West Brom’s most valuable academy graduates listed – Over £100m of talent has left The Hawthorns
West Brom fans love seeing local young players rise through the ranks of the club’s academy and burst into the first team.
Ryan Mason’s last starting line-up in the Championship against Millwall saw one academy product in goalkeeper Josh Griffiths start, with the Baggies regularly having ‘one of their own’ involved in some capacity in league matches.
Ollie Bostock made his senior West Brom debut in that 3-0 loss at Millwall and Cole Deeming was on the bench, too.
There are many reasons why there are more Baggies youth players appearing in the first team now than there used to be.
One is PSR; these players can hold a lot of value when it comes to balancing the books, as any academy sale made is seen as pure profit. Also, on the other side of things, PSR has limited West Brom’s spending in the transfer market in recent years, meaning they’ve had to rely on their own youth production to beef out the first-team squad.
Another is that West Brom simply have a very good academy – arguably the best in the country for a non-city club.
Morgan Rogers the poster boy for West Brom’s academy
Despite what the armchair fans will have you believe, Morgan Rogers is not a Manchester City academy product – he’s a Halesowen lad and boyhood Baggie who was on the Black Country club’s books at the age of seven.
Rogers made his senior West Brom debut before joining Manchester City in 2019 and after several loan spells and a permanent stint at Middlesbrough, he’s now tearing it up for Aston Villa and England.
Chris Wood has also been a success story over the last decade or so.
Even though the Auckland-born striker was brought to West Brom in 2009 from the now-defunct New Zealand club Waikato, he was still largely developed in the Black Country.
Now at Nottingham Forest, the 33-year-old has played 87 times for New Zealand and made 270 appearances in the Premier League and 223 in the Championship, bagging 169 goals in the top two tiers of English football.
It’s unfortunate it never worked out for Wood at The Hawthorns, despite scoring a stunning first goal for the Albion against Doncaster Rovers in September 2009 that you can watch below by hitting play.
However, he’s not the only one to have left West Brom and made a name for himself elsewhere.
West Brom’s most valuable academy products ranked
Unsurprisingly, football website transfermarkt have listed Rogers as having the highest current market value of all players to have graduated from West Brom’s academy.
He and Wood are joined by Finn Azaz, Dara O’Shea, Tom Fellows, Tim Iroegbunam, Sam Field and Louie Barry in the top eight.
Market value on the transfermarkt website is not the same as the value a player would or could be sold for. Please just bear that in mind.
Going by this metric, it’s unfortunate that you have to go down to 13th place to see the first current Albion player, which is the aforementioned goalkeeper Griffiths.
Griffiths, who impressed in West Brom’s win against Norwich City on 1 October, holds a market value of £1.3million.
- Griffiths is 24 years old
- He’s been on the books at West Brom since the age of 10
- After loan spells at Cheltenham, Lincoln, Portsmouth and Bristol Rovers, he’s emerged as Mason‘s number one goalkeeper
- This season, the ex-England Under-21s goalkeeper has made nine Championship appearances, conceding 10 goals and keeping three clean sheets
It’s a shame that West Brom’s current crop of academy products isn’t valued as highly.
However, there’s definitely a chance for some of them to boost their standing in the coming months and years with the club stuck in the Championship, knowing that one of the best ways they can make the money needed to return to the Premier League is by nurturing their youth.
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