Marwood: Building bright City future

What started with the Abu Dhabi takeover of a mid-table English club in 2008 has now morphed into a global business and earlier this month the CFG announced a partnership, which will see software giants SAP become their technology partner. SAP’s expertise is set to revolutionise player analysis across the four members of the group with their systems providing huge benefits for youth development.

That is music to the ears of the club’s former Academy Director Brian Marwood – now the CFG’s Managing Director of Football Services – who spoke to Sport360 about City’s wider approach to nurturing young talent and the importance of getting more academy graduates into Pellegrini’s squad.

We have seen UEFA introduce new regulations on homegrown players and also Barcelona suffer a transfer ban for breaking rules when recruiting players from other parts of the world. Does this place an extra onus on a club like Manchester City to develop their own young players?
I think football has become a global game. We have players in our academy who are from Manchester, we also have players from Spain, Austria, Norway and from all parts of the world. The important thing is talent, what is their ability like and could they play for Manchester City’s first team?

And I think over the next five years we will see more homegrown players within the first-team squad. I believe we have the right level now. We have a young player for example, Jason Denayer, who played at Celtic last year. He was the Young Player of the Year in Scotland and also made his debut for the Belgium national team.

He is a very promising and highly-rated young defender and there is every chance he will be in our first-team squad this year. So I believe more and more players will come through our system.

Players have started to go on loan from Man City to New York, is it a strategy to use New York City FC and the clubs in Australia and Japan to develop players?

There is a lot of debate here in England on this topic as in other countries you see clubs have ‘B teams’. Barcelona have a B team which plays at a level something like the English Championship and in Portugal and Germany you can also field teams in men’s football at a very early age.

Our boys play under-21 football and it’s not providing the platform for bridging that gap between being an 18-year-old and being a first-team player for Manchester City.

What we have to do is find a pathway and we believe that New York can help. If you look at the last eight teams in the Champions League this year then over 80 per cent of the players involved were playing men’s football at the age of 18. That’s an amazing statistic.

We don’t have that environment in England, and it is very difficult because the rules do not allow us to have a B team in the lower divisions. We have to try and create opportunities for the players.

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Patrick Vieira has been coaching the Under-21s and has been a key part of your youth setup. He has been linked with a number of managerial jobs lately, is there a concern he could be tempted away soon?

I think there’s always that concern when you have someone as highly-talented as him working with you. Ultimately one day he will want to be a manager and that is his ambition. We have played a part in helping him begin that career and make the transition (from being a player).

It is interesting that when he finished playing, coaching was not high on his agenda, I think he wanted to be a football director so he had a year’s experience within the business here. As a player you simply live the life of a player so I think it was important for him to understand what the broader aspects of a football club are and how important the different areas are, whether it is marketing, commercial or media and so on. I think the more he learnt, the more he developed a passion for coaching.

He is two years a coach now and has done a fantastic job with our under-21s. We are very proud of what he has achieved and I’ve no doubt, one day he will become a top manager.

What is Manchester City’s wider philosophy when it comes to developing young players?
I think that is something that has changed in the seven years since the owners came in.

At first we obviously wanted a team that was very competitive in the Premier League and Champions League, but it was also very important to them that we develop the academy in a way to produce players who could play in a Champions League team.

We did a research project that took us around the world with key learnings from all sorts of industries. We came back with 38 recommendations that were backed by the board and we now believe we have a very comprehensive way of developing young players from the age of eight here.

We put them into a school at 12 and give them private education. That allows us to help them develop behaviours and values, which we feel are crucial to them becoming top players and good people.

It also helps us control the time we have them. In the past they might have come in two or three times a week but now we have them every day.

So they go to school in the morning and then we take them through their football programme in the afternoon and in the late afternoon they go back to education in the classrooms here at the City Football Academy – we get more quality time with them.

We believe that allows us to give them the methodology of the way we want to play here, what we believe is ‘our way’ and we can also work on various aspects of their fitness and psychology.

We are now looking to take that to Australia, the US and Japan and use the things we have found here that work and create players for the future. It is really important to us and you can see that with the investment in facilities.

I have been in football for nearly 40 years and I think this is relatively unique. It is something that is close to our heart.

You talk about doing things your own way. What is the City way?

We have a very clear methodology in how we want our youth teams to play. And we want our coaches to be able to follow it so we developed a theme and consistency to what we do.

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So if you go to Melbourne you would see something very similar to what you see on the pitches here at the City academy. That will be the same in New York as we develop our academy there.

That philosophy has to keep evolving and changing though as the game always changes and we are well placed to stay ahead of the curve.

How important is it that young players spend time with the first team?

It is very important and we will see a lot of the young players go on pre-season tour with the first team to Melbourne. A lot of players will train with them and it is important they get that exposure.

Interestingly, one thing we do is that our under-18s train regularly with the women’s team and we have just had five players come back from a successful Women’s World Cup campaign in Canada. So I think we are always trying to test players and challenge them.