JJ Gabriel saga won’t discourage clubs from searching for ever-younger talent

JJ Gabriel’s future has taken centre stage this week (Picture: Getty)

The story that a child wants to play football in a new place has been leading many sports sections for the past few days. The boy in question is the 15-year-old JJ Gabriel, the new place probably Spain.

But the aggravating factor in all this is that he is currently registered with Manchester United, still one of the biggest football clubs in the world.

In this context it feels a little icky adding my voice to the noise around this gem of a player but this both is and is not about him.

The outrageous level of interest in footballers too young to drive a car, smoke or hold down any other kind of job is only set to increase in the coming years – and the ages at which their moves become news will get even younger.

There are a number of reasons for this but the speed of acceleration is a direct result of the spending we’ve seen this Premier League transfer window. More money than ever before was exchanged between Premier League clubs, with a £100million price tag no longer signifying a generational talent but instead merely a very good, currently suitable midfielder. £3.7billion spent all in across the window, nearly half of that in intra-Premier League transfers.

The financial might of the league means the rest of Europe has long been unable to spend comparably to clubs in England, with a few obvious exceptions in the ‘European Super League’ posse.

The knock-on effects become clear speaking with former Norwich and Huddersfield manager David Wagner this week in Germany, where he is now the boss of RB Leipzig’s academy.

‘We have to make a certain percentage – double figures for sure – of our team be produced by our academy… because the market in the last five, seven years went so expensive. It even makes it more important that we start to produce first-team players from the academy,’ he told me.

David Wagner is now the boss of RB Leipzig’s academy (Photo: Getty Images)

Leipzig’s amazing success signing Yan Diomande for €25m in July last year and selling him a year later, still aged just 19, to Real Madrid for €100m more is key to this ability to continue to compete.

‘You might have asked when we sold Benjamin Sesko, Xavi Simons, Lois Openda, I don’t know how many goals we sold last summer: how can you qualify for the Champions League if you sold your best players? Well, by buying Diomande and building him up.’

Clearly you can’t expect to find a Diomande-level signing every year.

Leipzig’s CEO of sport Marcel Schafer works closely with Wagner to plan for the team’s future and spelt out what this means.

‘You need to go earlier on the players. Obviously it’s tricky because we’re talking about really young humans. If you see in the market now 18, 19, 20-year-old players are the rising stars in any top five league,’ he said.

‘So we have to go a little bit earlier: bring them already into our academy and develop them quick as possible into our first team.’

When you consider that Lamine Yamal is only just 19 and has a World Cup to his name, what 16-year-old Max Dowman was able to do against Ipswich on Tuesday night feels less like an outlier.

JJ Gabriel has asked to leave United (Picture: Getty)

Many exceptional players are verging on complete when still boys. Three factors intensify the JJ Gabriel storm.

First he is really, really good and already well known – The Telegraph likened his possible exit to Barcelona losing Lionel Messi.