This weekend’s SW6 derby might become even spicier after the Evening Standard reports this morning that Chelsea are trying to lure young Fulham starlet Luke Harris to Stamford Bridge.
The seventeen year-old, on the bench for three of Fulham’s Premier League games so far this season, made his professional debut in last month’s League Cup defeat at Crawley Town. Harris, who is currently on a two-year scholarship at Craven Cottage, scored a superb hat-trick as Steve Wigley’s under 21s demolished a Chelsea side featuring several first-teamers at Kingsmeadow in August and that seems to have stirred the Blues’ hierarchy into making public their admiration for the Welsh under-19 international skipper.
Harris, tipped for a shock call up to Rob Page’s senior Welsh squad in the forthcoming international window, scored thirteen times in seventeen league appearances for Fulham’s under 23s last term at the age of just sixteen – as Wigley’s side stormed to the PL2 Division 2 title. He has yet to put pen to paper on a professional deal with the Whites but is believed to be happy at Fulham – especially after being integrated into the first-team squad by Marco Silva having impressed the head coach during an outstanding pre-season tour of Portugal.
I thought we had a deal with Liverpool?
Yet another big club stealing our boys. After all the work Fulham put in to bring them through. It’s a disgrace that’s it’s allowed to happen and had to be stopped unless these clubs pay big money for them.
The club needs to do more to stop this happening. There a quite a few things they could and should do.
Brentford shut down there academy because clubs would cherry pick their best players.
I’m not suggesting we do the same-however we need a new dof to align him or her self with the academy in order to implement some policies and procedures to protect our assets.
Here we go again we have to put a stop to this we can’t keep losing our best youngsters to other clubs or what is the point of having an academy if we keep losing our best youngsters.
What’s the point in going to Chelsea unless he wants to spend his whole career on loan?
It really must be spelt out to our grads that they will not get proper game time at the bigger clubs. There are a few exception but their development will be better here. If its money based then we have to fix that because a few thousand now could be worth millions later. And sign the better ones up to longer contracts when they initially sign pro forms.
We can’t afford to keep losing future talent as we have in the past
Reality very little we can do and if I was an agent of a young player why would you allow them to sign a contract beyond the age of 18/19 !! Either if your a Fabio the world is your oyster and you get the choice to either stay or go or if your not quite Fabio you’ll get an offer from Fulham anyway. Win win for the player and agent. Very little we can do