The Swiss research center CIES Football Observatory has published a report in which Athletic appears as the first club in the five major European leagues in which its academy players have played the highest percentage of minutes this season. Real Sociedad and Celta are next in terms of the Spanish championship. At the world level, MSK Zilina, from Slovakia, heads this classification in which the red and white entity appears in seventh place.
Lezama, according to the aforementioned study, leads this statistic at the level of the five major European leagues with a percentage of 55.8% of minutes, five points more than the figure for last year (50.9%). Athletic is twelve points ahead of Real (43.9%), second in the ranking with Celta (41.2%), Saint-Étienne (35.6%), Montpellier (34.5%), Olympique de Lyon (33.1%), Mainz (32.9%) and Barcelona (31.7%).
This report reflects that Bilbao is the third club among all the teams in the 27 UEFA European leagues with the highest percentage of minutes played by their youth squads. Lezama is only behind the aforementioned Slovakian team MŠK Žilina (85.5%) and the Ukrainian Dynamo kyiv (62.9%). Envigado, from Colombia, (76.4%), Banfield (66.6%), Lanús (62.6%) and Rosario Central (60.2%), all three from Argentina, are also ahead of Athletic.
The CIES Football Observatory, as the Ibaigane entity itself explains on its official website, follows the UEFA criteria to consider a youth footballer, considering as such those who have played in club teams for at least three seasons between the 15 and 21 years old.
“For this reason, the report includes 15 of the current members of the squad in this ranking, leaving out others who, either because they were youth squads for the club before turning 15, or because they played for agreed clubs, have not played three complete seasons at Athletic Club between the ages of 15 and 21. Thus, footballers who have gone through teams inferior to Lezama such as Lekue, Vesga, Yuri and De Marcos are not among the 15 included in the report, as well as those who do not They have played minutes in LaLiga 2021/22 until 4/19/2022, the date on which the period analyzed in the report ends,” they explain from Lezama.
The 15 players that CIES includes in the list of Athletic academy players with minutes played in LaLiga 2021/22, in this way, are Unai Simón, Iñaki Williams, Muniain, Vencedor, Vivian, Yeray, Sancet, Nico Williams, Zarraga, Nuñez , Villalibre, Agirrezabala, Nico Serrano and Morcillo and Nolaskoain. These last two are currently on loan at Valladolid and Amorebieta, respectively.
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