Europe’s historical citizenship regimes limited economic citizenship to specific groups. As in modern national citizenship regimes, those outsiders who sought to access economic rights needed to meet various criteria. In this paper, we evaluate how often individuals who had begun the process of qualification for economic citizenship failed to complete it. Our focus is on qualification by apprenticeship. This process generated human capital alongside rights. However, as we show for a range of cities, large numbers of youths entering apprenticeship contracts failed to complete them. We consider the nature, frequency and, to the extent that it is possible, the causation of these failures. Our results point to the value of failure as a way to maintain flexibility within labour markets Local, urban citizenship regimes preferred pragmatic responses to labour market tensions to rent seeking.