The part Manchester City got right: Build your own academy
Opinion | Future of Talent and Leadership Week in Focus
Advertising and media want finished talent but won’t pay to develop it. A missed opportunity, but change is happening, writes Omar Oakes.
Last week I was abducted by aliens. Nothing major, just a routine interrogation.
“You’re a journalist, aren’t you? What’s happening on your planet? What’s the biggest news story on Earth?” they demanded.
“Well,” I gulped. “There’s this Premier League football club called Manchester City. An independent commission has just found it guilty of breaking financial rules, including ‘sham’ contracts with commercial partners. They say they’ll appeal. It’s dominating the news. Also, Bill Nighy apparently has a podcast, and it’s all anyone wants to talk about.”
“Huh?” one of the little green men looked confused. “How have you not heard of Ill-Advised with Bill Nighy? And anyway, what’s wrong with this ‘Man City’ spending Earth money to get the best people? Isn’t that what you people call capitalism?”
As I was teleported back across the galaxy, I realised the aliens were only half right. Man City did spend fortunes buying the best people, but it also built them:
City has a best-in-class academy that produced Phil Foden, Nico O’Reilly and Cole Palmer, plus plenty who never became stars but were sold for serious money.
City could afford to do both because it’s owned by a cash-rich petro-state: Abu Dhabi. Most businesses don’t have that luxury.
So media, and increasingly advertising, is settling for the half that looks safe: buying ready-made talent.
Media’s Man City is the BBC
We’re all supposed to hate the BBC for the same reasons everyone hates Man City.
They are now both hulking Manchester-based institutions, propped up by public money and insulated from the normal commercial risks our bosses or we worry about.
But look at the outcomes. Like City, the BBC develops an enormous amount of talent that the rest of the market lives off. Chris Evans, Chris Moyles and Jordan North all made their names on BBC Radio, and now lead commercial radio breakfasts. Maya Jama went from Radio 1 to fronting Love Island. I’m old enough to remember when Ant & Dec were plain-old PJ & Duncan on CBBC’s Byker Grove.
Commercial media doesn’t pay transfer fees. It waits until the talent is fully formed on the BBC, then offers more money.
Off-air, it’s become the same story, just more diffuse. Advertising and media never needed formal academies, because agencies, advertisers and media owners hired people cheaply early in their careers and developed them into the managers of tomorrow. For sellers, the whole industry was the BBC.
Training happened while people worked, so it was never a line item. Which is probably why it was so hard to notice when it started to disappear.
The new academies are the platforms
Now both kinds of academy are shutting.
The BBC has to find £500m of savings over three years. From January 2027, 90 posts in BBC Local are at risk, 18 Saturday breakfast shows will be replaced by all-England programming and Sunday breakfasts will fall from 14 to six. Local radio and regional TV are where many presenters and producers first learn their trade.
Director-general and ex-Google exec Matt Brittin has been open with staff that popular shows will have to go. And when Laura Kuenssberg asked whether he would sign off an AI-made and AI-presented programme, he said: “I would do, within guardrails.”
Yikes. But don’t blame AI. Off-air, the implicit academy was being dismantled long before the chatbot craze. UK employers now invest 29% less per employee on training in real terms than in 2011.
So where does talent come from now? At MIPCOM last year, one company dominated every conversation: YouTube. Producers increasingly see it as the only affordable way to get a show off the ground. Make it cheaply, build a following, and hope a Banijay or Netflix picks it up.
So YouTube, TikTok and Instagram have become media’s talent academies. The crucial differences are that talent pays for its own development, on property it doesn’t own, and buyers show up only once the work is proven.
That’s the pattern in both senses of the word “talent”: proof before pay.
Whether they are the people bringing in the audiences or the ad revenue, the industry has become so risk-averse that it only wants to recruit people who are fully formed.
On the sales and strategy side, it’s worse than expensive – it’s impossible. Nobody has five years’ experience selling to AI buying agents, and this week Amazon merged its ads console and DSP into “The Amazon Ads Agent”.
You can’t buy proof that doesn’t exist yet. You have to fund the people who might create it.
Development is the business model
It’s actually more reckless to rely on buying talent. Finished talent is expensive, and for the jobs that matter next, it doesn’t exist.
Which makes development the scarce thing. And scarcity is an opportunity. Capitalism, as my (definitely not made up) alien friend would say.
Fair objection: you’re not Abu Dhabi. But look at what others are actually paying for, and these aren’t sovereign budgets.
Last week The Guardian announced 40 roles on 18-month contracts to train journalists as content creators, with at least 20% of their time set aside for training. Goalhanger, the company behind The Rest Is…, runs a three-month incubator for digital creators, offering up to £10,000 in production funding and a first-look development deal. For years, Global has sponsored the Global Academy, a West London school where 14 to 19-year-olds run their own radio station and TV channel.
Don’t mistake this for charity; it’s investment in the scarcest thing in media. You don’t need Abu Dhabi’s money, but you do need the nerve to pay for people before they’re proven.
Within the next 12-24 months, I expect this penny to drop harder. The media owners that build their own academies, for sellers as well as on-air talent, will own a supply everyone else wants.
The rest will be price-takers, paying top whack for finished talent that leaves the moment someone offers more.
Be more Man City
So stop free-riding off the state-backed giants and be an actual capitalist.
My question for any commercial director: who in your business is responsible for making someone good, and what’s their budget?
If the answer is no one, you’re not a talent business. You’re a buying club.
And sooner or later, someone is going to start charging you transfer fees.
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.