Wharton will most probably feature more prominently for Blackburn next season.
Interesting Young Players
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Wharton will most probably feature more prominently for Blackburn next season.
If he's still there. I've heard that Palace are extremely interested, and I'm sure there are others, too
Saw Newcastle being linked with him too. The big clubs might sign him with a immediate loan back I guess.
I’m willing to lay money on Darwin not being in the green curve for brain power.
Morgan Gibbs-White - not easy to feature high up this list, given the team he's playing for. Always thought he's younger but just realised he's already 23.
[article]When Steve Cooper lifted the World Cup with England’s under-17s six years ago, two of the goalscorers in the final were Phil Foden and Morgan Gibbs-White.
Foden is now a four-time Premier League winner playing regularly in Europe with Manchester City, while other stars in the England squad on that glorious night in Kolkata included Jadon Sancho, Conor Gallagher and Marc Guehi.
Gibbs-White’s journey to the top division has been a little more arduous, but we are now seeing exactly why Cooper regarded the forward as being on an equal footing with Foden and company in 2017.
Nottingham Forest’s record £25 million signing is inspiring his club’s push towards safety and flourishing under a head coach who has played such a pivotal role in his career.
In Forest’s crucial 4-3 win over Southampton on Monday night, Gibbs-White was outstanding, with a piece of individual brilliance for the fourth goal the standout moment of the match. A backheeled flick into the path of Danilo was the sign of a confident player capable of transforming matches in an instant.
Ahead of this weekend’s trip to Chelsea, Gibbs-White has created more goalscoring chances this season (63) than Mohamed Salah, Jack Grealish and Son Heung-min.
A No 10 capable of playing in a number of attacking positions, including off the sides, he is performing in the way Cooper always envisaged.
“At under-17 level it’s an age where you’ve still got it all to do, but where Morgan was at the time, he was definitely right up there with those other players like Phil,” Cooper says.
“The players that get to the real top are the ones who do make a difference in games. The exciting thing is there’s more to come from him.
“It’s the first time ever in the Premier League that he’s training and knowing he’s got a very good chance of playing at the weekend. That’s where a footballer wants to be.”
Whenever Gibbs-White takes to the field, the message from Cooper is usually the same - “make positive mistakes” and “get on the ball and be free”.
It is a bold approach that has elevated Gibbs-White into becoming such a key player this season, and he will be crucial in these final three games. He is the talisman, the game-changer, and arguably the best player alongside James Maddison at the five clubs battling to avoid relegation.
His route to becoming a Premier League regular has been frustrating at times. He was highly thought of at Wolves after emerging through their academy but regular first-team starts at this level eluded him.
Perhaps the pivotal moment came in January 2021: he had been on loan at Swansea, then managed by Cooper, before being recalled by Wolves in the January transfer window amid an injury crisis. Nuno Espirito Santo rarely used him over the second half of that season and it frustrated Gibbs-White, eroding trust and convincing him that maybe it could be time to move on.
A loan at Sheffield United last season was key to his development, scoring 12 goals and delivering 10 assists.
Cooper quickly made him a No 1 target at Forest after promotion was secured: a total deal worth a potential £42.5 million was agreed, though it is highly unlikely to ever reach those numbers. Initially paying £25 million, Forest will pay an extra £5 million at the end of this season if the club avoid relegation, while another instalment is linked to starts.
Extra incentives, including promotion to the England senior team, will take the cost closer towards £35 million, but other instalments such as Forest qualifying for the Champions League may never be triggered.
Gibbs-White is loving his new life in Nottingham. “Morgs” is particularly close with Brennan Johnson and Jesse Lingard, and lives next door to centre-half Steve Cook 10 miles away from the training ground.
Evangelos Marinakis, the Forest owner, told Telegraph Sport in December that Gibbs-White was “one of the best young players in the UK”.
He is also highly regarded within the Football Association, after playing in all of the junior levels up to the under-21s. Gareth Southgate likes players who have progressed through the pathway and considered promoting Gibbs-White to his senior squad in March, after Mason Mount’s withdrawal from injury, and has admitted he is “watching him closely”.
Cooper maintains a close relationship with Southgate and is backing Gibbs-White, 23, to eventually make the step up.
“I hope England is a target for him, because you should have ambition and motivation to get to the top,” he says. “The only way he can achieve those personal goals is by taking it every day as it comes.”
Cooper holds frequent one-on-one meetings with Gibbs-White throughout the week, and regularly goes through clips of his matches to pick moments apart.
While they have a close relationship, Cooper admits he can often be critical and “on his case”. It is a hardline approach designed to bring out the best in him.
Gibbs-White will be crucially important at Stamford Bridge this weekend as Forest look to move further away from the dreaded dotted line.
Performing on such a big stage will be no problem - it is where he has always wanted to be.
[/article]
[article]When Steve Cooper lifted the World Cup with England’s under-17s six years ago, two of the goalscorers in the final were Phil Foden and Morgan Gibbs-White.
Foden is now a four-time Premier League winner playing regularly in Europe with Manchester City, while other stars in the England squad on that glorious night in Kolkata included Jadon Sancho, Conor Gallagher and Marc Guehi.
Gibbs-White’s journey to the top division has been a little more arduous, but we are now seeing exactly why Cooper regarded the forward as being on an equal footing with Foden and company in 2017.
Nottingham Forest’s record £25 million signing is inspiring his club’s push towards safety and flourishing under a head coach who has played such a pivotal role in his career.
In Forest’s crucial 4-3 win over Southampton on Monday night, Gibbs-White was outstanding, with a piece of individual brilliance for the fourth goal the standout moment of the match. A backheeled flick into the path of Danilo was the sign of a confident player capable of transforming matches in an instant.
Ahead of this weekend’s trip to Chelsea, Gibbs-White has created more goalscoring chances this season (63) than Mohamed Salah, Jack Grealish and Son Heung-min.
A No 10 capable of playing in a number of attacking positions, including off the sides, he is performing in the way Cooper always envisaged.
“At under-17 level it’s an age where you’ve still got it all to do, but where Morgan was at the time, he was definitely right up there with those other players like Phil,” Cooper says.
“The players that get to the real top are the ones who do make a difference in games. The exciting thing is there’s more to come from him.
“It’s the first time ever in the Premier League that he’s training and knowing he’s got a very good chance of playing at the weekend. That’s where a footballer wants to be.”
Whenever Gibbs-White takes to the field, the message from Cooper is usually the same - “make positive mistakes” and “get on the ball and be free”.
It is a bold approach that has elevated Gibbs-White into becoming such a key player this season, and he will be crucial in these final three games. He is the talisman, the game-changer, and arguably the best player alongside James Maddison at the five clubs battling to avoid relegation.
His route to becoming a Premier League regular has been frustrating at times. He was highly thought of at Wolves after emerging through their academy but regular first-team starts at this level eluded him.
Perhaps the pivotal moment came in January 2021: he had been on loan at Swansea, then managed by Cooper, before being recalled by Wolves in the January transfer window amid an injury crisis. Nuno Espirito Santo rarely used him over the second half of that season and it frustrated Gibbs-White, eroding trust and convincing him that maybe it could be time to move on.
A loan at Sheffield United last season was key to his development, scoring 12 goals and delivering 10 assists.
Cooper quickly made him a No 1 target at Forest after promotion was secured: a total deal worth a potential £42.5 million was agreed, though it is highly unlikely to ever reach those numbers. Initially paying £25 million, Forest will pay an extra £5 million at the end of this season if the club avoid relegation, while another instalment is linked to starts.
Extra incentives, including promotion to the England senior team, will take the cost closer towards £35 million, but other instalments such as Forest qualifying for the Champions League may never be triggered.
Gibbs-White is loving his new life in Nottingham. “Morgs” is particularly close with Brennan Johnson and Jesse Lingard, and lives next door to centre-half Steve Cook 10 miles away from the training ground.
Evangelos Marinakis, the Forest owner, told Telegraph Sport in December that Gibbs-White was “one of the best young players in the UK”.
He is also highly regarded within the Football Association, after playing in all of the junior levels up to the under-21s. Gareth Southgate likes players who have progressed through the pathway and considered promoting Gibbs-White to his senior squad in March, after Mason Mount’s withdrawal from injury, and has admitted he is “watching him closely”.
Cooper maintains a close relationship with Southgate and is backing Gibbs-White, 23, to eventually make the step up.
“I hope England is a target for him, because you should have ambition and motivation to get to the top,” he says. “The only way he can achieve those personal goals is by taking it every day as it comes.”
Cooper holds frequent one-on-one meetings with Gibbs-White throughout the week, and regularly goes through clips of his matches to pick moments apart.
While they have a close relationship, Cooper admits he can often be critical and “on his case”. It is a hardline approach designed to bring out the best in him.
Gibbs-White will be crucially important at Stamford Bridge this weekend as Forest look to move further away from the dreaded dotted line.
Performing on such a big stage will be no problem - it is where he has always wanted to be.
[/article]
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The couple of times I've seen him, I thought he was really decent.
And just like that Gift Orban is training at AXA, hey, I like it.
Don't get it?
Wished he signed for us...looks like a good player and would cost us small change
Not sure what he will go for, but it's young players like this the scouts should be looking for around the world. Bringing them to Kirby at 18, as the law doesn’t allow anyone under 18 and then loaning them out like Chelsea. You then can buy elites players if need be by selling very good youngsters
Bristol City’s Alex Scott – Everything Everywhere All At Once
By Nancy Frostick and Thom Harris
Mar 16, 2023
19
If Bristol City midfielder Alex Scott ever writes his autobiography, he needs to look no further than last weekend’s Best Picture winner at the Oscars for a title.
Because ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ is what the Guernsey-born England youth international has been doing for Nigel Pearson’s Championship side this season, to the extent it is little surprise that Ashton Gate’s leading man is being linked with a string of Premier League clubs.
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Cautious estimates suggest the 19-year-old will cost £25million, and Pearson is adamant it will take more than that to prise Scott away. He drew praise from his idol Jack Grealish after they went head to head in an FA Cup loss to Manchester City in February, and Wolverhampton Wanderers, Tottenham Hotspur and Leeds United are rumoured to be among those chasing his signature.
What makes Scott so good, apart from the fact he has already made 85 senior appearances at such a young age, is his ability to progress play, get around the pitch and recover the ball. It is just about everything a manager could want from a central midfielder, with Scott having completed the second-most passes of any City player (989 in total, at a rate of 30.5 per 90 minutes), had the second-most touches (1684, 52 per 90), the most tackles (75, 2.3 per 90) and the most key passes (36, 1.1 per 90) while winning the most fouls (78, 2.4 per 90) in the first 36 games of the season.
But another part of what makes the former Southampton and Bournemouth academy kid an exciting prospect is his versatility, having featured as a right wing-back under Pearson last season before coming inside to feature as a No 10 or in a deeper role to great effect (as shown by his share of minutes per position below).
In any of those central roles, Scott’s desire to be on the ball and progress play is crucial to City’s attacks. When he plays as a central or defensive midfielder that role often involves him hitting defence-splitting passes and when he is operating as a No 10, often in front of Joe Williams and Matty James, he drifts into pockets of space in more advanced positions.
The still below from Saturday’s 2-0 home win over Blackpool shows Scott playing in a midfield two with 34-year-old Andy King, a 50-cap Wales international and Premier League title winner with Leicester City seven years ago.
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Scott’s movement out to the right provided an essential outlet for full-back George Tanner, as the youngster slipped a ball first time into the channel for Mark Sykes to run onto and trigger an attack.
In the same game, Scott’s movement to the byline with the ball after carrying it from the edge of the box created another chance as City recycled possession back to Jay Dasilva. Scott’s key strength is keeping possession ticking over with short passes, and his combination play in the final third is crucial to how they attack.
As play progressed he received the ball back from King (No 10) and delivered a cross into the penalty area with his left foot, which resulted in City winning a corner.
The freedom Scott, voted the Championship’s Young Player of the Month for February, is given in central midfield under Pearson allows him to roam anywhere, which makes him more difficult for opponents to pick up.
The graphic below shows Scott’s forward carries of 10-plus yards distance in the league this season, where he is averaging 3.2 carries of over 10 yards per 90 minutes as well as carrying the ball into the final third 1.6 times per game.
Defensively he is just as strong, with only 13 Championship players having made more tackles than Scott at an average of 2.3 per game as of the weekend’s fixtures. He ranks in the 95th percentile for tackles in the defensive, middle and attacking thirds, again showing how active he is all across the pitch.
His ability with the ball at his feet has led to him being nicknamed the ‘Guernsey Grealish’, with the England international labelling Scott a “top, top talent” following that recent meeting in the FA Cup. Scott identified Grealish as his favourite player as a youngster, at a time when training with the academies at Southampton and Bournemouth required flights from his home in the Channel Islands to the mainland every weekend.
His release by Southampton as a 12-year-old led to him signing for hometown club Guernsey FC in the Isthmian League’s South Central Division (the eighth tier of English football), where he became their youngest-ever player aged 16, before signing for Bristol City on a pre-contract agreement in 2020.
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“Guernsey is very unique; it’s a small island so we generally know every player and you see them grow up,” says Guernsey FC manager Tony Vance. “I’ve known Alex since he was probably four or five; you tend to know the ones that look really promising at a very early age.
“He was at Southampton for a few years and they’re probably frustrated now that they released him and he came back to Guernsey. When he was back over here he was a little bit disillusioned with football at around 15.
“In terms of playing for your island, there is definitely a sense of pride and ownership because we all care so much about it. What’s been interesting about his journey is while he wasn’t at a club as an academy player from very early, he never had a proper sort of apprenticeship. He got his apprenticeship by flying over and playing in men’s football in non-League (with Guernsey). That can have a real positive impact on players over being in an academy where everything is safe and results don’t matter as much.
“It’s no surprise that his statistical information is backing up what people are seeing, because his numbers were always good for us. There are things he does that can’t be measured at our level, like the way he can drive through players and break lines. The other thing he’s exceptionally good at is winning fouls — the way he puts his body between players to gain the advantage for such a young age, it’s very impressive.”
Scott playing for Guernsey in the eighth tier of English football (Photo: Guernsey FC)
Nic Legg, one of Guernsey’s directors, says: “I remember the first training session he (Scott) came along to because Tony actually said to me that it might be worth getting some footage done of the session and do some media around it, because he thought Alex could be that good, and a friend of mine came along and filmed the training session.
“And some of our senior players were kind of looking at Alex and they knew how good he was. We knew he was different, we knew he was really special.
“Obviously the challenge as a 16-year-old was it’s OK to be good in training but when you go into a physical league like we play in, it’s a completely different environment. And then Alex had an opportunity to travel away with us, he was on the bench and he came on to make his first appearance away from home. He didn’t score but he hit the crossbar with what must have been his second touch. He did a few bits of skill and there were probably about 100 people at that game but you could see people saying, ‘Who is this?!’
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“The fans loved watching him. It was really exciting and it became apparent very quickly that if we could give him an opportunity to move on, that’s exactly what we needed to do. The first thing that struck me about Alex and also his family when he came to us was, as a 16-year-old, how polite, humble and grounded he was. I always knew when he went to Bristol City, however well he did, he’d settle in and make a really good impression. For the football club in terms of losing his talent it was obviously disappointing for the fans, but incredibly pleasing to show the platform that the football club can give.”
Guernsey are an amateur side so won’t receive any development fee or sell-on clause should Scott land that big-money move to the Premier League — the club are a registered charity who have to pay for the flights and accommodation for every team who travel south from the mainland to their island around 50km (30 miles) off the French coast for games at the 5,000-capacity Footes Lane stadium.
But Bristol City are increasingly taking note of what they are doing.
Scott’s fellow teenagers Ben Acey and Tim Ap-Sion have also signed for them from Guernsey FC and City sent now-first-team full-back Cameron Pring on loan in the other direction when he was coming through their academy.
As things stand, Scott remains an integral part of Pearson’s side as they look to improve on a 17th-place finish last season. Should his future lie in the Premier League — and any length of time watching him play suggests such a move is inevitable — then the data based on this season is encouraging.
The smarterscout pizza chart below, which employs advanced analytics to break down elements of a footballer’s game into different performance, skill and style metrics, shows Scott’s strengths (carry and dribble volume, defending intensity, disrupting opposition moves) when adjusted to Premier League standard.
Scores are generated to show how often a player completes a specific action and how effective they are at them compared to peers in the same position, which is encouraging for Scott given his age.
Premier League interest in Scott, who has 16 England caps from under-18s to under-20s, is justified given his progress but teams need to be prepared to pay big money for one of the EFL’s brightest young talents.
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“It wouldn’t surprise me that clubs are interested in him, but there have been no bids,” Pearson said after the Blackpool game. “Whoever makes a proper bid at some point will have to put in a really big bid. He has to be more than £25million, he shouldn’t go for less than that. Since he made his debut, he’s played upmost of 80 games for us. Some people talk about playing in a second season you can get a drop-off, but I don’t think we have seen that at all.
“I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it, I’m aware of speculation but that’s all it is. There’s no doubt in my mind we’ll have to deal with bids this summer.”
Coup for USA?
Wonderful player, we should really try to make a move on him. If it works out he is £100m player in 6M
Ya, "born to Nigerian parents in the USA and was raised in England".
Might finally have someone to help them score goals - don't seem to have "regular" goalscorer since the days of Dempsey and Donavon.
Hojlund should probably stay at Atalanta for at least another season.
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