The Atlético Madrid Academy: La Academia and the First-Team Pathway

Ask an Atlético fan which trophy means the most and you may get a surprising answer: the sight of a kid from the academy wearing the captain’s armband. The club’s youth system, known simply as La Academia, has produced the current appearance record holder, a World Cup winner, and the most beloved striker in the club’s modern history. This is how the pathway works.

The base: Cerro del Espino

The heart of the operation is the Cerro del Espino training complex in Majadahonda, on the north-western edge of Madrid. The academy age groups and the reserve side are based there, and Atlético B plays its home matches at the Cerro del Espino stadium within the complex. For a teenager climbing the ladder, the geography itself is part of the education: the pitches where the youth teams train sit next to the ones used by the professionals, and the step from one to the other is meant to feel short.

Atlético B: the finishing school

The final rung before the first team is Atlético B, the reserve side that competes in the Spanish lower divisions. Under its earlier name of Atlético Madrileño the team spent spells as high as the Segunda División, and in more recent decades it has moved between the third and fourth tiers. Spanish rules bar a reserve team from playing in the same division as its parent club and from promotion to La Liga, so the B team’s purpose is never league position for its own sake. It exists to give 18-to-21-year-olds men’s football: real stakes, real tackles, real away trips.

Two stories from the archive capture that world well. A report on Atlético B winning away in Extremadura shows the grind of lower-division football that shapes these players, and the improbable tale of goalkeeper Iago scoring a winning goal for Atlético B is a reminder that the reserve leagues produce theatre of their own.

The famous products

The roll call speaks for itself. Fernando Torres joined as a child, debuted for the first team in 2001 at seventeen, and became club captain while still a teenager. Gabi came through the same system, left for Zaragoza, returned in 2011 and lifted the 2018 Europa League as captain. David de Gea was the starting goalkeeper in the 2010 Europa League triumph at nineteen before Manchester United paid a then-enormous fee for him in 2011.

The Simeone era has been carried by academy spines. Koke debuted in 2009 as a teenager and went on to break Adelardo’s appearance record, a story told in full on the records page. Saúl Ñíguez arrived in the youth ranks as a boy and became a Champions League-final midfielder. Lucas Hernández joined the academy at eleven, debuted in 2014, won the World Cup with France in 2018 and left for Bayern Munich in 2019 for a fee that made him the most expensive defender in history at the time.

The lesson the club never forgot

There is a scar in this story too. In 1992 the club’s then-president Jesús Gil shut down the youth setup as a cost-saving measure, and a slight fifteen-year-old named Raúl González walked across the city to Real Madrid, where he became one of the greatest players in the rival’s history. The episode is burned into the institutional memory, covered in more depth in the club history, and it explains the seriousness with which the academy has been rebuilt and protected since. Everything Torres and Koke later became is, in part, the club making sure Raúl never happens again.

How the pathway actually works

The route is deliberately gradual. Boys join the age-group teams and progress through the juvenil ranks, the strongest of which competes in national youth competition. The best are promoted to Atlético B for their first taste of senior football. From there, first-team involvement usually starts with training sessions alongside the professionals and a cup appearance or a late substitute’s run-out, exactly how Torres and Koke were eased in.

Not every academy player becomes a Koke, and the club does not pretend otherwise. Some are sold with buy-back or sell-on clauses, some build careers across the Segunda, and a handful return years later as seasoned professionals, as Gabi did. The system’s value is measured across all of those outcomes, not only the legends it occasionally mints.

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