What Scotland could learn from Nordsjaelland’s youth model

When the Scottish FA met leading clubs at St Andrews last month to promote the benefits of fielding youngsters in the first team, Danish side Nordsjaelland was put forward as an example. The club from Farum has built a reputation for selecting teenagers regularly and for selling developed players for significant fees.

Nordsjaelland, from the small north-east Danish town of Farum, average about 5,000 in attendance yet have become a recognised hub for youth development. Over the past decade they have consistently fielded some of the youngest sides in European football by regularly picking teenagers. On the pitch their results have been steady but off it the club has generated large transfer income: from 2015 to 2024 Nordsjaelland made a profit of more than £170m on player sales and this summer sold midfielder Caleb Yirenkyi to Coventry City for a club record fee of 27m euros (£23m). BBC Sport Scotland examined what Scotland could learn from the Danish club amid concerns over youth development at home.

The club’s stated philosophy is to give teenagers first-team opportunities so they can develop and accept making mistakes as part of that process. A Uefa report last season found 39% of Nordsjaelland’s total minutes were played by teenagers, the highest proportion in Europe; by comparison the Scottish Premiership’s average minute share for teenagers was 4% last term. That approach delivered a third-place finish in the Danish Superliga to qualify for Europe, and this season Nordsjaelland fielded six players under the age of 21 in their Conference League play-off victory against Swiss side St Gallen. Since the club’s youth strategy accelerated they have finished in the top half of the league in nine out of 10 seasons.

The club’s biggest purchase in the last decade came this summer with striker Alexander Lind for 3m euros (£2.5m), yet Nordsjaelland’s sporting director Alexander Riget says they must prioritise youth because they cannot match older players financially. "Our best players, normally, are our young players between 18, 19, 20, because they start here, and then they are sold," Riget told BBC Scotland. "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. "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 club backs the policy with sustained academy spending, allocating about 5.5m euros (£4.6m) to the academy compared with 10m euros (£8.4m) on the first team. Nordsjaelland house 32 young players at their campus and direct investment into facilities and coaching, a model their executives say began around 15 years ago. "You need to be willing to invest," Riget says. "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 key enabler of the club’s access to talent has been its link to the Right to Dream Academy, which bought Nordsjaelland in 2015 and was founded in Ghana by Tom Vernon in 1999; Vernon remains the club’s chairman. That connection has opened a pipeline to Ghanaian players and other West African talent who have gone on to lucrative moves after first playing for Nordsjaelland. Players who have come through the Right to Dream system and been sold after playing for Nordsjaelland include Caleb Yirenkyi, Tottenham Hotspur’s Mohammed Kudus, Lyon’s Ernest Nuamah, Ibrahim Osman of Brighton, and Kamaldeen Sulemana of Atalanta. "No player at the Africa-based academies have to sign for Nordsjaelland, but often they choose to do so because of their track record of giving players first-team minutes and launching their careers," the club say. "Two or three years ago, we opened the academy in Cairo," Riget says. "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."

Nordsjaelland’s recruitment has also included Scandinavian talent who have progressed to larger clubs and international recognition, with former players including Brentford pair Mathias Jensen and Mikkel Damsgaard. The club recruited Benfica’s Norway winger Andreas Schjelderup and Borussia Dortmund’s Sweden left-back Daniel Svensson from other Scandinavian countries, and Celtic’s Sweden midfielder Benjamin Nygren also came through the system; those players featured at the World Cup this summer. On the mix of recruitment, Riget says: "It's more or less half west African players and half Scandinavian players," referring to the £170m profit from player trading.

Nordsjaelland’s leaders say the model requires patient, consistent ownership and a coherent club-wide playing and training approach rather than leaving system choice solely to coaches. "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," Riget says. "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." Nordsjaelland now prepare to take on Heart of Midlothian at Tynecastle in the Conference League.