Football: investing in youth
Manchester City have a new record signing, said Evan Bartlett in The Independent. Finley Burns, an English defender, moved to the Etihad last week from lowly League One side Southend United, for the princely sum of £175,000. Why is that a record? Because Burns is just 13 years old. The fee – which could rise to more than £250,000 if he goes on to sign professional terms at the club – is “unprecedented” for a player that age, and for an academy as small as Southend’s. But with other big clubs circling – Liverpool reportedly also made a six-figure offer – City felt obliged to splash out.
Clubs’ willingness to shell out big bucks for “unproven youngsters” is nothing new, said Matt Hughes in The Times. City signed a reported £500,000 deal with Watford for then 14-year-old winger Jadon Sancho in 2015, and some £200,000 to Malaga for 14-year-old striker Brahim Díaz in 2013. But the size of the Burns fee – especially given that the club didn’t even take him on trial before “committing financially” – has nevertheless “raised eyebrows”.
Top teams are targeting increasingly younger talent, said Rory Smith in The New York Times. Scouts now regularly monitor players as young as eight or nine, and watch training sessions as well as matches. An academy in Manchester recently complained to a club “because one of its talent spotters had approached a four-year-old and his parents” in a car park. And it’s not just the big clubs trying to identify raw talent. Also in the game are big sportswear brands. Adidas and Nike both have “established talent identification departments”; Adidas alone has as many as 100 young players on contract. Most of these deals involve only free kit or store credit, but the best prospects can earn “five-figure sums to wear boots at a time when playing for the first team, on television, is still years off”. The catch? The deals generally include a “matching rights” clause, which essentially give the brand first refusal on the player’s future endorsement deals. Whether all this is suitable for youngsters is up for debate. But it’s clear that “the premium on promise has never been higher”.