Why youngsters are choosing foreign fields as proving grounds
With the route to a top Premier League club’s first team more difficult than ever, the brightest teenagers are looking at other options to further their careers
They have traded with the best in Europe over the past decade, so when Borussia Dortmund’s sporting director, Michael Zorc, buys a 17-year-old footballer without a single competitive senior appearance to his name for around £10million, the safe assumption is that the boy can play.
As it is, Jadon Sancho is one of the finest prospects in English football, a star of the England junior teams and the brightest in a constellation of young footballers at Manchester City – or at least he was.
When he turned 17 in March, the earliest point at which a professional contract can be signed, the expectation was that his would be the biggest deal ever for a boy his age, with £30,000 a week regarded as a possibility.
But he never did sign and that he came to leave the club last month is a source of great regret for City, who have established their formidable youth operation to find and develop players just like Sancho, a fleet-footed goalscorer of high technical ability.
It would be right to say that this was not a happy departure on City’s side, although they have a buy-back clause. Borussia Dortmund paid such a high transfer fee rather than the usual training compensation for a player on scholar’s contract because there was a serious market for Sancho.
Hot property for all his teenage years, Sancho was first acquired by City at the age of 13 from Watford, who were themselves crestfallen to lose him.
He will undoubtedly have benefited from City’s development and education programme over the intervening years and, while he will be well rewarded at Dortmund, he would have earned more in Manchester.
What marks this transfer out as a potential game-changer is that he is the first junior star of the current English academy system under the Elite Player Performance Plan launched in 2011, to decide that his best route into first-team football is a move to Europe.
While he may not yet be a household name in the English game, every teenager at a top academy will know who Sancho is, and will be following his decision with interest.
Chris Willock, the 19-year-old former Arsenal academy midfielder who had been at the club since the age of five, has done much the same, signing a professional deal with Benfica this summer.
Willock – who has two brothers, Matt at Manchester United and Joe at Arsenal – decided that his career was best served at a European club with a reputation for bringing young players through to the first team and very often selling them to high-end Premier League sides.
The academies of English clubs have long harvested the best young talent safe in the knowledge that none of them will ever leave, however slim their chance of seeing a run of first-team action. Why? Because the assumption is that English boys do not travel well, that they do not speak any language beyond their own and, quite frankly, the contracts are too good here.
But it would seem that for some of these boys, the penny has dropped. That crucial final step from under-23s to first team can only come at a club prepared to give young players a run of senior games, and at City, like many others, there is simply not that scope. Sancho has been given the No7 shirt at Dortmund, and although he is still due to play for England in the Under17s World Cup in India in next month, if things go well over the next few weeks perhaps Dortmund will ask him to stay in Germany.
The evidence in favour of developing outside the Premier League has long existed but this summer the two standout examples are more compelling than ever. Kylian Mbappe, 18, and Ousmane Dembele, 20, are the two French talents who between them will cost Paris St-Germain and Barcelona a combined total of around £300 million.
Playing wide for France against England in Paris in June they went past Gareth Southgate’s defence like an express passing the local train. At the age of 16, both could have signed for any club in Europe. Despite all the Real Madrid posters on his bedroom wall, Mbappe chose Monaco, where he was pushed quickly into the first team.
It is little more than a year ago he was in the France Under-19s team that won their European championships but on the way lost to England in the group stages of the tournament.
Mbappe is a special talent, but looking back at that England Under-19s squad, full of good players, it is notable just how few played Premier League football regularly last season. Dembele, whose No7 Sancho inherited, also had his pick of clubs when he left Rennes two years ago.
He chose Dortmund and has never looked back. Dembele is just four months older than Jeremie Boga, another highly talented France-born forward who has been at Chelsea since the age of 11, and is a full international for the Ivory Coast.
Boga was on loan at Rennes briefly with Dembele but his latest move, a loan to Birmingham City, has not been quite so spectacular.
These young players see what we see. They notice that Nathaniel Chalobah was sold by Chelsea to make room for Tiemoue Bakayoko,
The assumption is English boys do not travel well, that they do not speak another language
who plays the same position and is just four months older.
Many believe Chalobah is just as good, or at least he could be, but Bakayoko had over 80 Ligue 1 appearances under his belt for Rennes and Monaco, and Chalobah only made his Chelsea debut last September.
They notice that Paul Pogba’s decision to leave Manchester United in 2012 was the making of his career.
No one can say with any certainty that Sancho’s move to Dortmund will work as it did for Dembele or others, and it will be up to this confident young Englishman to show he can cut it with the best in Europe.
But when you look at the precedents it is hardly a surprise that he has decided to give it a try.