Chelsea ended last season without a trophy and finished 10th in the Premier League, but their academy teams won league and cup titles.
It highlights the quality of the talent coming through under the leadership of Shields and Van der Kraan, with pathways director Jack Francis providing continuity as he enters his 16th year at the club.
The Cobham academy was previously led by Neil Bath and Jim Fraser, who built a system capable of winning five consecutive FA Youth Cups, including three wins in a row against City, to match the long-standing record set by Manchester United‘s ‘Busby Babes’ in the 1950s.
Chelsea also won the Uefa Youth League in 2015 and 2016 and remain the only English club to have won the competition.
However, Chelsea were handed a transfer ban in 2019 over breaches relating to youth recruitment and are currently serving restrictions on registering academy players following historical offences dating back to the Abramovich era.
That first transfer ban helped create opportunities for Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Andreas Christensen and Reece James to establish themselves in the first team under Frank Lampard.
Those were heady days for Chelsea‘s academy, but City were rapidly expanding under their Abu Dhabi ownership and investing heavily in youth development, an area exempt from financial spending restrictions.
Such was the dominance of the two academies that they had an informal agreement not to sign players from one another, helping to avoid inflated wages and transfer fees at youth level. That arrangement has since ended.
Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal also began a new wave of investment in their academies after Brexit made it impossible to sign overseas players under the age of 18.
Notably, Liverpool signed now-England youth international Rio Ngumoha from Chelsea in 2024, prompting restrictions on youth scouts from a number of rival clubs attending matches.
While Chelsea were under new ownership, Bath was developing a fresh strategy. However, after Fraser left the club following a disagreement with senior figures, Bath also departed and former City staff moved into senior academy positions.
That transformation has surprised many within academy football, where stories persist of fierce rivalries between the two clubs, heated confrontations behind the scenes and intense celebrations after victories at lower age-group levels. A genuine rivalry developed between the dominant academy systems of the north and south over the past decade.
Asked about the rivalry in 2025, Delap said: “We hated each other in games.”
He added: “But everyone’s man enough now that, off the pitch, we can be friends. I used to play against Levi [Colwill] every year. It was a great battle. There are too many matches to remember, but we [City] beat them in the Youth Cup final [in 2020].”
There have since been substantial changes in coaching methodology at Chelsea. Scores of new staff have arrived and those who have remained at the club have had to adapt.
Liverpool women’s manager Gareth Taylor spent nine years in City’s academy and recalls how former Barcelona coach Rodolfo Borrell helped to establish a Johan Cruyff and Guardiola-inspired coaching philosophy.
He described Delap as playing with a “real edge”, Rogers as “really good and really humble”, and Palmer as a player who “used to run rings around opponents” and would “never get nervous”.
Taylor said: “We designed a really clear playing style. From under-11s and under-12s all the way up to the under-23s, you could see really clear alignment in the way we played, our identity and our style.”
The City-modelled revolution has made an impact on both the senior and youth teams at Stamford Bridge.
Now Chelsea, with Alonso coming in, will hope the approach brings more rewards.
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