In an interview with French sports paper L’Equipe in November, the venerable Real Betis coach Manuel Pellegrini reflected on how young players today arrive in a first-team environment more equipped to face the challenge than ever before.

Pellegrini, La Liga’s oldest coach at 72, has seen plenty of change in his 37-year coaching career. While he laments seeing youngsters seldom without a phone in their hands, he noted in the interview that they have the benefits now of individual attention from nutritionists, psychologists, fitness trainers and more.

As we celebrate the impact of teenagers in the Champions League, the words of Pellegrini are worth exploring. According to several coaches surveyed for this article, one clear factor in the sparkling of so many young talents today is the work of club academies. In short, these players have typically grown up in a more professional environment which prepares them technically, tactically, physically and mentally.

“My experience is that the players get things very fast”

Steve Cooper, a U17 World Cup-winning coach with England and now in charge of Danish side Brøndby, cites the success of the Elite Player Performance Plan in English football in creating a production line of “tactically astute” youngsters who “are used to a multi-disciplinary approach with game plans, performance analysis and data”.

Elaborating on the point about tactical understanding, Jan Peder Jalland, the coach of Norway’s Under-21 team, offers a striking example: “I was very surprised when I started to coach Norway at U15 level as I felt that tactically I could actually go higher and deeper than with some senior players I had worked with in the past.”

Jalland, a UEFA Technical Observer, sees players “growing up with a lot more knowledge”. He explains: “Now from a young age, they can see players from all around the world and see more clearly what the best players do. A lot of the players I’ve worked with have spent a lot of time on YouTube watching their favourite players, learning from them and then going out on the pitch and training on it.”

Interestingly, while Pellegrini, a bookworm, complained that he sees his players reading little, Jalland is particularly impressed by the capacity of his Norway youngsters to digest information. “When I grew up, we had one or two TV channels, but now they’re used to taking in a lot of information. My experience with youth national teams is that the players get things very fast and can also handle maybe more information than expected.” So long, he adds, as that information comes in small chunks – and in a visual format. “You have to get in more things in a very short time to keep the concentration. They’re so visual and their ability to take it in, in my experience, is very good.”

A current view of youth development in English football comes from Simon Clifford, a UK-based performance coach who mentors around 30 players, many of them at an early stage in their careers. According to Clifford, the gap from U21 football to the first team remains vast – and the step between the two intimidating. One young player described it to him as “going into the wild”, owing to the intensity of the first-team environment where winning is everything.

Yet he offers several reasons why the young generation profiled in these pages have been able to make that leap. First, he sees “a different level of player technically than we had before”. Next, he has noted a greater focus on ensuring players are physically ready, which can be a challenge when their bodies are still maturing.

“A big positive in recent years has been the evolution of strength and conditioning in clubs,” he says. “Players are in the gym four times a week and that’s made a big difference as, when they make the transition, they’re in a much better position.”

Clifford has also observed an effort to accustom players to the first-team environment. “There’s been a great push to get younger players involved in first-team training,” he explains. In addition to providing an extra body on the training pitch, they may also get the chance to shadow the seniors on a matchday. “You might get put on the first-team bus a few times.” And, on this note, we see the benefits of the UEFA Youth League, which often allows the youngsters at those clubs competing in the league phase the opportunity to travel to fixtures alongside their first-team counterparts, given the senior sides will have a Champions League assignment in the same city.

Crucially, Clifford has detected a stronger awareness that players need to progress quickly from under-age football – starting with loan spells. “What’s helped these last few years is players seem to have been put on loan far more readily and at younger ages than previously.”

So far, so good. But coaches working with young players will tell you the main thing they need is an opportunity. “The biggest factor is game time,” says Steve Cooper, who suggests that the financial landscape has been a factor in ensuring more minutes for young players recently, given the significance of selling home-grown talent for a club’s balance sheet.

Once youngsters reach the first team, they then require the right support structures. Safeguarding rules, for example, mean that players under 18 must change in a separate dressing room from senior players. There is also the question of their ongoing development, with Simon Clifford observing that a youngster’s progress may actually stall if they are just sitting on the first-team bench. “I say to players, ‘If we’re not careful, your technical peak is going to have been around when you were 14 or 15 because that’s when we were doing the most hours of individual technical work.’” In his mentoring role, he might work on technical details of their game – with the agreement of the player’s club – while also offering off-field guidance, which can involve helping them set daily goals for how to make good use of the “dead hours”, as he calls them, after training.

Another view on the close guidance that youngsters need comes from Cooper, who worked on individual programmes with players like Marc Guéhi and Conor Gallagher when he had them on loan at Swansea City, and later Brennan Johnson at Nottingham Forest. He does the same today with the teenagers in his first team at Brøndby and reflects: “Ideally, you want coaches that are brave enough to recognise when players are ready to go in and when to bring them out, while also keeping their individual education programme going. Are you reviewing games with them so they don’t just become a senior player?

“In the past, a 17 or 18-year-old would have gone into the team and just gone onto the same schedule as the 28-year-old senior pro. With the modern way now, at Brøndby we have a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old in the team and they are on strong individual programmes.

“It’s about sitting down with them so you are on the journey with them and providing support. When you give them the opportunity, you like to think the preparation and development work has been good, and then they have to go and deliver.”

And as this season’s Champions League shows, a good number are doing just that and plenty more.