How Chelsea broke rules to sign teenage prodigy Gilmour
Frank Lampard played a key role in bringing the Scot to London in a move that breached Fifa’s regulations
Signing Billy Gilmour in July 2017 was one of the Chelsea academy’s biggest recruitment triumphs, given the European-wide competition for Scotland’s best player in a generation, and the process was smoothed by the man who would eventually give the teenager his senior debut.
Frank Lampard was at the Cobham training ground then, helping out with the club’s junior teams as part of his Uefa A-licence qualification, and was asked to attend the presentation to Gilmour and his parents Billy Snr and Carrie that Chelsea hoped would seal the deal. It was led by Jim Fraser, the club’s assistant head of youth development, on whose advice they had prioritised Gilmour, but the presence of Lampard was crucial to convincing the boy to choose Chelsea.
Gilmour and his family were shown clips of the club’s Under-18s by Fraser and Jody Morris, Lampard’s current assistant, to demonstrate exactly why they felt the teenage midfielder’s sophisticated passing style would suit their development programme. As Gilmour helped to deliver his manager a crucial victory in Tuesday’s FA Cup fifth-round triumph over Liverpool, just his sixth senior game, the serendipity of Lampard being at Cobham that day two years ago was not lost on the club.
Since then, Lampard has taken a special interest in Gilmour, and they have a strong relationship as coach and player. Gilmour is a different kind of midfielder to the one Lampard was in his day, but they have much more in common; especially the pressure of growing up as a teenage prodigy in whom much hope is invested.
By 2017, Gilmour was already of interest to clubs in the Premier League, as well as Spain and Germany, as the star of the Rangers academy at a time when the Scottish club were in no position to see off wealthier counterparts.
Gilmour’s transfer fee is disputed, but it is
understood that it was worth as little as £2million to Rangers, whose considerable restructuring since then means that they are in a much stronger position to resist offers for their leading academy players.
Indeed, after last night’s Scottish Premiership game against Hamilton Academical, the club are expected to announce that Leon King, a 16-year-old defender/ midfielder in their academy, has signed his first professional contract at the club. King has attracted much the same interest as Gilmour did at a similar age, but Rangers have convinced him to stay. They have also secured the future of 16-year-old striker Charlie Lindsay from Glentoran in his native east Belfast, another prospect of some interest to Premier League clubs.
In 2017, Gilmour signing for Chelsea from Rangers was treated as an international transfer by Fifa, subject to the usual exemptions for under-18s that existed within what was then part of the European Union. It was also one of the deals that formed part of the charges laid against Chelsea last year by Fifa’s disciplinary committee, which considered the agreement the club struck with Rangers for Gilmour before his signing as having breached its transfer regulations. While Gilmour was still at Rangers, Chelsea had secured veto over the Scottish club even entering into negotiations to loan him elsewhere.
The Fifa appeal committee confirmed that what it called “the Rangers agreement” entitled Chelsea “to influence the independence and policies of another club”. As part of a much wider set of charges, they paid a considerable price, a transfer embargo and fine, reduced on appeal, and Rangers were also fined. Those kind of agreements are regularly struck between leading clubs acquiring top academy talent, albeit less formally. As Fifa’s disciplinary committee requested more details of Chelsea’s transfer dealing at junior level, the Gilmour deal appears to have been caught in the trawl of documents. In Scotland, teenage footballers can sign as professionals at 16, one year earlier than their counterparts in England, where the most talented agree scholarship deals with a guaranteed professional contract as soon as they turn 17. The latter was agreed by Chelsea with Gilmour and his family, along with the promise that they believed they could develop him into the best Scottish footballer since Kenny Dalglish.
Whatever it cost, Gilmour seems to have been worth the price. From north Ayrshire, he first began training at Celtic, the club his father supported, but switched to the other half of the Old Firm divide, partly because it was more accessible for evening games from his home town of Ardrossan. He was also a product of the Scottish Football Association’s performance schools programmes, aimed at trying to develop a higher standard of Scottish junior player.
Before he left for Chelsea, Gilmour studied Mandarin at school in Kilmarnock and modelled for the British fashion house Burberry. An established youth international for Scotland, his name was well known in the European game by his mid-teens. When major Premier League and European clubs came to recruit Gilmour, Rangers were still in a degree of tumult, in the midst of the short-lived Pedro Caixinha regime. Now, under new sporting director Ross Wilson, they have a competitive budget to sign and retain academy talent. Celtic have been successful in keeping London-born England Under-17s prodigy Karamoko Dembele, 17, who has already made his first-team debut.
Gilmour was famously scouted by Fraser and Morris in a development game at Hibernian’s training ground in which the then 15-year-old was shown a red card for a foul on Scott Martin, four years older. Rather than discourage the pair from Chelsea, it instead allayed any concerns they might have had about Gilmour’s willingness to deal with the physical side of the game.
At that time, Chelsea’s academy was primarily focused on developing a talented cohort of mainly London-born boys it had recruited in its youngest age groups. They made an exception for Gilmour and put a lot of resources into signing him – a decision that Lampard endorsed from the beginning.
They believed they could develop him into the best Scottish footballer since Kenny Dalglish