Arsenal leaned more heavily on their academy than any other Premier League club last season, a Press Association Sport study has found.
Homegrown players study: Key findings
- Arsenal topped the charts in terms of playing time for homegrown players, with Hector Bellerin, Francis Coquelin, Alex Iwobi, Kieran Gibbs, Emiliano Martinez and Ainsley Maitland-Niles combining for 6,628 minutes - 19.4 per cent of the Gunners' total.
- Manchester United used the most of their own academy products, 10, but their total playing time was less. Joel Pereira, Demetri Mitchell and Josh Harrop played just one game apiece, with Scott McTominay adding 96 minutes and Timothy Fosu-Mensah 94 while Angel Gomes became the first Premier League player born in the 21st century, but featured for only two minutes.
- The biggest contributor to United's total was Paul Pogba, who was allowed to leave the club after first breaking into the team and was re-signed last summer at a world-record cost of £89million.
- At the other end of the scale, Burnley and Swansea did not use any of their own academy products.
- Bournemouth, Liverpool and Stoke also gave less than one per cent of their playing time to players developed in-house.
- The Cherries, though, used the highest proportion of players developed in the UK at 90.3 per cent of their playing time.
- Burnley were second in that category at 85 per cent and were also the only team to exclusively use players who completed their development in Europe.
- Manchester City used just one of their own academy products - Kelechi Iheanacho for 526 minutes, of 1.4 per cent of their total - and recorded the lowest totals of minutes by players developed in the UK (14 per cent) and Europe as a whole (59 per cent). They used only four players who graduated from UK-based academies, with Raheem Sterling (Liverpool), John Stones (Barnsley) and Fabian Delph (Leeds) joining Iheanacho.
- The top six teams in the league - Chelsea, Tottenham, City, Liverpool, Arsenal and United - all finished in the bottom eight in terms of minutes played by UK-developed players.
Report
Arsenal leaned more heavily on their academy than any other Premier League club last season, a Press Association Sport study has found.
The investigation discovered that 19.4 per cent of Arsenal's total top-flight minutes were played by graduates of their youth set-up, with six players contributing to that tally.
Manchester United fielded more of their own academy graduates than any other top-flight side - 10 - but as a percentage of minutes played overall that equated to 17.1 per cent, with a number of youngsters fielded in the run-in as the Europa League became manager Jose Mourinho's priority.
The study looked at which academies players finished their youth careers at, with playing time calculated from publicly available data on soccerway.com.
Of the Arsenal six, only Kieran Gibbs and Ainsley Maitland-Niles are still eligible to play for England. Maitland-Niles was part of England's victorious squad at the Under-20 World Cup earlier this summer.
The single biggest contributor to the Arsenal homegrown tally was Spanish full-back Hector Bellerin, who played 2,498 league minutes.
Bournemouth had the highest percentage of players developed in the UK youth system in their total, at 90.3 per cent. However, the Cherries' own academy accounted for only 0.1 per cent thanks to a single substitute appearance apiece for Baily Cargill and Matt Worthington.
Burnley were the only side to use players developed exclusively in the UK or Europe, with UK-developed players accounting for 85 per cent.
However, the Clarets were one of only two sides who did not give a single minute of action to one of their own academy products, along with Swansea.
Manchester City had the lowest total of UK-developed players, with just 14 per cent of their minutes played total made up of footballers from the UK system. They also had the greatest proportion - 41 per cent - of players developed outside Europe.
Kelechi Iheanacho was the only City academy graduate to be used in the Premier League by Pep Guardiola, and even then sparingly - for a paltry 526 minutes.
Watford's percentage of UK-developed players was the second-lowest, at 17.2 per cent.