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Middesbrough's Academy has always had a reputation as a production line for professionals.

Now new research shows exactly how prolific the Rockliffe talent factory is.

The impressive Category 1 Academy set up is the tenth most successful in the country in terms of England-qualified graduates becoming professionals and making a career in the game according to new research by the Training Ground Guru website.

Boro could claim 37 graduates playing in the English professional game in the 2016/17 season when the research was carried out.

That included three plying their trade in the Premier League, nine in the Championship, 12 in League One, seven in League 2 and six in the National League.

At the top end that group included Ben Gibson and Stewart Downing in Boro’s top flight squad plus Lee Cattermole at Sunderland.

The Championship and lower leagues were liberally peppered with former Rockliffe graduates that season.

Dael Fry was on loan at Rotherham while David Wheater, Jonathan Grounds, Andrew Taylor, Danny Graham and Joe Bennett were regulars.

And further down the pyramid the likes of Tony McMahon was at Bradford and former first teamers Matty Bates and Stuart Parnaby were at Hartlepool.

It is an impressive Rockliffe roll of honour that has helped push Boro into the top 10 in the list.

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Manchester United top the table with 70, including a team coach full 18 in the Premier League. Arsenal are second with 66 and Chelsea and Spurs are joint third with 58.

Naturally the bigger clubs have impressive Category 1 Academies, more resources, better qualified coaches plus the glamour factor so can attract the most promising schoolboys and nurture them through to fully fledged careers.

But Boro have built a superb reputation over the years for the nature as well as the out-put of system set up by former king-pin Dave Parnaby, which aimed to turn out good people as well as good footballers.

The performance of Boro in the rankings and a couple of mighty minnows punching above their weight really stand out.

Perhaps the most impressive showing was from League Two Crewe Alexandra, a club long associated with youth development (as well as huge controversy in the last year).

Despite being in the fourth tier and only having a Category 2 Academy, Alex were ninth in the list having produced 39 English pros.

And Charlton, in the third tier and also with a Category 2 set-up, were seventh in the table, producing 44 pros across the top five divisions.

The rankings have been revealed in new research compiled by a data savvy dad weighing up which Academy to send his son to.

He quickly realised there was very little concrete available information on Academies fared when he started to do his homework.

And so he set out to collate, compare and analyse all the facts and figures he could find.

Mark Crane is a scientist by trade - an environmental toxicologist - and is used to working with complex data sets.

“A young player and their parents have little objective basis on which to judge whether it’s in their interests to join a club’s Academy,” he explained to Training Ground Guru, a specialist website for performance professionals.

“When you consider that only 0.5% of eight-year-olds at Academies make it into professional football at all, it’s easy to understand why kids and their parents want as much information as possible before entering the system.”

So he decided to decided to work out how productive each Academy was himself.

He compiled first-team squad lists, found out which England-qualified players had made at least one league appearance during the season and then researched which Academy each had attended.

Of course there are gaps. Northern Irish international Chris Brunt is a Boro graduate but isn’t England qualified for instance. Ditto James Morrison, who declared for Scotland.

Crane admits it is a work in progress. “It would be preferable for the leagues or FA to publish audited data that could then be analysed independently - and this study could also be extended to include several seasons and comparisons between English and non-English players.”

But it is a good starting point. And it puts flesh on the bones of the notion that Rockliffe is among the best.