Manchester City’s academy will have two graduates in the Champions League final this year … unfortunately neither of them still wears sky blue!
And with Phil Foden bearing the standard for home-grown talent in the current Blues first team squad, Pep Guardiola will be hoping that the initial predictions about the revamped academy will start to come true soon.
Foden is the only truly home-grown talent who will feature in the City squad as they seek to wrap up a historic English treble with victory over Watford in the FA Cup final on Saturday, unless you include imported second-string keeper Aro Muric.
The only other talent to come right through the City system and make his debut this season has been promising attacking midfielder Felix Nmecha.
But both Foden and Nmecha were signed as youngsters by Jim Cassell’s successful academy set-up.
Cassell’s talented team of youth coaches and scouts also picked up Kieran Trippier and Daniel Sturridge – who will be on opposing sides in the European showpiece in Madrid on June 1.
Cassell and sidekick Paul Power, along with coaches Steve Eyre and Alex Gibson and recruitment specialist Barry Pointon, did a sterling job before the Abu Dhabi riches changed the landscape of the club – and even afterwards.
There was some resentment among that group when football director Brian Marwood likened City’s set-up to the “Dog and Duck” before the 2008 revolution.
To be fair to Marwood, his comment was about the club in general, and referred to the size and funding of the operation rather than to the quality of the staff and their work.
Cassell and his team performed miracles despite financial constraints - Trippier, Sturridge, Foden and now Nmecha are evidence of that.
Trippier and Sturridge, along with Burnley stalwart Ben Mee, were in the last City team to lift the FA Youth Cup, in 2008.
But when the money came in, Cassell and his tight-knit group were moved aside and eventually replaced.
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The new structure still invested in scouting the best young local players, but has also established a scouting network which trawls the world for young talent.
Last season’s debutants, apart from Manchester-raised Nmecha, were Spaniard Adrian Bernabe, Kosovan international Aro Muric, French teenager Claudio Gomes and Dutchman Philippe Sandler.
When the academy was getting a financial boost and facelift, then academy director Mark Allen – now Rangers’ director of football - said it would be 10 years before the investment started to bear real fruit.
That decade has almost expired, and the fact that there are promising young home-grown players like Tommy Doyle and Taylor Harwood-Bellis in the team which unluckily lost this year's FA Youth Cup final to Liverpool, is perhaps a sign that the crop is ripening after all.
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