Will the PL2 makeover be youth football’s silver bullet?

A little over a decade ago, with the nation still digesting the 4-1 thumping to which the England men’s team had been subjected by Germany in the last 16 of the 2010 World Cup, the domestic game’s decision-makers concluded a major shake-up of men’s youth football across the country was needed.

The resulting Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) represented a radical transformation of what was happening at academy level, all with the long-term development of the youngsters involved in mind.

It effectively professionalised academy football, moving away from the old system of having youth and reserve teams and introducing under-18s and under-23s leagues. The latter was changed back to under-21s last season to more accurately reflect the ages of the players involved and, over time, the EPPP has been modified, tweaked and adapted in other ways.

It has been an undoubted success in improving the talent pool available to the England first-team manager and in helping clubs throughout the pyramid. The benefits, it is argued, trickle from the Premier League right down into League Two, the fourth tier of the domestic game.

This year will see another amendment — the latest attempt to improve the chances of young players breaking into senior teams and raise the bar yet higher. As a structural change it is only relatively minor, but the hope is the ramifications could be significant as clubs seek to bridge the gap between under-21s football and the first-team game.

Premier League 2 (PL2) will now consist of one division holding all 25 teams — instead of two divisions, a top tier of 14 and the other of 11, with promotion and relegation between them — with each playing 20 matches, meaning sides who previously competed in Division One will have six fewer regular-season games and it won’t be the traditional case of all clubs in the league playing all the others home and away.

The 25 clubs will be divided into five pots based on a seeding calculated using their performance over the last three years and play all the other sides in their pot plus either four or five teams from the other four pots to reach 20 games. At the conclusion of the regular season, the top 16 teams will progress to a knockout tournament to decide the champions. For the other nine, their year will be over.

Based on how chess tournaments work, it is known as the “Swiss model” and is the same structure that will be introduced in the Champions League from the start of the 2024-25 season.

The hope is that removing promotion and relegation will enhance the games programme and allow players to develop with no threat of dropping into a lower, weaker division if their team’s results are bad. But the big questions are: 1) will these changes make any meaningful difference?, and 2) why have they been introduced?

“I like the new idea,” says an agent who represents players involved in the competition and, like the other sources contacted for this article, spoke to The Athletic under condition of anonymity to protect relationships. “I just wish they played everyone home and away still. But this is a start — they can review it and see how it works.

“I don’t like the fact the lower placed teams’ season curtails so early, though. It should be as realistic as possible compared to the Premier League or EFL seasons.”

That final point is the key in the eyes of many.

The idea is that under-21s football should offer a similar number of games to the minimum 46 guaranteed to clubs in the EFL’s three divisions.

“In a League One season, you play 46 games in the league, but add in cup matches and the lads at that level are playing 50-plus games a season,” says one person working in academy football. “The reality is most of the kids coming through academies are going to be League One or Two players, so they need to be able to play that many games.

“At first glance, we’re taking potentially six guaranteed games away from them — from 26 to 20 — even if competitions such as the Premier League International Cup (for which the top 12 teams qualify and there are three guaranteed fixtures), the Premier League Cup and the EFL Trophy (another three guaranteed fixtures) still top up the number of games.”

The Premier League International Cup sees England’s top 12 academies face 12 development sides from across continental Europe. This exposes youngsters to teams offering a different style of play and who compete in domestic leagues against clubs’ senior teams, offering a greater challenge and more exposure than the current English programme does. 

“The objective is to…