Player Comparison: Class of ’92 vs West Ham’s Academy of Football

The Class of ’92 are generally regarded as the greatest batch of youth players to come through together — certainly of late. Now, this does seem a little like recency bias, as I think the Celtic team that formed the first British European Cup winners would also like a mention (check out the Lisbon Lions). But the branding is strong for the Man Utd group — and rightly so, they achieved plenty……. however, a few hundred miles south and a few years later, there was a contender.

In the red corner, Manchester United’s Class of ’92 — Giggs, Beckham, Scholes, the Neville brothers, Nicky Butt. Six lads from the same youth team who grew up, won the lot together, and became a documentary. In the claret-and-blue corner, West Ham’s Academy of Football from the other end of the same decade: Rio Ferdinand, Michael Carrick, Joe Cole, Frank Lampard Jr, Jermain Defoe and Glen Johnson. Six more who came through Tony Carr’s conveyor belt, then had to leave Upton Park to become the players they were going to be.

One group stayed. One group scattered. Both filled England squads for a decade. So who actually produced the better six?

The contenders

United’s six were a team. They won the FA Youth Cup in 1992, were in and around the first team by the mid-90s, and in 1999 four of them started the Champions League final (Giggs, Beckham, G Neville, Butt) with Scholes suspended and Phil Neville on the bench. They collected the same medals, in the same dressing room, under the same manager.

West Ham’s six were a production line. Lampard debuted in 1995, Rio a year later, Carrick, Cole, Johnson and Defoe followed. None of them won a Premier League title at West Ham, because West Ham weren’t winning Premier League titles and I fear never will. The education was excellent. The finishing school was somewhere else — Chelsea, Leeds, Spurs, then Old Trafford for two of them.

Ferdinand and Carrick ended up collecting later United medals alongside Giggs, Scholes and Gary Neville. The two groups aren’t sealed boxes. For this piece they still count as West Ham graduates.

Rules

Major trophies here means league titles, FA Cups, League Cups, Champions League, Europa League, and the Club World Cup / Intercontinental Cup. No Community Shields. No (glorious) Intertoto Cups. Beckham’s La Liga, Ligue 1 and two MLS Cups count as other league titles. Defoe’s Scottish Premiership with Rangers does too.

International is senior caps and goals. Giggs is Wales; everyone else is England. Clean sheets are Premier League only, and only for the players who were actually defenders. Phil Neville spent half his career in midfield, so we’re not pretending he’s a centre-back.

These are career medals, not “what they won as a six on the same pitch”. United’s numbers are fat because the same medals kept going to the same lads.

What they won

That’s not close. Fifty Premier League titles to eighteen. Nine European cups to four. Giggs alone has more league titles than the entire West Ham six put together. Before anyone shouts “they just stood next to Schmeichel and Keane”: yes. Fair point, and that’s what happens when a youth team walks into an already successful team instead of a relegation scrap. And perhaps that’s why they stayed with the club for many more years than the Hammers.

The West Ham counter is the obvious one. Those medals were won at Chelsea, United, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Spurs and Rangers — not at the club that produced them. Lampard’s 2005 Ballon d’Or second place, Rio’s 2008 Champions League, Carrick’s haul: all of it after they left. United’s six won as United’s six. West Ham’s six won as other people’s six.

If the question is “who had the better career?”, trophies smash it towards Old Trafford. If the question is “which academy produced the talent?”, you have to look at the players, not the pots they inherited.

International

Caps are the one place West Ham can land a punch — not on volume, on goals.

United 428–388 on caps, and that’s with Giggs playing for a Wales side that couldn’t qualify for a World Cup while he was in it. Strip him out and England caps are 364 vs 388. West Ham’s six were, as an England production line, slightly busier.

Goals aren’t close. Lampard 29, Defoe 20, Cole 10 — that’s a proper international attacking return. Beckham 17 and Scholes 14 is the United answer, and Scholes walked away from England in 2004 because the whole Lampard– Gerrard–Scholes puzzle never got solved. Neither group won a thing with their country. Euro 2004, 2006, 2010: plenty of these lads in the same dressing room, but unfortunately for England fans, it was the same story every time.

If you’re picking an England XI from the twelve (with a guest from Wales), you’re taking Beckham, Scholes, Gary Neville, Giggs, Rio and Lampard without thinking. Joe Cole behind Defoe — but that means no place for Carrick, who was actually criminally overlooked for England. Phil and Johnson are squad players in that team. That’s a pretty strong start to a team.

Clean sheets

Four defenders between the two groups, plus Phil who was a defender when United needed a defender and a midfielder when they didn’t.

Rio is third on the all-time Premier League defender list, behind only Terry and Carragher. Gary Neville is tied with Ashley Cole in fifth/sixth. Johnson is 16th, which is better than he is perhaps given credit for — spells with Chelsea and Liverpool offset against West Ham, Portsmouth and Stoke. Rate-wise Rio and Gary are basically the same: a clean sheet every 2.7 games, both spending their peaks in title-winning back lines.

Phil Neville’s 505 Premier League games are the most of any defender in this twelve. He doesn’t make the all-time clean-sheet table because a chunk of those games were in midfield, for United and then for Moyes’ Everton. Useful? Hugely. A clean-sheet specialist? That’s Gary and Rio.

Who was actually world class?

This is the bit that isn’t a spreadsheet. World class meaning: you’d have them in a Champions League final against anyone, in their prime, and not feel under-gunned.

Class of ’92. Scholes — yes. Zidane, Iniesta, Xavi, all loved him, and the career backs it up: 11 titles, two European Cups, the pass that made United’s midfield look clever. Beckham — yes, for a window. 1998 to about 2003 he was one of the two or three most famous footballers alive and, more usefully, one of the best crossers and set-piece players there’s been. Ballon d’Or runner-up in 1999. Giggs — longevity that’s never been touched in England, a treble, another European Cup at 34, and a first ten years as a proper winger who terrified full-backs. Was he ever the best left-sider in the world in a given season? Debatable. Was he world class? In the 90s, yes. Gary Neville — England’s right-back for a decade, eight titles, two European Cups. Best English full-back of the Premier League’s first twenty years. World class for a stretch; not a Ballon d’Or name. Phil Neville and Nicky Butt — outstanding professionals in a great team. Not world class. If they came through at a mid-table club they are very good Premier League players. At United they look like legends by association, which is both slightly unfair on them and slightly true.

Call it three world-class players, one international-class full-back, two very good squad men.

West Ham six. Lampard — yes, and the peak is as high as anyone in this twelve. FWA Footballer of the Year, Ballon d’Or runner-up in 2005, 29 England goals, a Champions League, three titles. Rio — yes. FIFPro World XI, the best English centre-back of his generation, the 2008 pairing with Vidić that still gets used as a measuring stick. Carrick — no, not quite, and that’s not an insult. He was the midfielder other midfielders liked, a serial trophy winner, chronically under-capped. World class is a different sentence. Joe Cole — 18 months at Chelsea where he looked like it, PFA Team of the Year, the 2006 World Cup. Then injuries cut him short. Defoe — 162 Premier League goals, 20 for England, never a title, never a European cup. A brilliant Premier League striker. Not world class. Johnson — England’s right-back after Gary Neville, which is a good career. Not world class.

Call it two world-class players, one who had a spell, three who were very good Premier League footballers.

On peak names, United still lead 3–2. On the drop-off after the names, West Ham’s tail is more talented — Defoe’s scoring record beats anything Butt or Phil put up — but the head of United’s list is Scholes and Beckham. That’s a problem for the claret-and-blue case.

The case for United

They won together. That’s the thing the trophy table is actually saying. You can scatter West Ham’s six across five clubs and add up the medals; you cannot rebuild the 1999 dressing room without United’s six. A youth team that becomes the spine of a treble winner is a once-in-a-generation accident. Scholes in the centre of a midfield, Beckham on the right, Giggs on the left, Gary Neville behind Beckham — that’s four world-or-near world-class players who already knew each other’s runs from The Cliff.

They also kept producing after the others left. Giggs and Scholes were still starting Premier League title teams in 2013. Gary Neville was still the right-back in 2009. The West Ham six were done as a peer group the moment Lampard signed for Chelsea in 2001.

The case for West Ham

They did it without a safety net. No Ferguson, no Schmeichel, no Cantona, no Keane, no Premier League as a birthright. Lampard had to drag himself out from under his dad’s name and then out of Upton Park. Rio went to Leeds, got labelled expensive, went to United, got labelled expensive again, then became the defender. Defoe scored 162 Premier League goals for clubs that weren’t winning the league. That’s a different kind of career to collecting a medal every May because the youth team happened to be at the right club.

And if you’re brutally honest about the bottom two in each six, West Ham win it. Defoe and Johnson vs Phil Neville and Butt: you’d take the striker with 162 league goals and the full-back with 54 England caps. United’s greatness is the top four. West Ham’s argument is that the whole six could play in a title race, just not the same title race.

International goals 63–43 is theirs too. England caps, theirs. Clean sheets, Rio puts them top.

Since then

An academy isn’t a one-off crop. What have they done for us lately?

United after ’92: Wes Brown, John O’Shea, Darren Fletcher, Jonny Evans, Danny Welbeck, Jesse Lingard, Marcus Rashford, Scott McTominay, Mason Greenwood, Kobbie Mainoo, Robbie Savage and Keith Gillespie. That’s a decent list. It’s also a list with some stand-out performers — but not the kind of medals that their predecessors racked up. Kudos to McTominay for winning Serie A and Rashford for La Liga. Pogba left as a kid and came back as someone else’s product. The Class of ’92 was not the start of a conveyor belt. It was the peak of one.

West Ham after that six: Mark Noble — the one who stayed, which is its own category — Anton Ferdinand, James Tomkins, Jack Collison, Junior Stanislas, then a quiet spell, then Declan Rice. Rice is the only graduate since Lampard/Rio you’d put in a world-class conversation, and he did the traditional West Ham thing: became the player, then left. Ben Johnson, Grady Diangana, Freddie Potts, Josh Cullen, Reece Oxford, the current kids (Golambeckis, Orford, Scarles) are the next roll of the dice. The pattern hasn’t changed. They can find them. They can’t keep the best ones. John Terry was with the club until 14 — though Rice was at Chelsea until the same age, so we’ll call it one from those two.

If you’re scoring the academies as institutions rather than as these two specific sixes, United have had more first-team graduates in the Premier League era and one later star in Rashford. West Ham have Rice, which is a hell of a later star, and a culture of selling. Different businesses.

So?

Trophies: United, and it’s not a debate. International goals: West Ham. Clean sheets: Rio, then Gary. World-class names: United 3–2. Careers from the bottom of each six: West Ham. The romantic version: United, because they actually were a team.

You can prefer Lampard’s 2005 to anyone in the Class of ’92 and you wouldn’t be drunk. You can prefer Rio to Gary Neville as the defender you’d build around.

West Ham produced the better striker, the better centre-back, and the better goalscoring midfielder. United produced the better team. In a comparison of six vs six, the team wins.

Winner: Class of ’92

What else?

It’d be ignorant to forget what went before these two batches of players — and here West Ham put up another decent fight to their larger rivals. Largely due to the World Cup winning trio:

• Bobby Moore — captain, and two assists in the final from centre-back.
• Geoff Hurst — scored the winner in the quarter-finals and a hat-trick in the final (no pens — I’m looking at you, Mbappé).
• Martin Peters — scored the other goal in the final.

Next to those three, West Ham’s 1964 FA Cup and 1965 European Cup Winners’ Cup teams were largely home grown. They were followed soon after by the legendary Trevor Brooking, whose loyalty to West Ham surely cost him further honours, but made him even more loved. Frank Lampard Snr and Alvin Martin followed soon after, as well as a surprise name — Ray Houghton — who also began his professional career there. Albeit briefly — a bit like Souness at Spurs.

Later on there were two British transfer records — Paul Ince and Tony Cottee, and many more to have done well (Paul Allen, Steve Potts, Alan Dickens and so on).

Man Utd didn’t do too badly. The Busby Babes, in particular Bobby Charlton and Duncan Edwards, could have made this a foregone conclusion and might have ruled football for years, but fate sadly had other ideas. Charlton went on to greatness, George Best joined him, Nobby Stiles also won the World Cup in 1966. Later on there was Sammy McIlroy, Mark Hughes, Norman Whiteside.

It’s fair to say that these are two of the best in England’s history at producing players.

Honours from club career records (league titles, FA Cup, League Cup, Champions League, Europa League, Club World Cup / Intercontinental Cup; plus Beckham’s La Liga, Ligue 1 and MLS Cups, and Defoe’s Scottish Premiership). Caps from national-team records. Premier League clean sheets from StatMuse defender rankings. Community Shields and Intertoto Cups left out on purpose.