Did Man City Make a Huge Mistake Selling Cole Palmer, Morgan Rogers and Their Other Academy Gems?
Pep Guardiola has a long history of coaching youth players. He graduated from Barcelona’s renowned La Masia institution and began his coaching career in 2007 when he was named manager of the Catalans’ B team.
A year later, he was elevated to first-team coach at Camp Nou, where he brought in players like Pedro and Sergio Busquets, along with the returning Gerard Pique, as Barca won the triple in spectacular fashion.
In his nearly ten years at Manchester City, Guardiola has witnessed an equal number of gifted players emerge from the academy.
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However, there is a significant distinction between the two teams, since the majority of the young players that have emerged at City have not established themselves as mainstays in his starting lineup.
Even though Phil Foden, Nico O’Reilly, and Rico Lewis, the academy poster boy, have achieved great success for their boyhood teams, they are a very small percentage.
Morgan Rogers, who left City in 2023 for Middlesbrough, is one of the most significant players for Villa and a real rival to Jude Bellingham in the England squad.
Guardiola’s team will play one of the greatest success stories of all the players who have left the club when they play Aston Villa on Sunday.
Since leaving the City Football Academy (CFA), Rogers has gone on to disprove his former employers, and he is by no means alone in this. “Imagine the amount of players who unfortunately left,” Guardiola stated last month.
They couldn’t have the spot [on the team] since they were elite players. My God, if you start counting the amazing players from other clubs that received their education and played in the academy and at Man City, you might have the starting lineup for the first team right now.”
WANDERLUSTSPORT examines the top players who graduated from City’s development system but were never selected, determining if it was the right decision for the team to let them go.
Cole Palmer
Present Club (Chelsea)
Palmer is the one who escaped more than any other City academy player in the twenty-first century. He was doing it while on their books, and they were aware of his skill level, but other players were blowing up after leaving City.
Even though he mostly played off the bench, he took chances in the first team, contributing to a goal every 185 minutes while scoring 42 goals and setting up 19 more in 61 games for the Under-18s and Under-21s.
Palmer scored in two of his final three games for the team, in the Community Shield and UEFA Super Cup, demonstrating to City shortly before they allowed him to go for Chelsea how excellent he was getting.
Palmer’s ascent at Chelsea caught many off guard, as he scored 22 Premier League goals and set up 11 in his debut season, and few City supporters were unhappy about the £42 million they received when he departed.
Palmer had the potential to succeed Kevin De Bruyne at Etihad Stadium and have a highly productive winger to take Riyad Mahrez’s spot.
Supporters must have been proud to see Palmer follow in Foden’s footsteps as the local academy kid who rose to the first team.
Micheal Olise
Present Club: (Bayern Munich)
Though he rarely speaks, Michael Olise has recently allowed his performances to speak for him, with disastrous results.
Once turned down by some of the best clubs in the world, including Arsenal, Chelsea, and City, he is now a star for Bayern Munich and a consistent source of goals for Harry Kane.
After being turned down by Chelsea, Olise moved to City at the age of 15, but he wasn’t cut out for the CFA and only stayed for one season before moving down a level to join Reading.
After thriving there, he joined the Royals’ main squad within two years and quickly started dominating the Championship.
He was later acquired by Crystal Palace for £8 million, which was a steal given that three years later, they would sell him to Bayern for £52 million.
In his first season at the Allianz Arena, Olise scored 17 goals and provided 17 assists while winning the Bundesliga title.
This season, he has continued where he left off, leaving City and the other major teams that let him go to wonder how they missed his potential.
Morgan Rogers
Present Club: (Aston Villa)
Have you ever pondered why both Palmer and Rogers perform the “ice cold” celebration following a goal? The two scored goals in the 2020 FA Youth Cup final against Chelsea and were best friends as City youth teammates from 2019 to 2021.
Palmer, however, was undoubtedly at his best at that level. Despite playing on the other wing, Rogers only contributed to 12 goals and played in half as many games.
Additionally, Rogers was loaned to Lincoln City and Blackpool in League One and Bournemouth in the Championship before joining Middlesbrough in the summer of 2023, but Palmer was promoted to the main team quickly.
It helped shape him into the outstanding player who, in his first full season at Villa, was named the PFA Young Player of the Year.
However, the truth is that nobody questioned Rogers’ departure at the time, even though City would have delighted to have had him in his current form. Not even Rogers, who acknowledged last month that “I was just not good enough.”
I wasn’t myself, I wasn’t prepared to be there, and I wasn’t the person they signed me as in terms of what they wanted me to become. Yes, neither the club nor I had the right player at the appropriate moment.
James Gittens
Present Club: (Chelsea)
In contrast to Olise, Jamie Gittens joined City at the age of 14 after making an impression for Reading’s youth teams.
The junior coaches at City admired him, but after witnessing how Sancho, with whom he shared an agent, had accelerated his career by moving from Manchester to Dortmund, he became impatient.
Gittens spent two years sharing a locker room with Erling Haaland after moving to Dortmund in the same summer as Jude Bellingham.
Gittens took his time making an impression in Germany, but with 12 goals and five assists in the previous campaign, he proved himself.
Like Sancho before him, his exploits earned him a lucrative move back to England when Chelsea paid £52 million to sign him.
His return to his native country is going eerily similarly to that of his former teammate and role model, as he started slowly at Stamford Bridge and has only appeared in Enzo Maresca’s starting lineup in two league games thus far.
Jeremie Frimpong
Present Club: (Liverpool)
When Jeremie Frimpong was seven years old, his mother and six siblings relocated from Amsterdam to Manchester, where he enrolled in City’s academy two years later.
He played in an age group that was lower than his own, which made him feel like he was being held back during his nine years there.
In 2019, when Frimpong sought to talk about a new contract, he was told quite plainly that he was too little and not physically fit enough for the senior team.
He was also compared to players in his age group who had advanced more. Rather than staying, Frimpong moved to Celtic, where he played frequently and became the dynamic right-back he is today.
Many City fans started to question whether they had erred in ignoring him when he was instrumental in Bayer Leverkusen’s thumping victory in the 2024 Bundesliga.
When Kyle Walker’s nose-diving performances left the squad without a reliable right-back last season and Frimpong moved title rivals Liverpool for £29.5 million in the summer, those sentiments were even more apparent.
Liam Delap
present Club: (Chelsea)
Liam-Delap, the 16-year-old son of Rory, the long-throw virtuoso of Stoke City, joined City in 2019 after being identified by Joe Shields, the academy’s head of recruitment, who had previously brought Sancho and Gittens to the team along with a number of other young players.
Delap was promoted to the U23s at the age of 17, and he played on the same Youth Cup winning squad as Palmer and Rogers.
Additionally, Guardiola gave him first-team football, in contrast to many of the gifted young players who progressed through the CFA’s ranks.
Guardiola stated, “He’s the type of striker we don’t have,” in 2022. “He is an amazing finisher, a great baller, and a typical British striker. He possesses a unique trait. He is not like other strikers.
Unfortunately, Delap sustained an ankle injury shortly after making his debut, which prevented him from playing for five months. Haaland was signed by City at this time.
After that, Delap went on three different Championship loans before being transferred to Ipswich Town for £20 million.
He secured a £30 million transfer to Chelsea after showcasing his Premier League skills with the Tractor Boys, but he hasn’t yet made an impact at Stamford Bridge due to an injury sustained in his third game of the season.
City shouldn’t regret using Delap because they haven’t exactly been short on goals because of Haaland.
Jadon Sancho
Present Club: (Chelsea)
Jadon Sancho only played for City for two years, but after moving from Watford, he made the significant transition from a promising young player to a potential generational talent at the CFA.
For the U18 team, Sancho tore opponents to pieces, including his future employers Manchester United, but he became irate when he was left out of the first team’s 2017 U.S. tour while Foden was selected.
Without ever appearing for the City first team, Sancho cancelled his training sessions and negotiated an £8 million ($10 million) transfer to Borussia Dortmund.
He blossomed into one of the world’s most exciting young players in Germany, as he finished a season with 17 goals and 17 assists.
It resulted in his signing a £74 million contract with United, from which City received an extra £10 million because of a sell-on clause.
Even if Sancho’s success with Dortmund raised many concerns at the time regarding the prudence of allowing him to leave, his career trajectory since coming back to England—being cut off from United, having a poor loan at Chelsea, and now hardly playing for Aston Villa—has validated City’s choice.
Ibrahim Diaz
Present Club: (Real Madrid)
Even though Brahim Diaz only played 50 Premier League games for City, Real Madrid was persuaded to pay an initial £15 million ($19 million) for him.
The decision was made too soon for Diaz, who failed to receive many minutes with Los Blancos during the next 18 months. It was a significant leap of faith for a 19-year-old.
When he went on loan to AC Milan, he performed significantly better and was instrumental in the Rossoneri’s first Serie A championship in eleven years in 2022.
He returned to Madrid a year later and has since established himself as a dependable squad member when needed.
When he scored against his old team last season, he frightened City by helping Real Madrid rally from a deficit to win 3-2 in the first leg of their Champions League quarterfinal play-off match.
Few supporters or City officials believe they made a mistake in allowing him to leave, despite that objective.
Romeo Lavia
Present Club: (Chelsea)
At the age of 16, Romeo Lavia left Belgian powerhouse Anderlecht for City, and he quickly won over his coaches. In less than a year, he earned his Carabao Cup debut for Guardiola’s first squad after being promoted to the U23s.
However, the club opted to cash in on him in the summer of 2022 when they sold Southampton four players.
City made £14.5 million from Lavia’s sale, and they made an additional £10 million when Chelsea bought him for £58 million a year later.
Due to injury, Lavia only played 32 minutes of Premier League football in his debut season at Chelsea, which was a turbulent start to his career.
Although he has subsequently recovered, he has only shown himself to be a squad player thus far, thus City had no regrets in moving him on when they did.
Pedro Porro
Present Club: (Tottenham Hotspur)
Several City acquisitions, such Pedro Porro, have hardly practiced with the first squad and have never played for them.
The Spanish full-back paid £11 million to join the Cityzens from Girona, a team in the same City Football Group, but he immediately left on loan to Real Valladolid. He signed a loan deal with Sporting CP a year later, with a £7 million buyout option.
After a year, the Portuguese team exercised it, costing City £4 million in lost revenue. After joining Tottenham, Porro had a terrible first season but has since developed into one of the Premier League’s most dynamic and trustworthy full-backs at a time when City desperately needs a dependable right-back.
In addition, Porro has haunted City on multiple occasions. He was the star of Tottenham’s 2-0 triumph early in the season and their 4-0 victory at the Etihad last season.
