NewsNow
July 25, 2026
Chelsea’s signing of Morgan Rogers this week marked yet another graduate of Manchester City’s academy plying his trade at a league rival. Rogers was initially sold by City in 2023 for a now-miserly £1.1m deal to Middlesbrough, and has since developed into a Premier League star who has garnered the attention of top clubs across the world.
Six ex-City academy graduates are now at Chelsea, representing roughly £300m of spend combined. This clearly isn’t a one-off deal, but part of a wider pattern that a club like Chelsea has become central to. Is this a deliberate strategy by the west Londoners, or simply symptomatic of a limited first-team pathway in Manchester?
Chelsea’s scouting network would likely be paying close attention to any outgoing City starlets, but the strategy seems to be to wait rather than swoop immediately. Cole Palmer’s transfer was the exception to Chelsea’s usual treatment of City outcasts; most of these signings have instead come via an indirect path. Liam Delap and Romeo Lavia, for example, arrived via Ipswich Town and Southampton, acquired and further developed elsewhere before Chelsea moved in to pay inflated prices. In Delap’s case (two goals in 41 games), the strategy clearly isn’t infallible — but the hit rate has still been strong enough to keep Chelsea repeating it.
So why does such a market for City outcasts exist?
The first team at the Etihad is so competitive that even genuinely good players can’t get minutes, meaning their “rejects” are systematically undervalued relative to their real ability. This isn’t necessarily true of academy discards from smaller clubs, or even some of the larger ones in the Premier League. A club with Chelsea’s stature and financial backing, though, can afford to wait for a secondary assessment of these players — often through a couple of seasons in the Championship or Premier League elsewhere. The inflated price is simply the trade-off for mitigating the risk of signing a genuine discard, rather than a potential star City overlooked.
From Manchester City’s point of view, do these later transfers represent failure? We asked the same underlying question when assessing Tottenham Hotspur’s recent sell-off, arguing that trading academy prospects is precisely what facilitates the acquisition of ready-made stars for the first team. There will, of course, be a player who in hindsight might have been kept, but looking at those Chelsea have indirectly acquired, would any of them actually make it into the current City first team? Even in Morgan Rogers’ case, the likelihood is slim.
The fan frustration instead appears to be a more emotion-driven reaction, with homegrown stars invariably proving more popular than outside signings — Phil Foden a clear case in point at City. City’s academy situation is a strength that produces an unusual side effect, in most cases simply generating additional resources to be spent on Championship-calibre stars for the first team. It’s a luxury most other clubs can only dream of, and the fact that many of these starlets end up at other top teams underlines the success of the system, not some inherent structural issue.
Keep an eye on Max Alleyne. City reportedly hosted an “exhibition day” for EFL scouts and agents last week specifically to showcase academy players surplus to first-team needs; a literal marketplace for exactly the kind of talent this piece describes. Alleyne, a 20-year-old centre-back who just won the Premier League 2 title and reached the UEFA Youth League quarter-finals, was among those on display. If the pattern holds, a move in the next year or two could look very different in hindsight — just as Rogers’ £1.1m sale did in 2023.
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