BirminghamLive went inside Birmingham City’s Category One academy
11:08, 12 Mar 2026Updated 13:54, 13 Mar 2026
Birmingham City’s academy regained Category One status in 2025
“It’s the most exciting project in world football. It really is.”
Mike Rigg closed our conversation in the boardroom at Birmingham City’s academy with what is, in isolation, an outlandish statement when you consider he used to work for Manchester City.
But it’s the comparison with City, who have won an unparalleled eight Premier League titles since Abu Dhabi started to pump cash into Manchester in 2008, that has swayed Rigg to that belief.
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“I was at Manchester City when it was scarily similar to what we’re going through now,” says Rigg, who has been serving as the club’s academy technical director for two years.
“Man City had Platt Lane, Carrington and the stadium. Platt Lane was the academy, Carrington was the first team, and the stadium was where the offices were. We’ve got EPIC, here (Wast Hills, now called the Knighthead Performance Centre) and the stadium.
“We had Jude (Bellingham), Jobe (Bellingham), JJ (Jordan James), they had Sean Wright-Phillips etc. Because I’ve been through both, this project is bigger.
“Man City were in the Premier League at the time, so it was a level above, but they weren’t building a stadium. They were talking about building a training ground. This is a bigger project.”
The project stems around the Sports Quarter and its 62,000-seater stadium, The Powerhouse, that will dominate the city’s skyline.
Proposals are the very definition of world-class and that is what Knighthead Capital, Blues’ ultra-ambitious American owners, are striving for across the board.
The academy, which is headed up by Rigg and Louisa Collis, was the first branch of Blues to arrive at English football’s top table when it was awarded Category One status last year.
“Prior to Knighthead, it’s been a very under-resourced Cat Two club,” Rigg said, starting to explain the academy’s transformation.
“We sat down and had a conversation with our Football League regional manager, Dan Harris – who has been world-class in supporting us. ‘Do you realise what you’re taking on?’
“When we started looking at everything, oh my word. It’s way more detailed than any other first team world I’ve lived in and that’s not surprising because there’s a lot more to it.
“We’re talking pre-academy, six and seven-year-olds, we’re talking about under-21s, education, life skills. The first team is very cut-throat – get ready, get your squad together, win – whereas we’re dealing with 10 teams, we’re dealing with very strict criteria and rules and regulations which don’t apply to senior football.
“My first week, I came here and everybody was sitting in cars and having Zoom meetings. The pitches had never been playable because there had never been any work done on them. The astro-turf is old.
“This was all pre-Knighthead. I remember coming in and they were saying, ‘Do you think we’d be able to buy some new footballs because the footballs have got bits ripped off? They haven’t invested in kit and equipment.’”
The Knighthead Performance Centre, formerly known as Wast Hills, is home to Birmingham City’s academy and women’s teams
Those car-based Zoom meetings were a result of the fire at Wast Hills that happened in March 2023. You can understand why there was plenty of scepticism when Knighthead pledged to build a Category One academy.
Many of the existing staff members were around in 2021, when the club were awarded Category One status only to be stripped of it inside 12 months when the Professional Game Academy Audit Company (PGAAC) checked in and found that the necessary improvements hadn’t been made.
Collis – who is the only woman in the position of academy manager for a men’s team in the country – said: “We know the history of the academy and losing Cat One, so there was additional pressure as well because we wanted to make sure PGAAC, the Premier League and the EFL knew we were really serious.
“We didn’t just want to achieve it by ticking boxes, we wanted to sprint across the line.
“When we said we were going Cat One half the training ground was burnt down, so it was hard for people to visualise it, but you now see the facilities we’ve got and people started to see we were serious.
“I was very mindful of the words I was saying and hopeful that the club would back us and they did. It shifted the culture.”
Around £5million was invested in the facilities at the Knighthead Performance Centre, which serves the academy and the women’s team, and the academy has doubled its workforce to 70 full-time members of staff, with another 90 involved on a part-time basis.
Rigg added: “On top of that there’s all the policies and procedures that we have to put in place which are mind-blowing. The audit is like an Ofsted report. They come in and we have to produce evidence on everything – retained, released, registration, nutrition, sports science, the performance clock, the games programme.
“Cramming all of that into what was effectively an eight to 10 month period was an incredible and ambitious programme.
“The club could have left it two years but when we had the first meeting with PGAAC and the EFL, they said: ‘Listen, you’ve done this and messed it up, if you do it again and play at it, you won’t really get another chance. People won’t take you seriously.’
“So the owners and the club, again, allowed us to go Cat One-plus. We went a little bit more. We reached the standards but we went above.
“You’re audited on rules breaches because in the EFL there’s a whole list of 276 rules and you have to show evidence for all of them. Rules from members of staff to paperwork, and we got one rule breach, and it was one of our part-time members of staff hadn’t done his first aid course.
“PGAAC came in and went, ‘I’ve been doing this for 12 years and I’ve never known any club do that’.
“That was down to really good staff, dedicated people, and unwavering support from the ownership and the board. It was all driven by our academy manager Louisa Collis who pulled all that together.”
It is worth remembering that when Blues jumped to Category One in 2021, the previous owners had outlined plans to close the academy altogether a few days earlier.
They toyed with the idea of implementing a ‘B team’ model, like the one Brentford have, before performing an almighty U-turn.
Dynaeo Martin-Moore, who now captains the under-18s, was one of those players whose dreams were momentarily crushed.
“It was scary,” said Martin-Moore. “I was here from pre-academy and I had built up loads of connections with the staff and players, to be told we were leaving it was like, ‘Well, what do I do now?’
“We still speak about it: ‘What if? Where would we be now?’ With us still being here, we’re almost a bit grateful. New owners have come in and fixed it. They have bettered everything for us.”
The same can be said for staff members. Under-18s boss Martyn Olorenshaw is one of the longest-serving coaches in the club’s academy and had to manage the crisis.
“There was a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “We thought we were out of a job. It was a difficult 24 hours because you had to make lots of phone calls to parents to try and reassure them, sympathise with them and at the same time you’re thinking, ‘What happens with us now?’”
Olorenshaw and Martin-Moore are living in a different world to what they were back then. They want for nothing in a facility that includes improved pitches and state-of-the-art equipment, such as the £50,000 Alter G anti-gravity treadmill.
Injured players can use the anti-gravity treadmill to maintain cardiovascular fitness without weight-bearing
Knighthead hope the pay-off will be first team players.
The academy that harvested Champions League winner Jude Bellingham, his brother Jobe, Demarai Gray, Jordan James, Jack Butland and Nathan Redmond hasn’t produced for Chris Davies.
Davies has signed 38 players in the last two years to chase promotions and academy prospects haven’t been afforded the opportunities they once were.
Other than Gray – who returned to the club from Saudi Arabia last summer – Zaid Betteka is the only academy product to play for Blues’ first team this season.
“The first team’s bar has been raised significantly and that means our standards here at the academy have to be raised,” accepts Rigg.
“It could happen next week or in a couple of years. What I do know, from all the discussions I have with the leadership team, the director of football, and the club – I’ve been in enough football clubs where they pay lip service to it, here they don’t. There’s a genuine desire to breed homegrown players.
“But the onus is on us to raise the standards, not for Chris to lower the bar, and that’s really tough.
“This magical pathway doesn’t exist. We’ve just got to make sure our boys are prepared for it and our intention, year on year, is to raise the bar.
“We’re not a community scheme, it’s not a grassroots club, it’s a part of the football club that wants to produce players.”
It is a challenge that Olorenshaw, who has produced his fair share of Championship footballers, is relishing.
The clear style of play – possession-based football that promotes relentless pressing off the ball – has filtered down to the academy.
“It’s a principle-based thing,” says Olorenshaw. “We are able to speak to the first team staff a lot, they’ve been great in terms of sharing things with us. Our head of coaching (Mike Scott) is trying to create a best practices document.
“It’s about trying to embed parts that are really important but whatever we do has to suit the players that we have. It has to suit the 16, 17, 18-year-old lads that I’ve got in my group and brings the best out of them.
“It’s not copy and paste. It’s mirroring the really important principles and behaviours that the first team really value. It’s important we embed that at the professional development phase so that when they go to EPIC the transition is smoother.”
Birmingham City’s academy starlets are constantly reminded of the players who came before them
Another way in which the academy is mirroring the first team is in their use of data.
Blues are a data-driven club now – almost every decision at first team level, be it recruitment or selection, is informed by numbers.
Knighthead make their investments based on cold, hard facts rather than intuition, and they run their football club in the same way.
“I go back over 12 years in data from when I first joined Fulham,” explained Rigg. “It was new to me. I remember travelling around with scouts and we were making multi-million decisions on basically live scouting.
“The world has changed and it’s not going to go back. The process and the structure behind this club, and how player acquisition is managed, from the use of the data and the alignment of ideas to the contribution of the manager, it’s better than any club I’ve ever worked in.
“Better than Man City, better than any of the Premier League clubs I’ve worked at. The whole process behind it is better than any club.
“Because we’re now in Cat One, Opta produces F24 data for us. We get data for under-18 and under-21s games.
“Data doesn’t exist for under-16s and it’s arguable how reliable that data would be if we did have it.
“We’re not just talking about recruitment data. We have wellness data, fitness data – we’ve got a guy called Matt Cook, our head of performance, and he uses data to manage fitness and injuries, their loading.
“Every single professional football club uses data but I think we’ve got one of the smartest operations I’ve been involved in.”
Whilst the academy has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last two years, a different stratosphere awaits at the Sports Quarter.
An inner-city academy will sit within the 135-acre complex overlooked by The Powerhouse and its 12 enormous chimneys.
Ending our 20-minute conversation, Rigg said: “Imagine we’re in the Premier League and the Sports Quarter, as an academy it should put us up there with the world leaders and that’s our ambition.
“Youth development doesn’t happen overnight. We’re now starting to recruit seven-year-old players that may be making their debut in the Sports Quarter by the time they’re 18, 19. The bar is raised and we have to raise our bar.
“Being in the Premier League in a 62,000-seater stadium playing in the Champions League, you get to recruit the best in the world.”
And that is what big, brash Birmingham City are unashamedly aiming to become.
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