Rico Lewis will always remember the Wednesday night that saw him become the youngest player in the history of the Champions League to score on debut.

The 17-year-old fulfilled his boyhood dream in front of 50,000 Blues cheering him on to mark his first Manchester City start in style as he scored against Sevilla. And, after a few hours of sleep once the adrenaline finally wore off, he was back at the training ground on Thursday morning for school lessons.

Anybody who enters City's academy is given a tour of two schools they can attend - St Bede's College in Manchester and The Barlow state school in Didsbury - and education continues for those who earn a football scholarship at 16 until they are 18. It doesn't have to be A-Levels, it can be vocational courses or qualifications from another country, but the rule at City is clear and without exception: if you don't study, you don't play.

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Lewis has been a star pupil and didn't need telling after his Champions League goal, even if there were some who were surprised to see him the next morning. But City academy's head of operations and development Mark Adams makes sure that every youngster coming through at City learns either the easy or the hard way that being good at football isn't everything.

"If they don't do their homework, they don't train. We're quite strict with that," Adams tells the Manchester Evening News. "We get updates on their progress and have a stringent rewards and sanctions policy.

"If a player does well in school, as well as the school reward them we as a club reward that effort, attainment and behaviour. But if they don't work hard and don't arrive on time and do their homework, we try to emphasise to the players and their families that football is a privilege at this age.

"The most important thing is school, and then football is the added privilege for them to be able to come out of school on an afternoon or two afternoons as they get older is a privilege and they have to earn that. We like to check that they are progressing so we monitor how they are meeting their target grades and if they're not we would amend their programme so they won't train as much and will spend more time in school.

"That's the same for every player and it always has been. It has evolved over time and more now than ever we are firm with the players that if they misbehave at school they just will not train - and they know that."

City's education programme has evolved over time. Their link-up with St. Bede's, which began in 2011, has practical benefits of making sure kids are never late for training because they are battling Manchester traffic, but it also serves as a vital recruitment tool for parents who are away of the vanishingly small odds their children have of becoming a top footballer; a study in 2019 showed that just 180 out of 1.5million boys playing organised youth football in England would ever manage a single minute in the Premier League.

That is made clear from an early age by the club, and even as they progress through City's academy their youngsters work on a 'dual career plan' to prepare them for another career right up to the point that a job in elite football becomes viable. As much as the club have to prepare the next generation of their team, it is almost more important to look after those that don't make it.

"Young boys are in a unique position where at 16 they're having conversations about employment as well as education. They're all educated to 18, so when they come to us at 16 we educate them full-time in the football club and players can study A-Levels, vocational qualifications," Adams said.

"We want them to continue on an educational aspirational journey. That's really important for us. It's so important that they are constantly referred back to the programme and the opportunities that it gives them.

"We don't want no longer being a footballer to be something nobody speaks about, so we talk about it from a very early age. In the foundation phase when we have meetings we will be talking to them about the one guarantee in football is that it will end.

"We want to prepare them for the end the best we possibly can so we don't talk about second careers, we talk about a dual career plan so all of our players from the age of 14 are having annual meetings with a careers advice service that we provide separately to the school on a plan for life after football."

When City enrol youngsters to their academy, they take on responsibility for their education however close the talents end up to their first team. As much pride as there is at the breakthroughs of Lewis, Phil Foden and others then, 1,092 GCSE grade 4s (equivalent to a C) achieved by academy students over the last decade are also celebrated as a sign of a job well done.

There have been many things tried that haven't worked; initially City students were segregated at Bede's but they missed the benefits that can only be had when firmly integrated so now only have a day of teaching at the club from Year 10 onwards. On the other hand, attempts for City scholars to learn at colleges had to be abandoned because it wasn't workable with the football demands.

The main reason both have been possible is because of the building of the £200m City Football Academy, which celebrates its 10-year anniversary this weekend. Lewis will have walked in on Sunday to an academy building full of up to 25 teachers and peripatetic tutors all buzzing about the place covering the diverse needs of the young students.

"They might come in for an hour, some might come in for the day," Adams explained. "It starts at half eight in the morning and will finish with homework clubs for foundation phase kids, GCSE revision sessions for our U16s , A Level sessions for the residents who live upstairs. It's like a school within a football club.

"In 2014 we had four classrooms, then in 2020 we expanded so we've now got nine classrooms. One of the classrooms has the capability to be a science lab.

"We could do all of this education in-house but we want the boys to socialise and mix with other children and give them access to other opportunities that other children at St Bede's get. But the support we've got to deliver a bespoke education programme where players can study anything they want to study is brilliant. For us, it enables players to complete an education programme that works for them.

"It's also uniform for the girls. The girls can't access the full time training model at the moment because the rules don't allow that to happen but 16-18 they mirror the programme that the boys do and at times integrate into sessions with the boys. We're proud that the education programme doesn't just service the boys but serves the girls as well."

Alongside whatever curriculum is being studied, there are the hidden lessons to prepare the youngsters for football whether they know it or not. Every classroom looks out onto the first team training pitch by design, and academy players will be involved in some first team media or community activities - they wrap the Christmas presents that Pep Guardiola and his squad hand out at local hospitals every year, for instance - in order to get them accustomed to what life at the top is like.

Ultimately, the message drilled in about respect and behaviour are at least as critical to succeeding in Guardiola's team as it is any other walk of life. Young players have seen their prospects of making it ended by a poor attitude in training or being late for team meetings regardless of their football ability, with the coach unwilling to accept poor behaviour.

"We're really simple with the rules we give the players: they attend school, they respect the teachers and they work as hard as they can. That is our mantra and if they do that we will have very few conversations," said Adams.

"The first team manager said in one of his interviews about when they go over to the first team the players need to be ready. It's these small experiences. If they're late for school, they need to understand the impact for them because that is replicated in life.

"All of the time, everything we're doing is like a hidden curriculum. You might get one or two opportunities in that environment when you're there and you need to show the best version of yourself.

"That's what we're trying to really give them that insightful opportunity to understand that on the campus that we've got you're so close to it and you will get an opportunity at a very young age because of the manager and the way he works with young players. When you're given that opportunity, you need to be on time, focused and listen."