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Manchester City are a side famed for their unparalleled riches and domination in the transfer market, but a revolutionary change could be on the horizon after years of extravagant and often gratuitous spending.
Phil Foden’s inclusion in the starting XI to face Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday caught most people by surprise. Pep Guardiola has often been scrutinised for a perceived reluctance to fully trust in the prodigious teenager, provoking a tidal wave of bemused journalists to paint a bleak outlook for the future of youth at the club.
But his decision to entrust the 18-year-old in a fixture of paramount importance to City’s season was the most telling sign of what the future holds for Foden and the rest of an academy which has been criminally short of world class talent since Sheikh Mansour took charge in 2008.
This was a game against a side who were considered genuine title contenders just a few weeks ago and had just beaten City over two legs; the title was and is still on the line; the stakes couldn’t have been much higher – yet Guardiola included him from the start in place of David Silva, potentially the most talented player in the history of the club.
Plenty has been made of his match-winning display and rightly so. But the implications of his impact transcend beyond how it influenced the club in the immediate term.
Since City’s sugar-daddy owners rolled into the club and transformed the expectations not a single player has risen into the first team from the academy.
A club who once prided themselves on their ability to embed the next generation of talent into the senior squad – and successfully brought through the likes of Daniel Sturridge, Micah Richards, Stephen Ireland and Joey Barton – have effectively turned the academy into a money-making machine.
Players have been brought through, loaned out and then sold on for a healthy profit in order to fund multi-million pound deals for established stars. But murmurs of City’s potential breach of Financial Fair Play rules and the solitary addition of Riyad Mahrez last summer hint that perhaps winds of change are beginning to blow towards the Etihad Stadium.
Naturally the players residing within the youth ranks must be genuinely exceptional to make the step up in class but with a £200 million academy system already in place there is simply no excuse for the toxic and unsustainable trend of obscene investment to continue.
Guardiola has set the wheels in motion for a shift in strategy by slowly embedding Foden into the side, allowing him the time to adjust to the speed of play his team are expected to play at by training with the senior squad on a regular basis and affording him cameo appearances on a semi-regular basis, and now it seems the final stage of the process is beginning to take place.
Foden is unlikely to keep his place in the side for the trip to Old Trafford on Wednesday but his inclusion against a talented side on Saturday proves that he could be a big part of the squad next season.
There is now a glimpse of tangible proof that the £200 million investment has produced a player who could one day be worth a huge fraction of that cost, and Eric Garcia’s handful of quietly impressive displays this season point towards another imminent graduation.
After all these years of neglecting the academy system there are some trophy-worthy fruits beginning to grow, and Guardiola’s cautious but ultimately cunning approach to embedding them into the side could represent the advent of a new philosophical approach to long-term development at City.