The Lancashire outfit have long had a big reputation for developing players, but how on earth do they do it?!

When England’s Lionesses lined up in the 2023 Women’s World Cup final, they did so with a midfield trio that had all come through at the same club. Keira Walsh, Georgia Stanway and Ella Toone had all been team-mates at Manchester City, yes, but before moving to one of the country’s powerhouses, all three spent a significant period of their youth with Blackburn Rovers.

Despite playing in the third tier of women’s football throughout the 2010s, Blackburn produced a number of players that caught the eye of England’s youth set-up, with Walsh, Stanway and Toone winning their first caps for the Young Lionesses while at the club.

“It was amazing. I made some best friends for life there. It's where I really enjoyed playing football and probably where I found my love for it,” Walsh said of Rovers earlier this summer, speaking on during that historic World Cup.

“[Blackburn] instilled the right way for me to play football, getting the ball down, passing and I think it's kind of got me to where I am now, learning that from such a young age, so I appreciate it. I wouldn't be sat here playing for Barcelona and England if it wasn't for you lot at the academy.”

That emphasis on developing young talent hasn’t gone away in the years since those big names moved on, either. Five players in Blackburn’s current first-team squad have come through the club’s youth system and they’ve all played their part in a fast start to the new Women’s Championship season, Rovers moving up to the second tier back in 2019.

After winning four of their opening five games of the season, Blackburn’s productive youth system is not only at the heart of England’s recent successes, it’s also a big reason why the club has entered the conversation for promotion to the Women’s Super League. So how do they continue to produce talent after talent?

GettyGetting a head start

When Walsh joined Blackburn back in 2008, the club was unrivalled in the area. At the time, Man City’s first team were yet to assert themselves at the top of the women’s game and while Manchester United had an excellent academy set-up, the Red Devils had disbanded their senior team in 2005. Blackburn was the place to be.

“We set up a centre of excellence early doors,” Nick Jackson-Cooney, who coached Walsh during her junior years, explained on . “We were one of the early ones within Lancashire and the north-west. We were very professional in what we did and players started to see that. We started to get a nucleus of players coming in and I think we just built up a reputation early on.

“We did attract a lot of good players – Georgia coming from Barrow, Keira coming from Rochdale – but they were coming from all over to come to Blackburn, which helped me because I had an outstanding team! In the five years that I was with Keira, I think we only lost one or maybe two games, which was unbelievable. We were always the team to beat, so it was really good.”

“Back in the day when I was younger, it was either the Manchester FA or Blackburn, and that was it really,” Millie Chandarana, who progressed into Blackburn’s first team around the same time as Walsh, tells GOAL. “I know there were teams like Cumbria, and Liverpool and Everton were too far, but they were the only teams. There wasn't any United, there wasn't City. I think Blackburn was the only real club back then for girls to get through the elite pathway.”

Nick Birchall spent nine years working for the Lancashire FA, which Blackburn falls under, before joining the club last September as academy manager. Leading club development for the county for almost a decade, he was well-placed to see the excellent job Blackburn were doing.

“In Lancashire, they were the top women's club affiliated to the County FA. They were kind of the pinnacle that we were trying to feed girls into, from the grassroots side of it,” he recalls, speaking to GOAL.

But with girls and women coming from across the country to join the club, Blackburn were not just a top club because of a lack of intense competition in the area, as the fantastic things that Rovers were doing and their head start on others in the north-west would allow them to build up a seriously good reputation.

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That unique selling point of having a productive youth set-up that also had a clear route through to a top-level senior team caught the eye in the area. Chandarana, for example, swapped United for Blackburn as a young girl, and she says that pathway was on her mind when she did so.

“A big thing was that they had a women's team at that point, whereas United didn't, so with United, you didn't really know where you were going,” she explains. “But with Blackburn, they at least had that women's team that had been established for a long time.

“It was easier to see [that pathway] back then through Blackburn than it was United, definitely. Even teams like City, it was easier to see a pathway with Blackburn. Blackburn was the best option back then.”

It’s a reputation that the club would only develop over time. Emma Taylor, seven years Chandarana’s junior, arrived at the age of nine, and all of Walsh, Stanway and Toone would progress from the youth set-up to the first team during her first six-year stint in blue and white.

“Having someone to look up to when you're that young, because they were a few years above me, looking at them and where they can get to just shows that with hard work and being at a good club, you can get to wherever you want to be at,” Taylor tells GOAL.

“Blackburn is one of the best clubs to do it, really. As you've seen with the other people coming through the academy, it's a really good place to be development-wise and you could see the pathway. Even at under-nines, you could see it going up through each age group.”

Blackburn dropped out of the top-flight in 2011 and spent eight years playing in the third tier, but that youth set-up remained first class. Now in the Women’s Championship, a promotion achieved four years ago has only enhanced the attractiveness of joining this club as a young player.

“We've seen a big influx of overseas players into the WSL. It's been big. Here, I think we can very clearly show a clear pathway from beginning in an emerging talent centre at a very young age, all the way through up to the first team. It's a very clear progression,” Ellis Clark, Rovers’ general manager, explains when GOAL asks what sets this club apart in a development sense.

“We've had a few of our U21s make appearances for the first team this season. The men's team do that unbelievably well. The men's academy path into the first team and the talent that is produced is unreal, so we want to follow suit in that and it's more than possible. I think having that pathway and that clear progression allows people to see, 'Yes, I can do that, I can be that and I can do it at Blackburn because people have done it before me'.”

GettySecrets to success

So, why are Blackburn so good at producing young players? Their reputation certainly helps get players through the door. The route through to the first team does, too. Toone, for example, spent six years with Manchester United’s youth sides before making her senior breakthrough at Blackburn in a four-year spell. But when the players get to this club, what is it that allows them to flourish?

“I think it is always a good environment,” Taylor, who returned to Blackburn in the summer after time in the youth set-ups of Liverpool and United, says. “That's something I've had from when I was younger and this year it's really good as well. It's always quite close, the staff are really close to the players and if you have a good relationship with everyone, it's just easy to work together on the pitch.”

Birchall agrees. A year into his role as academy manager, he believes “good communication”, especially between the staff and the players, is a big reason for the success.

“That's one thing I've tried to build on since I've come in. It's to communicate more with the parents and players and give them the longer-term vision of where we see them as a player and how they're doing,” he explains. “Academy football does get quite a bad reputation in general, in terms of players getting released and being very cut-throat. But what we're trying to do is make sure that there are opportunities for players and that they can see where they fit within our plans longer-term, not just from one year to the next.

“I think that's the biggest challenge in girls’ academy football at the moment, that you can only offer them a one-year registration, whereas in the boys’ game, you can give them three or four years of stability. It would be great to do that and then you can have an individual plan for that player over a longer period of time.”

Despite the challenges, Birchall and his staff have been thorough and detailed with their visions for the players and had “really positive feedback” in doing so. “It feels like everything is more switched on, it feels like everything is more organised and I think they feel more part of the club,” he says, asked about the response to this approach.

It’s no wonder that over 600 girls applied for trials at Blackburn this past summer, then. This is a club that has had a top reputation for a long time – but it is not standing still. It’s constantly looking to build on that.

Empathic environment

When GOAL asks Chandarana what the environment was like when she progressed into Blackburn’s senior team as a 17-year-old, she pauses. “I feel like it was intimidating back then,” she admits. “I think that now, it's not an intimidating environment as such. It's more of that high-performance environment. Everybody's got a job to do to get them to where we're going to end up. You know what I mean?

“Even the young players coming through, they've all got a job to do and if they're not doing it, people are going to tell them. And if others are not, no matter how old you are, if you're not doing something, you're going to get told that you're not doing it.”

Something that makes it easier for Blackburn to have this type of environment, one that is welcoming but holds everyone accountable, comes from the make-up of the squad. Rovers have one of the youngest groups in the league and, with that, they have a lot of players who have experience of progressing into a first team and what it feels like to do that as a teenager. “When people are coming up, you know exactly where they're at and kind of what they're looking to achieve in the year,” Taylor explains.

“You see a lot of people passing [their experience] on,” Clark, who became general manager back in February, adds. “It’s been really interesting to see all the players that step up to that as well.”

Clark picks out Tyler Toland, the 22-year-old Ireland international who joined the club in the summer, as a good example. Toland signed for Man City four years ago after excelling in her homeland and has had experiences in Scotland and Spain, as well as being capped at senior level. Despite her age, she can really help the younger players, and Clark says she’s been great for Jemima Dahou, the 18-year-old dual-registered from Man City.

Blackburn have tapped into the experiences of this group, too. During the summer, the club did sessions with the first team on how they felt as a youngster coming into a senior environment and they’ve used that feedback to try and improve Rovers’ pathway. The U21s making that step up have benefitted massively from this attention to detail.

“They've felt like they've been welcome and they've felt like they've been part of the group,” Birchall says. “We know it can be daunting if you're only 16 or 17 going into a women's environment when you're used to playing in your own age group. I think it's good that we've got a group that understands that and is really supportive when the players move up.”