Portuguese clubs are outside the top 20 (!) when we look at this season.
Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris Saint=Germain are the biggest talent “breeding grounds” for the Big Five , the five best European leagues = England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France = according to a study released by the Football Observatory (CIES) on Wednesday.
This season, Barcelona has forty players developed at the club spread across the five major leagues, ten of whom play for the club itself. Real Madrid has 35 (six at the club) and PSG 31 (six internally).
Even extending the analysis period to the last five or ten years, these same three clubs dominate, even in terms of minutes played by their respective players. The more attentive reader may argue (and rightly so) that these clubs are in top-5 leagues, facilitating the distribution of players to other national clubs.
Looking at the current season, Benfica comes in 22nd place on the list , with 16 players. It is the second club outside the top 5 with the most players, well behind Ajax (27 players, fifth on the list).
Sporting is 43rd on the list, with 11 athletes, just one more than FC Porto, ranked 50th . Clubs such as Hertha Berlin (Bundesliga 2), Salzburg, River Plate and Anderlecht are ahead of these two national clubs.
However, if we analyze the data from the last five to ten years, Sporting surpasses Benfica in the number of players trained in the top=5 clubs, illustrating how the dynamics of youth development have changed in Portugal in the last decade.
Different angles of analysis yield different results. While in October Benfica was proud to be chosen by the same entity as the best youth academy in the world , the sample and metrics used were different then.
Forty-nine world leagues were considered, with three aspects of analysis = number of athletes, minutes played, and level of competition = which led to a final index. In this final value, Benfica came out ahead of Barcelona and River Plate.