I’m sure I’m in the company of millions when I say I’m still emotionally hit by the loss of Kevin Keegan.
His former Liverpool teammate Phil Thompson summed it up when he said “so many people will say [Keegan] was my first hero”, which is the moment it hit me that King Kev was exactly that for me.
The thing about carrying around heroes in your pocket: You tend to gather pocket-lint-sized “did you know…?”-style trivia on them as well. Try this one for size: Did you know Kevin Keegan once shut down the Newcastle United academy teams entirely?
Of course you did, as most United fans do. But did you know he once went as far as walking into Gateshead dressing room, the site of a Newcastle youth team’s loss on that day back in 1994, and waved about his chequebook telling them he could sign any player in the world, and that the academy kids may as well not even be there?
On the face of it there was always a ruthless side to Keegan when it came to man management. Some players who fell out with him called it “emotional”, where others just said Keegan was a working-class lad willing to push any buttons to get the competitor from within you.
With the resurgent success of the current Newcastle U-18 team, I revisited the stories about Keegan’s decision to close down the academy teams back then – and why Keegan’s reasoning has actually come full circle to be mirrored in the graveyard that is U-21 football today.
Class of ’92, Graveyard of ’94
In the mid 90s, one red team in Manchester was about to enjoy the fruits of their fabled ’92 team coming to the fore. The results of which made for a now a historic Premier League showdown with Kevin Keegan’s United at the 95-96 Premier League summit.
On Newcastle’s side, however, comes to the story of the Newcastle academy ’94 generation who hold Keegan to blame for why they never got a leg up to senior football.
Former Chronicle writer Matthew Ketchell once did the hard yards of interviewing four members of that ’94 generation for FourFourTwo, including Stu Elliott (no relation to Robbie) who’d since come back to the club in 2019 to serve as a Newcastle youth coach. One of Elliott’s ’94 teammates, Paul Brayson, contends that Keegan’s decision to shut down the academy “was one of the worst decisions ever.”
Another ’94 teammate, speaking to Ketchell in that article, (understandably) remained nameless when put their feelings forward bluntly that “because of Keegan there was nowhere to go in that club.” And Brayson echoed the spirit of those thoughts by concluding that “if a decision like that was made by a Premier League club these days, there’d be hell on – outrage.”
I happen to think Brayson is correct, but correct for all the wrong reasons.
The current state of U-21 football – as a whole and not just limited to Newcastle United – has brought Keegan’s original concerns about making an empty spectacle of youth football into a cold, systemic reality for several years now. And we’re all wondering what to do next.
Fast forward to this summer of 2026, and I was a bystander to two Newcastle United fans having an online back-and-forth about whether Matthias Jaissle could really do anything to bridge the gap between academy and Premier League action. One fan weighed in claiming that the topic itself was overly-pessimistic, naming Manchester City and Chelsea as the clubs who lead the PL table, in the 2025-26 season, for minutes played by academy players in the Premier League.
I remember the exact list of names they quoted as evidence that youth football was getting a chance in the Premier League: Phil Foden, Reece James, Bukayo Saka, Nico O’Reilly and Kobbie Mainoo.
Sounds like irrefutable evidence on the face of it since they’re all household names today. But they all share something critical in common with Newcastle’s own Lewis Miley, in that they all “escaped” the U-21 football graveyard before it had a chance to claim them.
Before we get into why we’re dealing with a graveyard at U-21 level, we should be clear that it’s a long-standing issue and that it isn’t just a North East problem.
The U-21 Box-Ticking: Between football and roleplay
In late 2001, Kevin Keegan was firing up the beginning of his reign at Manchester City, where he’d find familiar company in the form of centre-half Steve Howey. If Howey thought he had an “in” with Keegan showing up to the club, he’d bet wrong as Keegan turned out to be the first manager in Howey’s career telling Steve that he’d be going to the bench. But away from the antics in the blue centre of Manchester, one professor Arne Güllich was starting to monitor the fate of German youth footballers a world away from his desk at the university of Kaiserslautern in that very same year.
It was a project that would take Güllich twelve years to complete, by which time England’s league clubs (including then-Mike Ashley owned Newcastle) had already agreed to scrap the old catchment-area rules around academy football, for a new Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). This was a system that now lets any youth player to move to any academy around the country, provided the price is right.
As with any acronym in modern football, the framework of EPPP sounds impressive and even highly principled on the surface: England’s academic level was meant to become a land of opportunity. Think about the prospect of 2030 coming around and Newcastle United having the biggest football academy in the world bar Real Madrid’s Valdebebas grounds… why would you want to deny any youth in the land the chance to train there? But once that thought has passed, peel back the wrapper on how this has really played out underneath.
The real effects of EPPP on present-day English football make it look like Keegan’s decision to bring the hammer down on Newcastle’s academy as now prophetic. What we’ve seen since is that money and growth has pilfered the competitive spirit out of the youth. Keegan’s objection to back in the 90s was that St. James Park would end up being worn down for a ground-share schedule that was essentially just roleplay for sponsor money.
“Pontins sponsored the [youth] league,” Stu Elliott would explain to Ketchell in that previous FourFourTwo article, “and because of the money they’d put in they wanted a bit more glamour to it, so they asked every club to play 50% of their home reserve games in the club stadium.”
Elliott reveals his own scepticism over Keegan’s stance when Elliott concludes with: “Bear in mind there was about 14 teams in the league, so you’re talking about six, seven home games max.”
Elliott makes a fair point in isolation. It’s yet another decision that makes it look like King Kev was being emotional and blowing it out of proportion. But what was only “six, seven home games max” in the mid-90s has now turned into a matrix of uncompetitive roleplay around England and European youth football.
Sure, the pitches have been kept separate, so there’s no problem there. But guys like Gullich put in 12 years of study to tell us for free what programs like EPPP would become: Highly-specialised youth footballers rarely (if ever) would get a crack at senior football. Almost never. And especially not over young athletes who put their talent to the test across many competitions.
To put it even simpler: The longer you spend going through the ranks of academy football, the less likely you are to ever make it out of there. The numbers, framed in however many different number of metrics you want to filter them through, still overwhelmingly point to this bottom line conclusion.
There’s a current 2% of U-21 players being promoted from their academies directly into the same club’s Premier League bench. For every Stu Elliott that can go back into the system at coaching level, there’s now independent, sports science names like Dr. Chris Pratts actively hosting workshop to prepare academy kids with the mindset to take a loan elsewhere (into truly competitive lower-league football) rather than die in the comforts of upper-echelon academy sport. Pratts came up with a very compelling article (which, yes, doubles down as marketing for him but it’s still worth the read) in the Guardian paper last year.
The underlying cause for the graveyard? It boils down to the lack of true competitiveness that systemic roleplay introduces into the sport, when it becomes a mere box-ticking exercise at scale.
Stu Elliott himself could attest to the boxes ticked. Under Kenny Dalglish’s brief tenure at Newcastle, a young (Stu) Elliott would find himself promoted to the Newcastle senior bench on Champions League nights. But this was nothing but a formality to make sure Newcastle could pass UEFA quotas, so that Elliott’s teammates – on paper but not really teammates in spirit – could get the green light to face the likes of Barcelona. Without being ungracious to Elliott himself, history shows he sat on those benches without anyone higher up having a sincere intention of him getting a look in.
We know that’s what today’s league football looks like, with harder quotas nowadays around naming matchday squads even at domestic level. So what about the names that do make it to the Premier League from their academy? How do we explain the Jameses, Fodens and Mileys of the world?
Back in Germany, Gullich (later back up in a further study in the post-COVID 2020s by Michael Barth) found that there were two types of young athletes that were more likely to get a shot a the big time.
One was young teenagers who got into academy football at a late stage compared to their peers (think of a 14-year old who decides to take up academy football in the same side as a teammate who’s been grinding at the academy since they were 7 years old), and the second is young teenagers who’ve come through the ranks while enjoying a sudden growth spurt along the way. The kind of spurt that would force the coaching staff at the club to pluck them out of the youth ranks well before they completed the final rung of the academy. Lewis Miley is very firmly in the latter category.
You could argue which of the two categories names like Foden, Mainoo, Saka and O’Reilly belonged to at their respective clubs but it’s not important. What fundamentally ties these now-household names together is that they were all fast-tracked from U-18 football directly into the senior squad*.
(*Reece James is a bit of an exception, in that he took the loan route to prove himself in the lower leagues at Wigan – as a 19-year old competing with seniors – before coming back to Chelsea and being thrown into Stamford Bridge matchdays. But again, James avoided U-21 football entirely.)
It’d be like me claiming I’m a high school “graduate” who got called up to write software later in life. Yes, technically true, but if I skipped the very last couple years of school because I was too busy training for working life, then what does my diploma (or arguably even my school) have anything to do with it?
Similarly, there’s no outright quote from Eddie Howe’s coaching team decisions around Lewis Miley that would deliver it home in a nutshell, but bits and pieces from separate official club interviews paint a picture of why Howe and his team decided fast-track Lewis to training with the senior squad. The lad was caught in between the lesser of two negatives: Not specialised enough to make a difference in any role at U-21 level, but just not quite physically built enough to last all 90 minutes in the Premier League either.
The two negatives cancelled out into a very positive decision from Howe’s men: If you have a generalised talent who’s got a chance of becoming a Premier League star, you may as well throw him in at the deep and find out how bright the star shines. And the point of Gullich’s own study was that being specialised at U-21 level is faint praised that you’ll be probably be damned with for the rest of your short career.
If you’ve lasted enough to tick a box and fill a role as a defensive midfielder for the U-21s or a specialised left-back, then you’re simply helping your U-21 coaches to make quota. They know you’ve become reliable enough that you’ll do a job for the U-21 team on the day, but it’s increasingly likely it’s the last team for which you’ll ever wear the club’s badge. Another example would be Elliott Anderson, who I was surprised to find listed as a striker at 19 years of age, on the Newcastle squad list.
That was probably the role at which he was most effective for the team at that level. But pack some size and athleticism needed for senior level, and suddenly Anderson’s skill set is best expressed at attacking midfield or the left with in the Newcastle senior team, and then taken an ever further transformation where he now plays as a world-class deep-lying playmaker for both Manchester City and England.
Rory Finneran has seen the purposelessness of U-21 football staring him in the face, opting to go the Reece James route, taking up a loan at Notts County this season (already to rave reviews) in the hope of landing on a Premier League bench in the near future. Names like Alex Murphy have tried to go this route before, and Murphy will try once again for this season at none other than Bundesliga-2’s Kaiserslautern – where Murphy already racked up an assist on a raucous debut in the local derby there.
Back in England, the games at U-21 are filled with players who don’t know what it’s like to compete… simply because they don’t know any better. You might even venture that Park Seung-Soo’s temporary lay-off to the Asian Games, this very month of 2026, as a 19-year old expected to compete at tournament stacked with U-23 players (it was that or he’d have to do military service) is a saving grace for Park’s competitive edge.
Even the most promising 21-year-old would look around at opponents they have to beat on the day, and the competition is made up of either overage players who’ve been shoved into a youth game to recover from injury, or players of any age (even kids) who’ve effectively been told they’re living on the bomb squad: Guys who’ve managed to fail upwards into a wage big enough that their current form no longer merits, but too big for the club to immediate cancel on and pay out.
When we say players of any age come into the second category, it’s truer than ever in the EPPP era where a teenage talent can contract-hop between academies for a sign-on fee and better wages around the country. Nowadays, wrapping up your career at 21 years of age, having never tasted what it’s like at the top level, can be a pretty lucrative way to spend your adolescence compared to your mates outside of the footballing world entirely.
The situation is going to grow even more complex come January 2027, when the Lassana Diarra-inspired set of laws kick in to all ranks of football that will bring about the end of player trading at volume. There’s no time to get into how the Diarra laws will change the game, but the conflict driving those changes is the same at core: How far do we want academy football to become merely “jobs for the boys” before we rein it backin to the kind of competitivity that Kevin Keegan was looking to preserve some three decades ago?
Pontins wanted glamour; and so reserve football got dressed up as a show. Kevin Keegan looked at that trade and shut it down rather than keep staging it. Thirty years later, EPPP, matchday quotas and contract-hopping teenagers are the same show at national scale, where football keeps the appearance of development while the competition drains out of it. To finish on the bright side, though, there remains Lewis Miley.
I saw him make a very odd decision in the second half of this past weekend’s game against Bournemouth – the likes of which explain why Miley’s the promising talent and I’m just watching on the sidelines.
Miley picks up the ball about fifteen yards short of the halfway line, and is faced with a very easy, straightforward pass ahead of him into space. There’s a free teammate ahead of him ready to receive the ball, and I would have bet my house on Miley just making that pass. After all, it’s the stuff of which 92% pass completion rates (the rate Miley has racked up in his Premier League career so far) are made of, right?
Instead, Lewis makes the decision to drop his shoulder, make a square pass into the middle of the pitch.
That square ball just about evaded the opponent sitting between Miley and his fellow backline teammates standing infield of him. But what it also did was encourage Newcastle’s backline to stay up close to the midfield in possession, while Miley himself ran into the space (which he had long-since correctly identified as a trap Bournemouth had set) to become another spare option to drag opponents away from closing down Newcastle’s backline on the ball.
There was a recent article on here about players who see space before it’s made itself known to anyone else, the kind of trait that lets you see football one or two moves ahead. Lewis Miley may not be entirely there yet – not to the point where he has pundits raving with the usual platitudes about being a player who “always looks like he has time” – but at a mere 20 years of age I’d argue that, thanks to testing himself against the greatest level of competition so early in his career, time is the one thing he’s definitely still got on his side.