardiola might need him in the build-up to the win over Leicester City, so there’s a question mark.

Kian Noble, only just 18 but who has trained with the England seniors, steps up in shape and ends the standout performer of the drills. Mudd cannot stop praising his reading of situations.

A few days earlier there were conversations about Nico O’Reilly. Alkmaar is huge for City, the first quarter-final since Foden, Jadon Sancho and Real’s Brahim Diaz dovetailed together, and perhaps O’Reilly would benefit from the experience. He’s only featured for the age group teams twice since October but worth the ask.

‘In a way,’ O’Reilly says days earlier when asked if he now feels like one of Guardiola’s players. ‘I’ll feel more like a first-team player when I can help, impact more.’

Sunday emphatically alters that answer, O’Reilly a gamechanger off the bench in FA Cup victory at Bournemouth whom Guardiola marched over to the away end to accept the plaudits. In that moment, the academy waved goodbye to him once and for all.

He makes a full Premier League debut against Leicester. Like the vast majority of Wilkinson’s cohort, O’Reilly’s been in this building since Under 9s. He had the pick of City, Liverpool, Everton and rivals Manchester United. His mum, Holli, let him choose. 

‘It was narrowed down to City and United,’ he says. ‘Training here was so much better. At the other clubs it was just run around, play games – it wasn’t really helping you out. It was a bit of fun.’

O’Reilly, who reveals he started out as a left back, stills regularly goes over to the academy. Talks with the education staff, pops in to say hello to the house parents at the on-site hotel, where players stay before early kick offs.

He keeps an eye on results, attending a recent defeat against Crystal Palace. Defeats are usually rare, the Under 21s and Under 18s top of their respective leagues and the latter in an FA Youth Cup semi-final.

‘I love you Stephen,’ Mudd booms across a pitch around an hour after Wilkinson’s meeting. Stephen Mfuni, who went on tour with Guardiola as a 16-year-old last summer, is stepping across to sweep up comfortably.

Ex-coach Brian Barry-Murphy said a while back that the way in which Guardiola utilises the kids in training is unique and Mfuni is proof that constantly being around them works.

‘If I take their stuff into games I am way ahead of everyone – two steps ahead,’ he says on the side of pitch five, two CCTV-style cameras looming to capture video to later review. ‘Because you know what will happen, what will come next. Over there everything is bang on.’

Over there is competitive, cutthroat, and watching Wilkinson’s kids in the boxes – or rondos – is to see that edge filtering down.

Simpson-Pusey, the talented Divine Mukasa (39 goals and assists in 33 games but guilty of missing the penalty at AZ), Lakyle Samuel (son of the late Jlloyd) and Reigan Heskey (son of Emile, 32 goals and assists in 32 games) are arguing about the outcome, about who goes in the middle. They end up taking a show of hands to determine the result.

Wilkinson has handed control of the session to Mudd, a coach with various age groups here for 13 years. The boss steps in to have quiet words with defenders about positioning and awareness, in a tactile way he will have seen the main man do it over on the other pitch.

The academy roll call of those who have gone on coach at the highest level, at City or elsewhere, reads: Enzo Maresca (Chelsea), Lee Carsley (England), Patrick Vieira (Crystal Palace), Barry-Murphy (Leicester), Carlos Vicens (City), Danny Walker (Chelsea). It provides a platform.

‘You’d be naïve to say no,’ Wilkinson nods. ‘People are naturally interested by your experiences here – the quality, the interactions with the first team. It’s an unbelievable place to develop. The knowledge you’re amassing is huge. I’m really privileged. People can be in too much of a rush for what is next.’

Wilkinson was the guy who first inverted Rico Lewis, empowered to try that by ex-academy director Jason Wilcox, sat on the opposite side of the executive box when the seniors meet at Old Trafford tomorrow (SUN).

Wilcox’s influence at City was huge, as was Rodolfo Borrell before him. Yet Wilcox’s replacement, Thomas Krucken, has implemented a surprising amount of change since joining in November 2023.

Surprising in the sense that wandering through the building, you see the 27 pictures of international debutants developed since the City Football Academy was opened 11 years ago. And reminded of the faces who are no longer here, thus the money generated: £362million from academy graduates in a decade – half of that since 2022.

Samuel, the latest full back asked to invert, notices how those who went before him are flourishing. ‘People are breaking through and being who they want to be,’ he says. ‘Morgan (Rogers) has done something recently about feeling the difference between City and moving away. Then here, Rico moving up helped me out! Look at him, he’s doing amazingly.’

England age group teams are dominated by City past and present, the Premier League littered with them. In the same building, you see Foden, you see Lewis, you now see O’Reilly, James McAtee.

United’s tradition has always been homegrown youth and their long history of an academy product in every matchday squad continues but, as O’Reilly says: ‘We’re mainly all Manchester boys’.

City have stolen several marches in this area and yet, Krucken – an energetic 100mph German perched in his office with a fistful of notes crammed with ideas – demands more in striving to remain at the vanguard.

Aside from condensing the acronymised mottos, hung on the walls, there has been a huge study done into the ‘Future Player Programme’, which started with a survey of 140 experts across City Football Group’s clubs on how they think the game will look in 10 years’ time. The final summit on that was a fortnight ago and Krucken has formulated his thoughts.

He’s sent for the experts. The multi-sport programme for younger players, a European philosophy, sees basketball taught at the John Amaechi Centre, formerly of Orlando Magic and an icon in these parts. Taekwondo is taken by 2012 Olympic semi-finalist Martin Stamper.

Krucken’s used a German professor for developing how best to deliver information to younger generations.

‘We all agree that the speed of the game is increasing,’ he says. ‘I remember my first speech in, I had a slide with the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog. You enter the bridge (clear) and end in the fog. What happens behind that fog? Nobody can tell us. In this building, we have the answer.

‘Scanning behaviours – the positioning, where to drop in and observe for the right first touch – are going to make a difference. We’re working on this with a guy from Norway, Geir Jordet.

‘It’s not just moving the head around and people say, “oh he is a good scanner”, no it’s about the perception of the situation. What does the player do with that information for a better decision? We’ve learned we can increase this knowledge.’

Krucken is excitedly discussing Artificial Intelligence – ‘it can make our life easier, with animation’ – and developing new technologies.

He reaches for his phone to show a prototype model of a two-metre screen to be fixed at the side of a pitch, a tweak on the vast tactical walls now seen at many elite clubs, en vogue since Julian Nagelsmann introduced them at Hoffenheim. Perhaps it is no great shock Krucken and Nagelsmann shared an office there.

‘One day soon we will have more screens,’ Krucken says. ‘So if we’re training wingers, they don’t have to walk 40 metres in the rain to a screen. Just a short run, get the feedback and go back to the exercise. The foundation of the academy’s purpose is to be the best in the world. One day we want that.’

Live feedback is something City are working hard to finesse, looking at a system to send clips with data directly to a player’s mobile phone straight after training.

Krucken, who actually started his coaching journey at City’s old home Platt Lane and worked with a teenage Kieran Trippier, talks about how concentration rates are ‘six to 10 seconds’ when youngsters are not directly engaged and so has revamped their learning.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are now dedicated to individual sessions of up to an hour. Individual work is not something City have ever properly done before, instead focusing on styles of play and working within a system. They’ve also enabled their coaches to become more tactically flexible, with the Barcelona 4-3-3 still a base but licence to change within that.

‘You can’t develop a forward if you’re not finishing 60 or 80 times a week with methodology behind it,’ Krucken adds.

‘And not just 10 minutes after a session, staying on a pitch and kicking a ball into the net. It’s clear, planned in advance, in 10-week blocks. For example, every Monday we talk about the week: what does Ryan McAidoo’s training look like?’

The 16-year-old right winger McAidoo, a rarity in that he was signed from Chelsea last summer, has flourished as a result.

‘Nowadays players aren’t as unpredictable as we should be,’ he says. ‘We’re working to make me that. We’ll do a film session from a previous game and replicate something on the astroturf. It’s got me thinking about crossing the ball more as well as going at my man. It varies my game.’

Striker Matty Warhurst, who had extra finishing drills with Shaun Goater when in the Under 13s, says he is approaching matches with more confidence and clarity. A poacher, he is wound up by friends for ‘tap ins’ and yet prides himself on movement refined in these individual hours.

‘Erling Haaland works on it,’ he says. ‘If it was easy then everyone would be doing it.’

The pair’s Under 18s coach, the German Oliver Reiss, admits that challenging his squad can be difficult. Wilkinson says similar, owing to some lack of competitiveness in the league, claiming it makes measuring genuine progress tough.

Reiss sets McAidoo goals to beat a man and cross a certain amount of times a match and, in his first season at City, has found a different set of characters to inspire.

‘When I coached at Hertha Berlin, all I had to say to the players was “this is what we’re working on today” and they would be hungry to get going,’ Reiss says.

‘I don’t want to say they are not hungry here but in Germany it was, “come on, stop talking coach, let’s go”. Here, my feeling was they want more explanation and to see the sense in an exercise. How does this help me as a player? I like that.’

Reiss has been without his captain, Rhys Thomas, for most of the campaign through injury. Another inverter with a sky-high potential, Thomas is badgering Reiss to analyse matches in a bid to improve while stricken.

They do appear to be creating thinkers and most are conscientious, happy with the black boot policy until the Under 18s and the correct length socks. ‘Citizen of the Month’ is awarded for stellar behaviour, beamed on screens inside the building.

Incredibly, one of Krucken’s individual programmes is on professionalism. ‘We prepare the players to be part of Pep’s squad one day,’ he says. ‘Be on time, be reliable. When you’re late for an appointment with a physio, call them. Don’t text them. I’m with Txiki (Begiristain) every day and we get feedback when Pep is not happy, although that wasn’t a problem this season.

‘Our staff really keep an eye out for this. No mobiles in the gym, treatment areas, the canteen. Have conversations. We’re all humans, let’s talk. If you go out with 20 balls, you have to come back with 20 balls. Don’t come back with 18 and think the kit man will sort.’

The session is ending and, as the stragglers mess about shooting, McAidoo is struggling with a big black netted bag, shovelling tens of balls into it.

JACK GAUGHAN’S THREE TO WATCH

MAX ALLEYNE (19)

Signed from Southampton in 2021, a classy central defender who is powerful in possession. Would have first-team experience by now were it not for injuries.

STEPHEN MFUNI (17)

Only just turned 17 and was the youngest member of Pep Guardiola’s pre-season squad last summer. Equally comfortable at centre half and left back.

REIGAN HESKEY (17)

The son of former England striker Emile, Heskey can play off either wing and has already crafted consistent end product. His older brother, Jaden, also stars for the academy.