Jason Wilcox exclusive: Man City target future Ballon d'Or winners in academy reset

"Why can't one of our young players win the Ballon d'Or? Why not?"

It says a lot about the thinking behind the doors of Manchester City's training complex that producing a Ballon d'Or winner may not be the most ambitious target that academy director Jason Wilcox has set. But after the success in lifting young players to the standards that Pep Guardiola has demanded in recent years, it is little wonder that those in charge of the academy have moved their goalposts to be bigger and better than ever before.

The failure to produce first team players was an elephant in the room for the Sheikh Mansour era for almost a decade, and — as chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak admitted this week — the arrival of Guardiola didn't instantly change the narrative; the Catalan was criticised by many for demanding patience around Phil Foden's development while Jadon Sancho left and thrived at Dortmund, charting a new path for talented youngsters that weren't getting game time at top English clubs.

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Perhaps inevitably, given the uprooting nature of the takeover, the academy struggled to find its purpose and keep up with the phenomenal pace of the transformation at first team level. In those circumstances, the balance of winning trophies at youth level and producing players for the professional game has been a difficult one to gauge.

However, the last few years have seen a change of emphasis that looks to be paying off handsomely. City have just won the Premier League 2 (the Under-23 league) for a second consecutive year and the Under-18 Premier League for a third straight year, while at the same time providing more first team matchday appearances than at any other period