There’s been a lot of talk over the last few weeks — months, years, really — about Munster’s academy, and it’s particularly relevant right now as we kick into 2026/27 properly.
Why? Well, if we’re talking about Munster’s place in the modern game, we’re not really talking about CEOs or governance reviews — as thrilling as governance reviews are, don’t get me wrong, I, for one, love them — we’re actually talking about players. Sooner or later, everything comes back around to what’s on the field.
In the first article in this series, I spoke about the need to generate “waves” of players coming through to the first team squad, but I didn’t speak about how you achieve that.
A Long Clock
Here’s the uncomfortable bit first: an academy is slow. Really slow. The guideline I’ve been working off — and it squares with what best practice says across the professional game — is that it takes somewhere between five and seven seasons for an academy to start producing most of the players a senior squad needs.
Not some of them. Not a couple of standouts a year who make the highlights reel. Most of them.
That sounds like an absurdly long time until you walk the timeline yourself. A lad gets picked up in the National Talent Squad at 16 or 17. He’s a Year 1 academy player at 19, if he’s lucky and healthy. Three academy years later, he’s on a senior contract at 22 — and even then, a senior contract isn’t the same thing as being a player you’d pick for a Champions Cup game. Most forwards in particular aren’t doing that until 24 or 25.
So when you put money and coaching into the base of the pathway, the return doesn’t show up on the team sheet for the best part of a decade at the extreme end, and five-to-seven seasons at the realistic end. Everything in between is faith, spreadsheets and Munster A games in front of a few hundred people.
You don’t judge an academy on the year it gets the funding. You judge it on the year the first full wave that funding produced is old enough to be judged.
So where’s Munster on that timeline?
The club has more or less told us.
When this season’s academy intake was announced in June, general manager Ian Costello said increased investment in the academy and pathway has been a key strategic priority for the past five years. In that time, by the club’s own count, NTS numbers have doubled, and 19 players have moved from the academy into the senior squad.
Five years. Which puts us, on the guideline above, right at the start of the window where the academy should be producing most of what we need — not at the end of it.
Let’s translate those numbers. We’ve had nineteen graduates in five years is a shade under four a year. This summer alone, Max Clein, Seán Edogbo, Ronan Foxe and Ben O’Connor stepped up, with Michael Foy following in 2027. That’s bang on the average, which is reassuring in one sense.
If you’re promoting four a year and a typical career at the province runs something like eight seasons, the steady state is roughly 30-odd homegrown players in a senior squad of 45 or so. That’s a back-of-the-envelope figure — I actually don’t have an envelope; I’ve worked it out on another Google doc — it assumes nobody leaves early, nobody gets banged out of the game through injury, and every graduate actually becomes a URC level player, at least, rather than a contract that doesn’t get renewed. Gene O’Leary Kareem stepping away from the pro game this summer, ahead of what would have been his third academy year, is a reminder that sometimes, the pipeline leaks.
So four a year gets you to “a lot of the squad”. Getting to “most of the players you need” — the players you’d actually pick when it matters — needs either a higher conversion rate or better players in each wave.
Ideally, it’ll be both.
How you actually make a wave
Right — the bit I dodged last time. How do you get waves rather than the odd ripple?
Think of it like the sea, since I’ve started the metaphor and I’m not letting it go now. A wave isn’t one big swell. It’s a lot of water moving in the same direction at the same time, and the size of it is set well before it reaches the shore. By the time you can see it from the beach, there’s nothing you can do to make it bigger.
In pathway terms, that means four things.
Breadth at the base. You can’t promote players you don’t identify. Doubling NTS numbers matters more than any single headline signing to the academy, because it widens the pool every later decision is made from. It’s telling that all eight of this year’s intake came up through the NTS, and all eight were in Ireland U20 squads. That’s the base doing its job — though it’s worth asking how many of those eight we’d have spotted anyway, and how many are genuinely the product of a wider net.
Overlapping cohorts. An academy with a strong Year 1 and a thin Year 3 doesn’t produce a wave; it produces a gap followed by a surge, and gaps are where you end up signing a 31-year-old tighthead from somewhere warm. You want every year group carrying genuine senior prospects in every position group, so the promotions keep coming whether or not one cohort is a vintage one.
Game time before the senior team. Look at the intake bios and almost every one of them has a full AIL season behind him — Christian Foley has 26 senior appearances for Young Munster across two seasons; Jamie Conway, 19 for Shannon in his first year. That’s not a cute little footnote either. The AIL and Munster A are where academy players learn to win a collision against grown men, and the clubs and schools carrying that load deserve a lot of credit. (Ballina-Killaloe producing five academy contracts in four years, Joe Finn the latest, is the kind of thing that should get a club a statue.)
Somewhere to land. This is the one that’s mostly out of the academy’s hands. A wave only counts if it breaks onto the first team, and that means senior minutes — real ones, in real games, not the last ten in a dead rubber. If the senior squad is stacked with experienced signings on multi-year deals in the same positions, the best-run academy in Europe still backs up like water behind a dam.
None of those four things is that complicated in isolation; all of them take years, and all those things have to be happening at once. It just takes a lot of unglamorous work.
Which brings us back to now.
If the five-to-seven season guideline is right, and the club’s investment started five years ago, then 2026/27 isn’t the season the academy gets judged. It’s the season the wave should be starting.
That cuts both ways. It means we shouldn’t be hammering the pathway because a 20-year-old hooker isn’t starting in Europe yet — that’s not how the clock works. But it also means you need to start seeing the results from here. By 2028 or so, the players who came into an expanded NTS at the start of this push will be 22, 23, 24. They’ll be exactly the age where they should be pushing for the matchday 23, not just filling out the squad.
I’ll commit to this much: four promotions a year is a decent pipeline, not a finished one. The base has been built. The next two or three seasons decide whether it becomes a wave or just a steady trickle we keep topping up in the transfer market.
In an ideal world, an Irish province gets most of the way to prominence from within — that is to say, homegrown academy products. There’s always scope for an Irish-qualified or project player pick-up. Leinster, for example, augmented their squad both before and during their “waves” with guys like Jamison Gibson-Park, James Lowe, Isaac Boss, Ben Te’o, Robbie Henshaw, Michael Bent, Sean Cronin, and Mike Ross. You can then top off your team with NIQ players, who all need dispensation from the IRFU performance director. The Performance Director has to assess NIQ signings in line with your team’s level — are you challenging for Europe and need someone to get you over the line, or do you have issues in your team that can’t be filled with an Irish player that a NIQ will improve — and then weigh that up with the needs of the national team and the Irish rugby ecosystem itself.
That can often be a point of frustration for coaches, in particular, but it’s a quirk of the Irish system that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Ultimately, your level is determined by the players you develop yourself, and I think Munster are doing just that.
