Everton’s academy is producing footballers. Just not enough at the top level

Harrison Armstrong is exactly what Everton want the academy to produce.

A local player who has come through Finch Farm, made his senior debut and established himself in the first team while still a teenager. The midfielder has started all five of Everton’s Premier League games this season, playing 445 of the 450 minutes available.

The problem is that Armstrong is increasingly looking like the exception rather than the rule.

Everton’s academy continues to produce professional footballers. The problem is that very few are becoming Everton, or even Premier League, footballers.

That distinction is important.

There is no shortage of former Everton academy players earning a living in the professional game. Some are playing in the Championship, others further down the pyramid, and Everton have also generated decent transfer fees from academy graduates.

But that should not necessarily be enough for a Premier League academy. Nor for a club who must maximise every advantage it has to compete with clubs with greater resources, and more spending leeway when it comes to rules and regulations.

The real test of an academy at a club like Everton should be how many players it produces who are capable of performing at the highest level — ideally for Everton, but at the very least elsewhere in the Premier League.

And on that measure, the recent record makes uncomfortable reading.

A BBC analysis of the 2025/26 Premier League season found that Everton had just one academy graduate playing in the division, Harrison Armstrong, who accumulated 499 minutes. For comparison, Manchester City had seven academy graduates play Premier League football, Chelsea had five, Brighton six, Arsenal four and Liverpool three.

That data was collected in April, with Armstrong finishing the campaign with 529 minutes, after his loan recall in January.

As a result, Everton ranked 15th in the Premier League for minutes by academy players at the time of the April study. Had Armstrong not been recalled amid issues in the winter window, the Toffees may have ended the campaign on zero. 

Everton were not merely behind the biggest academies in the country. They were behind clubs with significantly smaller resources. Armstrong’s emergence this season is therefore encouraging, but it also raises an awkward question.

If he is the exception, what has happened to the rest?

Anthony Gordon’s progress to England and Barcelona regular is an academy success story, while Ross Barkley and Antonee Robinson are perhaps the most prominent Premier League examples. Elsewhere, Ellis Simms is hoping to establish himself in the top division at Coventry. In the Championship, Isaac Price, Tom Cannon, Lewis Dobbin, and Nathan Broadhead are all forging careers in the second tier. 

But evidence of Finch Farm products becoming Everton regulars is scarce. It’s not an Everton-only problem. After the exits of Trent Alexander-Arnold and Curtis Jones, this season marks first time in Liverpool’s 134-year history that the senior squad lacks a player born in the city. Liverpool is one of the UK’s biggest footballing hotbeds, and both of the city’s sides are struggling to consistently turn local talent into first-team regulars.

Everton have traditionally prided themselves on giving young players an opportunity. The club’s history is littered with academy graduates who became first-team regulars, from Colin Harvey to Tony Hibbert, Wayne Rooney, and more.

That conveyor belt has slowed dramatically.

The Premier League’s enormous spending power — described by Antonio Conte this week as “bazookas” compared with the “pistols” used elsewhere in Europe — means local talent must compete with some of the best young players in world football before even bridging the gap between youth football and senior action.

There will be an obvious counterargument to all of this. Training Ground Guru ranked Everton’s academy seventh in the country for productivity last season, having placed it fourth the year before.

But that perhaps tells us something about the way academy success is measured. Everton are producing professional footballers. What they are not producing in sufficient numbers are players capable of playing at the level Everton aspire to.

The ultimate purpose of an academy at a Premier League club is to produce players good enough for the Premier League.

At the moment, Armstrong is doing that. The question is when the next one will arrive.