Lezama, leader among the big five leagues

The 337th weekly report from the prestigious Swiss research centre CIES Football Observatory revealed that from the five major European leagues, Athletic is the club with the highest percentage of minutes played by its own academy players during the 2020/21 season.

From academies around Europe, Lezama is at the top of the table with club-trained players having turned out in 50.9% of all minutes played this season, putting Athletic ahead of RC Celta (49%), Real Sociedad (48.5%), AS St-Étienne (35.0%), Brighton & Hove Albion FC (30.1%), FSV Mainz (25.0%) and Genoa CFC (21.0%). The average percentage of minutes played by home-grown players from clubs in those five top leagues is 13.2%.

The report also shows that Athletic Club is fifth among all teams from the 27 domestic leagues in UEFA in terms of percentage of minutes played by academy-produced footballers. The Lions are only behind four clubs from leagues outside the big five: Slovakian side MŠK Žilina (61.5%), Ukraine’s Dynamo Kyiv (60.2%) and Czech clubs Sigma Olomouc (52.0%) and FC Slovácko (51.1%).
The CIES Football Observatory follows UEFA’s criteria when considering what constitutes a home-grown player, namely those who have been on a club’s ranks for at least three seasons between the ages of 15 and 21.

For this reason, the report takes 14 of the current first-team squad into account, leaving out others who, in most cases because they were academy players at Lezama before they turned 15 or because they were with affiliated clubs, did not play three full seasons at Athletic Club between the ages of 15 and 21.

Therefore, footballers who have played for Lezama’s youth teams, such as Iñigo Lekue, Ibai Gómez, Mikel Vesga, Ander Capa, Yuri Berchiche and Óscar de Marcos, do not appear among the 14 included in the report, as well as those who did not play any minutes in LaLiga 2020/21 until 5/5/2021, the end date of the period analysed in the report.

Source, CIES Football Observatory