The question is simple and almost nobody answers it: if a club invests ten million a year in its academy for a decade, does it get that money back? The short answer is yes, with two conditions explained at the end. The long one requires first dismantling the argument everyone reaches for, because it is true and at the same time the least important.
The argument is that a homegrown player is pure profit. Spain's accounting rules for sports entities require the cost of developing your own player to be expensed in the year it is incurred and forbid capitalising it on the balance sheet, out of prudence and because it is hard to measure. A signing, by contrast, is booked as an asset, as a registration right, and amortised over the length of the contract. That is why a player developed in house is worth zero in the club's accounts and, when he is sold for twenty million, almost all twenty are capital gain. Not exactly twenty, because LaLiga's financial control rules deduct the costs tied to the deal and the financial effect of deferred payment: with half a million in exit costs, the recognised profit is nineteen and a half. A player signed for twenty who still has eight million left to amortise leaves, with the same costs, eleven and a half. Eight million of difference that come solely from where the footballer came from.
But that is a question of when the cost shows up in the profit and loss account, not of how much it costs. The academy's ten million a year leave the bank account exactly like the fifty of a signing; the difference is that one is spent every year and the other is spread over five. Accounting does not make an academy a good idea. What makes it a good idea are three things that sit outside that calculation, and the first is regulatory.
Both LaLiga and UEFA, in its 2025 sustainability framework, allow clubs to exclude from relevant expenditure the costs directly attributable to development: coaches working exclusively with the academy, the residence, medical care, education, travel, kit, facility rental and the wages of players under 18. The amortisation of a signing, on the other hand, counts in full towards the squad cost limit, alongside the salary and the agent's commission. The consequence is arithmetic: a million spent on developing consumes less of the salary cap than a million spent on buying. And it is a deliberate decision by the regulator, best seen in what the rule refuses to exclude. Scouting, bonuses for securing a young player's registration, agent commissions and payments to another club for landing the kid all count as relevant expenditure with no favourable treatment whatsoever. Two million invested over years in developing is not worth the same, for financial control purposes, as two million paid to poach a sixteen-year-old prospect. The rule distinguishes between developing and recruiting on purpose, and that distinction is the first reason a club wants an academy.
The second reason is the signing that never happens. If a centre-back from the academy occupies for five seasons a slot that would have required buying someone else for fifty million, those fifty million never amortised are the largest return an academy produces, and they appear in no annual accounts as academy income. It is a counterfactual, it cannot be audited, but it is what explains the balance sheet of a club that buys instead of develops. Atlético de Madrid, according to its audited 2024/25 accounts, closed the year with player registrations worth 452 million in gross cost and 243 million in net book value after amortisation, with 234 million in additions in a single season and 76 million of annual amortisation. Every slot filled from within avoids adding one more layer to that asset which has to be amortised year after year.
The third reason is the one that changes how everything else reads, and to see it you need the numbers from the CIES Football Observatory. The study published on 1 April 2026 defines a developing club as one where the player spent at least three seasons between the ages of 15 and 21, and it includes variables not yet collected and sell-on percentages, so its figures are useful for comparing models but do not match audited accounting gains. By that yardstick, Real Madrid leads the past decade with 395 million euros in income from players it developed across 40 deals, although only 81 of those millions arrived in the last five years and Álvaro Morata alone accounts for a fifth of the total. Villarreal comes second with 203 million, and here sits the most striking figure in the whole series: 168 of those millions, 83 percent, belong to the last five years, with Álex Baena as the main contributor. Atlético add up to 181 million over ten years, but only 21 in the last five, and Lucas Hernández explains 44 percent of the total. Barça are fourth with 173 million, 98 of them in the last five years and Nico González as the largest contribution at 14 percent. And Espanyol close the list with 81 million, 44 of them recent, with Joan García accounting for almost a third.
Read on its own, that ranking says Madrid have the best academy in Spain and Barça the fourth best. But the same CIES published another figure in January 2026: the market valuation of each club's academy graduates still under contract. Barça's was 738 million euros, the highest in the world in their study. Espanyol's, for scale, was 59 million, led by Javi Puado at 19. Barça sell less than Villarreal and yet hold inside the building four times more value than they have sold in ten years. That gap between what is sold and what is kept is the third reason: an academy produces a stock of sellable players with zero acquisition cost, and that stock appears in no financial statement until somebody pays for one of them.
Put another way, an academy generates money in three ways. The first is the sale, and the accounts measure that one well. The second is the purchase that never happens because the kid from the academy takes the slot. The third is the asset held back, waiting for somebody to want it. The last two do not exist for accounting purposes, and they are what explains why a club like Barça, which sells relatively little, announced in 2024 that it would concentrate its investment on developing its own players with only selective signings.
With all this, the verdict depends on which club you are. For a big club that can hold on to its players, an academy pays off beyond argument: Barça are the extreme case, with 173 million sold and 738 retained, and their return comes from savings on signings and from the stock, not from sales. For a mid-sized club with good scouting, it pays off as a hybrid model, which is exactly what Villarreal do: their own development structure plus the ability to identify, develop and sell. Their academy sales are not incidental income. The club lost 14.1 million in 2023/24 and approved a budget of 143.4 million for 2024/25; in an entity of that scale, 168 million in five years of academy transfers is what holds the accounts together. For a smaller developing club, it pays off even while losing its best players, because every exit produces a fee, reputation to attract the next generation and an income almost nobody counts: FIFA's solidarity mechanism sets aside five percent of every subsequent international transfer to be shared among the clubs that developed the player between the ages of 12 and 23. Espanyol have taken 81 million in ten years with a structure that looks nothing like the two giants', and the CIES study credits them with ten academy graduates under contract. Atlético, finally, are the warning that the ten-year figure can lie: 181 million sounds good until you see that 21 arrived in the last five years and that a single player explains almost half. The current intensity of their academy model has nothing to do with what it was eight years ago.
That leaves the two conditions, and without them everything above turns into propaganda. The first is that the real cost of an academy graduate is not his individual invoice but that of his entire generation. The most repeated error in sports journalism is comparing the twenty million of a sale with the three hundred thousand euros that supposedly went into developing that star, ignoring the hundreds of footballers in the same cohort who consumed coaches, residence, doctors and travel for years and produced not a single euro. Honest profitability spreads the whole academy spend across those who made it, and no Spanish club publishes that denominator: audited accounts show how much is earned selling players but not how much it cost to produce each intake. Without that number, an academy always looks more profitable than it is, and Morata, Baena or Joan García look like bargains.
The second condition is that the academy also consumes salary cap. LaLiga includes reserve teams, the academy and the remaining sections in the squad cost, with their salaries, commissions and amortisations. The idea that the academy does not count towards financial control is false. What gets favourable treatment is genuine development spending, not the entire structure, and the club that cannot tell one from the other loses the advantage.
With those two conditions, the answer holds. Having an academy is worth it, and it is worth more the better the club is at keeping what it produces. What is not worth it is measuring it by the capital gain on the last sale. It is the only thing that shows up in the accounts, and it is the smallest part of the return.
