Newcastle United have just been shown damning stat about how badly the academy has been neglected

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Newcastle United have now been shown how badly their academy has been neglected in the last decade after damning stat is published.

You could probably count on one hand the number of quality players who have graduated through the academy into the Newcastle first team over the last decade.

It’s no secret that the academy was massively neglected under Mike Ashley’s reign but it’s now been proven in a statistic published by CIES Football Observatory which shows Newcastle’s academy is not in the top 100 most profitable, beaten by Swansea.

Newcastle’s academy has been a desolate wasteland

Take away Sean Longstaff and who exactly are the players who have been developed through the club’s youth ranks in recent years? You’d honestly struggle to name any.

More often than not, if there was a talented young player playing in black and white they’d probably be poached by another big club for absolute pennies, but it didn’t matter to Ashley.

This idea that Ashley was a brilliant businessman at Newcastle is completely false – if he’d paid any attention to what was going on behind the scenes he could have had a successful and profitable academy given the talent that he had in the local area.

Instead he neglected it altogether and let potential stars walk away practically for free, how that can be considered a smart business move is honestly very confusing.

A recent example is Bobby Clark who very recently came on for Liverpool against Arsenal in the FA Cup. The teenager, son of Lee, left Newcastle just months before the takeover went through and now he’s developing well under Jurgen Klopp.

The Magpies’ academy is now on the rise

Thankfully for Newcastle fans the club are placing a huge emphasis on bringing the best young talent into their academy with the idea of developing them into first-team players.

There have been huge efforts made by sporting director Dan Ashworth to ensure that Newcastle’s academy is an attractive place to go for young stars and not a stepping stone towards a big club.

Several players have already joined Tyneside from abroad including the likes of Cathal Heffernan from AC Milan and Leo Sahar from Wolves who were signed in the summer.

Newcastle can look forward to a much brighter future and they will hopefully start to climb that list in the very near future.