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From a league of their own: How big-money foreign imports are forcing England's best into the lower leagues

While Premier League clubs spend millions nurturing players through their academies – with the vast majority then failing to secure a first-team place – this season has seen the flowering of a number of outstanding footballers who have learnt their trade at the lower levels of the English leagues and now have the world at their feet

Nick Townsend
Saturday 28 November 2015 19:46 GMT
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Tottenham's Dele Alli learnt his trade at MK Dons
Tottenham's Dele Alli learnt his trade at MK Dons

Another captivating exhibition by Dele Alli in last Thursday’s Europa League tie at FK Qarabag will have surprised no one. Such performances have become his touchstone. But it is the explosive progress of the teenage Tottenham midfielder since the summer which has astonished all but those who witnessed his development within what has become a fertile breeding ground for precocious talent – the playing fields of Milton Keynes.

Alli’s former MK Dons youth team-mate Brendan Galloway, who is also 19, is another product from this same rather incongruous setting. He set out a year earlier for Goodison Park, and such has been his impact this season, filling in for the injured Leighton Baines, that Everton’s manager, Roberto Martinez, plans to reward the Zimbabwe-born defender with a new contract after only 14 Premier League appearances.

Two very diverse talents; yet both careers were finessed within a council-owned training base where they and their team-mates had to vie for green space with dog-walkers, kite-flyers and model-aeroplane pilots.

What both thrived on was the opportunity to gain experience and flaunt their talents. Galloway became the youngest first-team player in MK Dons’ history at 15 years of age, while Alli played for more than two years in League One before his move to north London.

Others, too, have prospered within MK’s set-up (the club have plans for a new state-of-the-art facility); men like Sam Baldock, who moved on to West Ham, and Sheyi Ojo, signed by Liverpool in the face of stiff competition from Chelsea. No wonder scouts have long assembled in numbers at youth games, and managers and coaches, familiar with racking up air miles in pursuit of precocious talent, are appreciating that it can be found being nurtured and developed much closer to home – and not just at MK.

As David Wetherall, the former Bradford City defender now head of youth development at the Football League, says: “A lot of Football League clubs can point to their track record of players graduating from their academy into the first team. I’m sure that will be an attraction when young boys are considering who to sign for.” Not all will be boys. There have been the slow burners and those who have resurrected their careers after initial rejection. The poster boy for this is undoubtedly Jamie Vardy, undoubtedly the footballer of the year so far, who was both.

At one time he worked in a factory making carbon-fibre splints for collapsed foot arches, and his journey via Stocksbridge Park Steels, FC Halifax Town and Fleetwood Town to become Leicester City’s goal-poaching phenomenon has been an education to all players in the lower echelons (he was initially released by his hometown club, Sheffield Wednesday).

Like Alli, he has seized the imagination of the public, offering an inspirational narrative to so many others not on the books of the moneyed. Comparisons can be invidious, not to say destructive, and some may have been tempted to get above themselves after being bracketed in the same sentence as the Bayern Munich striker Thomas Müller and Barcelona forward Neymar. But Vardy continues to look like a man who will refuse to dwell on the plaudits and allow his standards to drop.

Charlie Austin was released by Reading before making his name at QPR

The same can be said of Charlie Austin, who was released by Reading but hiked his way back through non-League football and Swindon Town to the lower reaches of the Premier League with QPR and an England call-up.

As for Alli and Galloway, we will never know if they would have similarly prospered at the multi-million academies of one of the Premier League leviathans.

In truth, there would have been a good chance had Alli joined Tottenham as a boy. Spurs, Arsenal and Southampton – the last-named of which have produced Gareth Bale, Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain over the years – each have nine players in their squads who have progressed from their youth ranks to play in the Premier League, according to a recent review by Sky Sports.

In contrast, Kelechi Iheanacho is the only former Manchester City youngster to feature for the current first-team squad in the top flight, and while Chelsea source some of the most gifted young players from home and abroad it is a disquieting reality that John Terry is the only former Blues’ youth player in the current squad to have reached more than 10 Premier League appearances.

The much-heralded teenager Ruben Loftus-Cheek appeared set to buck that trend this season, but thus far has made one Premier League start against Aston Villa, and even then was withdrawn by Jose Mourinho at half-time.

Southampton's academy have produced Theo Walcott, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Gareth Bale (pictured)

Alli, the same age as Loftus-Cheek, is absent against Chelsea today because of suspension, but already boasts 88 first-class appearance for club and country. Mike Dove, MK’s head of youth, says there are no limits to what he can achieve at either level. “The coaches here allowed him freedom to play. We’ve let him make mistakes. His group lost games early on by 10, 11-nil. It doesn’t matter. No one remembers those scores.”

He adds: “You do get players who have all the technical ability, but don’t have that want to succeed, that fear-free drive. It seems only yesterday that he was this little skinny kid here, but all the way along he’s never been fazed by a step up.”

Alli may have been an exception in League One, but today the lower leagues, and particularly the Championship, boast greater quality than they have ever done. The fact that the Euro 2016-bound Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales squads contain a number of players from the second tier of English football tells its own story.

But it is Alli, more than anyone, who has firmly nailed the notion that those below stairs cannot comfortably live with the aristocracy. Just three months after his final League One appearance, against Yeovil, he was nutmegging Real Madrid’s Luka Modric in a pre-season friendly before announcing himself emphatically three weeks later at Leicester, scoring Spurs’ equaliser.

Alli has been a mainstay of Spurs's first-team since being given his debut by Mauricio Pochettino

The rest is history in the making. His manager, Mauricio Pochettino, had warned in late September against a premature England call-up, claiming: “He has personality and good character. But it is too much of a rush to talk about bigger steps for him.”

Yet after 438 minutes of Premier League football Alli took the biggest stride of all, receiving the first of four England caps, and, more important, looking born to it.

Back on the playing fields of Milton Keynes, there couldn’t have been a greater surge of pride.

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