The two cameras being carefully set up on my arrival at the Nike Academy give an insight into the training centre’s inner workings. The first is positioned by a performance analyst at the top of a high bank overlooking the pitch at their St George’s Park base, where the players are about to go through a series of drills before the next day’s game at Swansea City. The second camera is stood on a tripod next to the huddled squad, focused on their manager; his team talk is being filmed for the academy’s next marketing video.

The match against Swansea’s Under-23s carries huge importance: it will be the players’ penultimate chance to impress before the next batch of trials, when several will make way for new recruits. At the end of November around fifty 16- to 20-year-olds plucked from trials in major cities around the world will take part in the catchily titled Nike Most Wanted Global Showcase. Some will be invited to join the academy where they will live, train and play together until they are either signed by a professional club or deemed not good enough and asked to leave.

Player turnover is high but the potential rewards are extraordinary: a professional contract and the beginning of an otherwise unlikely career in football. Four players have already found clubs this season, 12 made it last year and more than 60 have signed since the project began in 2009. Unearthing a superstar has eluded Nike thus far but there are several notable alumni, like Celtic’s Tom Rogic, who was an 18-year-old playing amateur football in his home town of Canberra when he heard about the academy and decided to trial. Now 23, he is an Australia international and was an integral part of Celtic’s title-winning team last season.

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The Nike Academy has been a source of intrigue since its inception partly because it has maintained an element of secrecy. It has developed rapidly into a full-time programme, moving base from Loughborough University to the FA’s centre of excellence at St George’s Park in 2013. Nike employs staff to rival any academy, including a sports scientist and a psychologist, who nurture the 24-player squad made up of 17 nationalities.

One of the most talented in the current crop had played only for his school team before joining. He arrived raw, one coach says, but with daily training his improvement was rapid. Another who is exciting management, Benis Belesi from Belgium, pulls up in training clutching his hamstring. “These players arrive at 16, 17, 18,” says the academy’s strength and conditioning coach, Josh Dixon, son of the former Arsenal right-back Lee Dixon. “But in terms of their conditioning they arrive well behind where they need to be. We have to push them. Sometimes they blow up.”

Today’s “matchday-minus-one” session lasts an hour and a half: a short-passing drill, stretches and sprints, a match scenario playing through the thirds of the pitch and finally a frantic, small-sided game which brings out a friendly competitive edge, as well as talent in abundance. The manager, Jon Goodman, and his assistant, the former Wolves goalkeeper Matt Murray, take time to work with the goalkeeper Tim Brown on playing out to his defenders’ feet. “If he goes into a club and they say ‘just shell it’, he can do that,” says Goodman. “But if he goes into a club and they need him to play out from the back, then he needs some more in his armoury.”

Matches are typically exhibitions against some of the best academies in the world, with some eye-catching results – youth teams from Barcelona and Internazionale are among a long list of scalps – but Goodman prides himself predominantly on helping players earn contracts. “I’m as emotionally attached to this as I have been in anything else in football, despite the fact it’s not a football club,” says Goodman, who played for Millwall, Wimbledon and Republic of Ireland before roles as a sports scientist with Reading and Leeds United. “The reward you get when the lads get contracts is second to none. They are life-changing instances for those players.”

How does it compare with being part of a real club? “When I was with Brian McDermott at Leeds it was ‘Goody, we’ve just got to win’. You cannot beat that thrill. But that unfortunately can contaminate your thought processes, so you end up becoming fixated on removing errors and overly enthused about a victory that gets you through to the following week. Whether we beat Swansea – that’s just my ego that’s affected by that. Fundamentally [the result] doesn’t matter so it’s a very interesting challenge. We’ve got freedom in how we work, freedom in the players we are able to recruit from all over the world. Not a lot of clubs can do that.”

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That freedom has allowed Nike to increase its reach in youth football. It has small-scale academies in Moscow, Barcelona and Tokyo and more are planned around the world, each offering a piece of Nike’s coaching experience while feeding talent into the main hub at St George’s. Player recruitment is helped by social media: team talks and training sessions, like the one in preparation for Swansea, become YouTube videos as do showpiece matches like a win over Barcelona at Wembley, which can generate millions of views and present something of a utopia to aspiring players.

But what is life like in the academy? Goodman accepts there are obvious difficulties in bringing together teenagers from all over the world, some of whom do not speak any English when they arrive. Homesickness is not uncommon and some former academy players work as chaperones to help new arrivals settle. The manager says his players’ change behaviour when the cameras switch on – though that may not be bad preparation for life as a footballer.

Nike has the squad under “media lockdown” but a former graduate, James Cottingham, is candid about his experience at the academy. The midfielder joined after being released by Sheffield Wednesday at 19, which helped earn him a playing contract in America before injury curtailed his career. “It was better than being at a professional club and playing in the reserves. At that time I wasn’t ready for first-team football and these guys had every box covered – conditioning, gym work, massages after training, ice baths scheduled, food, living accommodation, all expenses paid, training kit, training twice a day.

“We were in flats, shared apartments with the team, we ate together, completely full on, no girls allowed, no going out. They kept tabs on everybody. It was spot on and to be honest there wasn’t time for messing about because everybody was there for one reason. We were playing two or three games a week against the likes of Arsenal, Inter, Genk.

“It’s still professional football but it doesn’t come with the bollocks that professional football comes with. The pressure as a young player, you’re on the clock really in this day and age. If you’re not in the first team at 18 or 19 then you’ve had it.”

It is clear the Nike team’s ability to get results against lofty opposition is both a blessing and a curse. “Nike laid a lot of opportunities on the table,” says Cottingham, “but what I would say is it was quite unbelievable that most of the players aren’t now playing professional football. Because you would take 11 of the Nike Academy boys and straight up swap them with 90% of the teams we play, and generally that was the feedback from the pro clubs. But [they would say] we’ve just offered those young boys contracts, so we can’t just sack 11 off and bring 11 in. The guys at Nike were really frustrated.

“The likes of myself at Sheffield Wednesday, I just needed to be taken out of that environment in order to flourish, I needed to step back and get comfortable again. That’s what the Nike Academy does, to get into an environment, play football every day, enjoy yourself and get back in there. From a neutral standpoint it’s incredible that those boys [I played with] aren’t playing professional football now. That was one of the pitfalls, I don’t think Nike saw that coming, and I don’t think there’s any way you can get around it.”

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One way around it, of course, would be if the company took the controversial step of buying a professional club. Seeing the academy infrastructure already in place it is hardly a stretch to imagine Nike taking the route of Red Bull, which has bought clubs in Leipzig, Salzburg, São Paulo and New York. A Nike brand manager insists this is not the intention – yet. “No, but Nike is a fast-moving company so that doesn’t mean it would never happen. If strategically it made sense then it could be [our objective in the future], but I think the freedom and flexibility we have now is unique.”

After staying overnight in St George’s onsite Hilton Hotel, the team travel down to Swansea’s training ground the next day and remind the manager of their qualities with a 3-2 win. The final match before trials is against Barnsley and after that several players will be asked to make way for fresh talent. The academy continues to churn and Nike’s growing scouting web continues to feed it. “We went to play in Russia and they had their own [Nike] academy, which demonstrates how far it’s all come,” says Goodman. “The challenge now is where does it go?”