Exeter city, a fan owned club, seem to have developed a successful cat 3 academy. Extract from BBC piece.
A future made in youth development
Ollie Watkins' transfer to Brentford, and subsequent sell-on clauses when he moved on to Aston Villa, has netted Exeter City around £6.5m
Most people in this part of Devon agree that Exeter's jewel in the crown is the club's youth academy.
With no rich benefactor to back the club in the transfer market, Exeter have had to produce their own players - both to staff their first team and provide revenue in player sales to other clubs.
England's Ollie Watkins, Wales' Ethan Ampadu, Swansea City captain Matt Grimes and Peterborough's Joel Randall have all left Exeter for fees in excess of £1m, while a host of other players have
earned the club six-figure transfer fees.
"The night we won promotion there were seven academy players who started the game, and those academy players are big players now and are likely to be in demand during the summer," says Hawker.
"It's about finding your strength and what you can afford and really exploiting that."
He adds: "It's not just the people that go for million-pound transfers, but actually the people who play week in, week out.
"The academy's not luck, it's there by design and it's successful by design, and it's certainly one of the things that allows us to put a team on the pitch that can compete at this level."
Today's academy players now have use of a new £3m building that opened this year to replace a 'temporary' structure that was erected in 1974.
"It's possibly the greatest achievement of the Trust," says Fulls.
"Fans will always want a successful team on the pitch. We go to be entertained and we want to win things and we want promotions.
"You can spend money on players, they come and go with or without success. What the Trust has done is they've spent money wisely on the infrastructure which lays the foundations for success over a number of years."
"You set yourself these targets and somehow when you do that and see that vision, and you can see it in your mind, somehow you get there," Tagg proudly says outside the new training ground building.
"When you look back there's the Manchester United game, there's the Liverpool games, there's the 3G training pitch - but for me this is probably the biggest of all, to provide a facility for staff and for players that will take us to another level."
And we need a training ground to boot not having to play home youth games in Preston or Myrescough or wherever we can play on.
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) and Trybull due to Critch only playing players he's signed. In his position I would also play safe with players I've known and trusted for years. This 1st game back was huge for him and a loss would have been almost catastrophic! He needed that fisting at the end and he knew it...
