Introduction: Elite soccer academies represent one of the most common forms of talent development programmes in the UK, yet they are increasingly being challenged regarding their ‘healthiness’ or ‘appropriateness’. The morality of engaging young players in intensive, pressurised, performance focused environments, given that only few can “make it”, has been questioned. Instead, proponents argue that academies offer powerful contexts for positive development, readying players for life. As with any system, it makes sense to see academies as offering a context of impact possibilities; performance and personal, positive and negative, short- and long-term. This study aims to address the shortfall of holistic approaches in evaluating the impact of academy involvement. Methods: A mixed-methods approach was utilised to comprehensively and holistically evaluate the impact of one elite English youth soccer academy. Over one-year, longitudinal quantitative data on physical and psycho-social wellbeing, school report cards and injury were collected from 58 U12-U16 players. In addition, focus groups and peer interviews explored players’ (n=57) perspectives regarding ‘in-time’ impact, whilst semi-structured interviews with both successful and unsuccessful ex-academy players (n=7) explored ‘over-time’ impact. Results & Discussion: Findings revealed a wide range of potential academy impacts and highlight how academy involvement is neither inherently good nor bad but has potential in both directions. Involvement with this specific academy resulted in predominantly positive developmental outcomes regarding enjoyment, perceptions of psycho-social health, wellbeing, personal and social development. Nonetheless, potential risks were identified, including injury, and compromised identity, social and educational development. Combining quantitative and qualitative data, as well as long- and short-term perspectives, produced a more nuanced picture of academy impact, highlighting impacts as interrelated, neither universally stable nor consistent over time. Conclusions: This is one of the first studies to employ a rigorous and integrated mixed-method evaluation, providing a nuanced understanding of the impacts that may emerge from soccer academy involvement. This specific context provided unique and promising insights suggesting that soccer academies can provide a positive developmental context.
ORCID: 
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)