Serie A has the dubious honour of being the only league with three sides who didn’t use a single club-trained player this season and the statistics for the bigger teams aren’t much more reassuring.

Following the failure to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, Italian football promised a reckoning with the lack of new talent coming through the ranks.

It seems that will take a lot of work, because the CIES Football Observatory crunched the numbers and found there are only eight clubs in 40 international leagues who didn’t use a single club-trained player this season.

They are Brentford, Watford, Elche, Bayer Leverkusen, Union Berlin, Bologna, Udinese and Venezia, so three representatives from Serie A.

The definition of a club-trained player is someone who has been at the club for at least three years between their 15th and 21st birthday.

Overall, Serie A ranked 38th out of 40 leagues in terms of percentage of minutes played by club-trained players during this season, averaging 7.1 per cent.

The other major European Leagues don’t fare much better, the Bundesliga with 9.9 per cent, Ligue 1 has 11.8 per cent, the English Premier League 12.1 per cent and Spanish LaLiga 17 per cent.

In club terms, Genoa are the Serie A side with the most minutes played by home-grown players, 23.9 per cent of the minutes from eight players.

Roma are the highest-ranking ‘big’ club on 14.1 per cent of minutes with six players, then Milan way down on 7.3 per cent of minutes from four players and Napoli 6.00 per cent of minutes with two players.

Inter managed only 3.5 per cent of minutes with two players and Juventus even less at 2.6 per cent with two players.

Juve are the biggest outlier, because they are the only Italian club who also have an Under-23 youth team playing in the third tier – Serie C – which in theory was meant to prepare youngsters to go straight into the senior squad, but that has hardly happened under Max Allegri’s watch.

2 thought on “Serie A only league that has three clubs without home-grown players”
  1. Udinese has been a farce for a long time now. For Serie A in general though, why play or find the Italian when there is an Albanian or Georgian out there that is much cheaper. I can’t even say Brazilian or Argentinian because we don’t even get the good ones anymore.

    At least there is the Serie A World Cup to look forward to in December.

  2. This is a disgrace but I’m not even surprised, italian football needs to seriously wake up, joke of a league

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