West Ham United and Tottenham are looking to lure Fulham’s young Irish starlet Ollie O’Neill away from Craven Cottage as his contract runs down this summer, according to various reports this afternoon.
The Irish under-21 international, who was previously linked with a move to Arsenal, has failed to agree terms over a new deal at Fulham and the Hammers are interested in taking him to the London Stadium for a nominal development fee when his current contract expires at the end of June. The Athletic’s David Ornstein revealed West Ham’s interest in the talented midfielder this morning. O’Neill has starred for Steve Wigley’s under 23s, who won the PL2 Second Division this season, scoring six goals and adding three assists in 23 league appearances.
The 19 year-old was yet to make his senior debut, but was an unused substitute when the Whites were knocked out of the League Cup on penalties by Leeds United in September. Tottenham are tracking the Ealing-born midfielder, according to the Sun, who scored a last minute winner on his under-21 international debut against Sweden earlier this season. Losing O’Neill, who is a natural central midfielder or number ten, but has excelled on the left wing under Wigley would be a big blow to Fulham’s academy – especially with Fabio Carvalho poised to join Liverpool in July.
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Why are we again letting Academy players leave can West Ham and Spurs not produce their own youngsters we seem to produce good young players for other clubs then they come in and take them we still have not learned our lesson this is beginning to become a bit of a pxxx take now for our supporters
I totally agree with Kieth hasn’t Tony Khan learned anything about renewing our best youngsters contracts before they run down, yet he has renewed Tim Ream’s contract and I don’t think that was a priority as I can’t see him starting too many games in the premiership. We can’t keep losing our best youngsters in this way we are becoming a feeder club for other teams to steal our best youngsters for a pittance so wake up and sort this out now.
I assume that on some level the team has tried to re-sign a guy like this, but the player has demurred and waited to see if first team games were forthcoming (and for ONeill they obviously didn’t).
This is (at least in part) a consequence of our ‘unstable nature – always fighting for promotion or to stave off relegation the last half decade. Silva didn’t trust this kid enough to play him and the team can’t really throw a massive salary at someone who might turn out to be not quite good enough (like the majority of academy kids do) and when FFC’s level isn’t a sure thing from year to year.
Maybe Khan and the team could have done more to keep this kid (or Fabio, or Harvey E) but it sure seems like the biggest culprit here is our unstable league position. I think a lot of teams in our situation find this a tough pattern to break.
@30f – I think those are valid points, but I would counter that Norwich (a far more unstable club than us) have brought through Ben Godfrey (31 games as a 20 y/o), Jamal Lewis (22 games as a 19 y/o) & Max Aarons (41 games as an 18 y/o) in the past few years as well as the Murphy brothers before them. We have similar quality of players but have only brought through Sessegnon and Carvalho, although they never played together like the Norwich three.
There is a culture at Fulham about not blooding our own youth players and it is frustrating when you consider how average some senior players have been. I hope this is changing under Silva, but we we really have only ourselves to blame: even this season when we dominated most games, the only young player to see time was Carvalho.
Sidenote: I don’t think we were ever retaining Harvey E, no matter what we did.
@AP – Yes, you and I are on the same page here. The issues with us keeping our young players do not come from poor deal making or not offering enough $$ to keep them, the problems come from how much the academy kids play (or don’t play).
It can be tough for coaches to pull the trigger on young players when the team is desperate for every point, but that is the challenge many teams face. That is the part (IMO) the team as a whole needs to get better at. As you said, if Norwich can do it …
I wonder how much the Khan’s (near?) limitless commitment to spend on FFC is actually a hindrance here. If there was less money available to sign Seri, Anguissa, Knoackaert, Wilson – do our youngsters get more run just out of necessity? Would that have us in a better position to keep those academy products – definitely. Would that make us a better team overall – I’m less sure of that.