Since the 1970s in France, and 2000 in Germany, professional football clubs organise the training of boys aged between fifteen and eighteen, who work actively to make the sport their profession. How these institutions recruit players? How the players become top-level sportsmen, and what impact does this status have on their lives? This thesis aims to understand the social logic in this area from this double perspective. This work is based on a field study carried out in two regions involved in the production of footballers. In a comparative perspective, this thesis describes and analyses the socialisation of players, as well as the social construction of an economic and political space and the everyday work of a multitude of players involved in their education: parents, coaches, recruiters, agents and teachers. Football academies are institutions dedicated to the production of excellence, where competition is the norm. The relatively low rate of professionalisation means that players and coaches are constantly under selection. They have to maintain and improve their position in order to become professionals in the sport. This thesis analyses the different ways in which young people are looked after, in terms of their relationship with the self and the group, with autonomy and with the family, and in terms of variations in scale. In an arena that produces a dichotomy between success and failure, this work helps us to understand what elite sports training does to individuals, and how it reconfigures their aspirations to become professionals. Far from being viewed as an end in itself, the final stage of their training allows us to enlight the social and moral value of this system and the resources that apprentices acquire in the most popular sport.