When the Scottish FA met the country’s top clubs in St Andrews last month to press the case for fielding young players in the first team, Nordsjaelland would have been a fitting example to put in front of them. The Danish club from the small town of Farum in the north east of Denmark is preparing to face Heart of Midlothian at Tynecastle in the Conference League, and it arrives as one of European football’s most productive developers of young talent.
The numbers behind that reputation are striking for a club with an average attendance of about 5,000. Between 2015 and 2024, Nordsjaelland made a profit of more than £170m on player sales, one of the highest figures in Europe. This summer they sold midfielder Caleb Yirenkyi to Coventry City for a club-record fee of 27m euros (£23m) — a player their sporting director, Alexander Riget, describes as the club’s best last season.
What separates Nordsjaelland is a willingness to put teenagers on the pitch and let them develop through their mistakes. A Uefa report last season found that 39% of the club’s total minutes were played by teenagers, the highest share in Europe, against an average of just 4% in the Scottish Premiership. The approach has not come at the cost of results: it produced a third-place finish in the Danish Superliga and European qualification, six players under the age of 21 featured in the Conference League play-off win over Swiss side St Gallen, and the club have finished in the top half of the league in nine of the last 10 seasons. Over the decade in which the youth strategy accelerated, their biggest outlay on a player was this summer’s 3m euros (£2.5m) for striker Alexander Lind.
Riget argues the club has little choice but to rely on youth if it wants to compete with bigger Danish names such as FC Copenhagen and Brondby. “Our best players, normally, are our young players between 18, 19, 20, because they start here, and then they are sold,” he said. “A player like Caleb Yirenkyi, sold to the Premier League, would be an example. He was our best player last season. So if we want to achieve something, it should be with talent who is too good to be in Danish football, basically. That’s the idea.” He also pushed back on the assumption that youth equals instability. “There’s always a dialogue about young players making mistakes. Sometimes you can see it from a different perspective – that young players often don’t have a lot of bad experiences. So they are more brave when they play. I don’t think necessarily that young players are making mistakes, and older ones are not. That’s not how we see it.”
The strategy rests on unusual levels of academy investment. Nordsjaelland spend about 5.5m euros (£4.6m) on their academy against 10m euros (£8.4m) on the first-team squad, a ratio very different from most clubs, with 32 young players living on the club’s campus as they are developed both as adults and as footballers. The template began 15 years ago and the money goes into facilities and coaching. “You need to be willing to invest,” Riget said. “But the problem is often you get the result after seven, eight, 10 years. So having that patience and ownership is crucial. We have been lucky we have had three different owners during the last 15 years, and all of them have bought into that way of thinking. It’s not normal in football where patience is often a problem.”
A central part of the model is access to West African talent, which Riget says has helped raise the level of the club’s Scandinavian teenagers. Nordsjaelland were bought in 2015 by the Right to Dream Academy, a network of football schools founded in Ghana in 1999 by former Manchester United scout Tom Vernon, who remains the club’s chairman. That link created a pipeline to players in Ghana in particular, mutually beneficial because it offers a route into European football while allowing the club to profit from later sales. Yirenkyi is one of several Ghanaian players to have come through Right to Dream and been sold in multi-million pound deals after first playing for Nordsjaelland, along with Tottenham Hotspur’s Mohammed Kudus, Lyon’s Ernest Nuamah, Brighton’s Ibrahim Osman and Kamaldeen Sulemana of Atalanta. Players at the Africa-based academies are not obliged to sign for Nordsjaelland but often choose to because of the club’s record of giving first-team minutes. “Two or three years ago, we opened the academy in Cairo,” Riget said. “In the Cairo and Giza area there are close to 30 million people and there is no real academy structure. There is so much potential still in Africa for many more clubs. Of course, the awareness of the market and the prices in terms of signing or buying players from clubs in Africa have increased, but there is still a lot of potential also for clubs in Scotland, for sure.”
The model is not exclusively African. Nordsjaelland have helped forge the careers of Denmark internationals including the Brentford pair Mathias Jensen and Mikkel Damsgaard, while Norway winger Andreas Schjelderup, now of Benfica, and Borussia Dortmund’s Sweden left-back Daniel Svensson were recruited from elsewhere in Scandinavia into the academy. Riget’s summary of the roughly £170m profit from player trading is that it is “more or less half west African players and half Scandinavian players”.
For a Scottish club considering a change of approach, there are lessons to take and limits to acknowledge. Dismissing the idea that young players cost points, and maintaining a long-term commitment to the strategy, are central to what Nordsjaelland do, but the Right to Dream connection and the sheer scale of the club’s investment cannot simply be transplanted elsewhere. Riget’s advice is to start somewhere regardless. “The most important thing is you have a consistent ownership bringing calmness down to the organisation, and then you stick to the strategy when things become difficult,” he said. “The other thing is that instead of the coach deciding how to play, the club have a club model – that’s how we are training, that’s how we are playing. Because then it’s much easier for the players when they make the transition into the first-team squad that they are used to playing in that way. Then things are just going faster at first-team level.”