A meaningful number of established senior goalscorers were released by an academy in their teens. The pattern is consistent enough to say something about how selection decisions are made.
Release decisions are made at the worst possible age
Most academies make their heaviest cuts in the mid teens, which is exactly when growth rates diverge most sharply between individuals.
A player mid-growth-spurt is temporarily worse than he was: his coordination is disrupted, his balance is off, and his sprint speed can regress for months.
Judging him in that window measures a temporary state, and the boy who happens to be assessed six months later gets a much more flattering reading.
Coaches assess the player in front of them
Assessing potential means predicting a body and a mind that do not yet exist, and human judgement is far better at describing the present than forecasting the future.
So reports fill with what is observable now, and the observable now is dominated by size, speed and current output.
The qualities that predict a senior striker, such as movement in tight areas and the willingness to keep making runs unrewarded, are harder to see and harder to write down.
Rejection filters for a different quality
A released teenager who continues in non-league or lower-division football is playing against grown men, usually while working or studying, with nobody managing his load.
The ones who come through that route arrive with a durability and a decision-making speed the academy environment does not generate.
They have also had to keep going without the reassurance of being told they were talented, which is a genuine filter.
Why the academy route still dominates
None of this means academies are wrong more often than they are right. They produce the overwhelming majority of senior professionals.
The point is narrower: the error is asymmetric. A wrongly retained player costs a place, while a wrongly released one is invisible unless he succeeds elsewhere.
Clubs only ever see their false negatives when those players turn up scoring against them years later.
What clubs have changed
Several clubs now track released players formally, keeping contact and a route back, which is an admission that the original decision was uncertain.
Recruitment departments also increasingly scout lower divisions for forwards in their early twenties rather than assuming the pool was settled at sixteen.
The strikers arriving that way are cheaper, more experienced and easier to assess, because they have already been tested against senior defending.