What happened to the Premier League’s youngest ever player?

Matthew Briggs made history on the final day of the 2006/07 season. 13 years on he tells Richard Edwards how nothing after that quite went to plan

Matthew Briggs was thrown in at the deep end (PA)

At the age of 16 there are always more answers than questions. Self-doubt can wait. Just ask Matthew Briggs.

Whistled up to the Fulham first team by then manager Lawrie Sanchez, who had presided over just one win in 11 matches, Briggs made history by becoming the youngest player in Premier League history at Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium on the final day of the 2006/07 season. The world was at his feet.

The only questions running through his mind at the time were how many more appearances he would make and how long it would be before he became fully established in the top flight. The answers to both, he reasoned, would come sooner rather than later.

Now, almost 13 years on, and with his record having been broken in May 2019 by another Fulham player, Harvey Elliott, who went on to join Liverpool last summer, he has had plenty of time for reflection – and to wonder what might have been had he not been handed that debut while still at secondary school.

“I didn’t have any support at that time, it was a case of being thrown in and being expected to handle the pressure and the expectation,” he says. “I was given my debut and then for the whole of the next season I wasn’t involved in the first team at all. That was detrimental to my mental health – there was no explanation.

“I should have asked more questions. I was so young I didn’t think I was entitled to knock on the manager’s door or ask why I wasn’t part of the squad or what I needed to do to get into it. You’re dealing with grown men and I was just a kid.”

Which pretty much sums up the problem facing prodigiously talented youngsters across all sports.

It’s not only Briggs who has struggled. Reuben Noble-Lazarus made his Football League debut for Barnsley at the age of just 15 in September 2008. He was last seen playing for Chorley in the National League and is currently without a club.

Elliott, who is now at Liverpool, will hope for more luck than both of them but clearly faces an uphill battle to establish himself at Anfield. The previous record holder, meanwhile, can only look back on what might have been.

“As a 15 or 16-year-old kid I was playing reserve team football, youth team football and was the best of the bunch, I was really enjoying my football,” he says.

“I wasn’t expecting to get drafted into the first team. All of a sudden I’m plucked and made the youngest Premiership player. After that I didn’t know where I stood. I remember the following season I was struggling. I was asking myself ‘what’s wrong with you’. I was making stupid mistakes. I started questioning everything.

“The mental side of football, especially when you’re young is huge. You need to feel appreciated, you need to be made to feel like you’re a good player. I started to think that no-one really cared about me as a footballer. I would go into training but I didn’t have that same fire in me. Making my debut should have given me the motivation to work harder to get back in the team but no matter what I did it didn’t seem like I was going to be given another chance.”

He even began to question Fulham’s motives for handing him the opportunity in the original instance.

“I started to think it was a publicity stunt,” he says. “Fulham were getting some stick at the time for not bringing through young English players. I started to think they had thrown me in just to show that they were. They chucked me in. But then they chucked me straight back out again.

“I’ll admit it, there have been times when I almost wish I hadn’t made my debut and just come through like any other player at the age of 19, had that steady development. I look at Danny Welbeck, Andros Townsend, Chris Smalling and Jack Wilshere – these are all players I played with or against. I’m seeing them playing Premier League and international football and I was better than them. I was always the first person picked wherever I played.”

Briggs stayed with Fulham until 2014 (PA)

Briggs would stay at Fulham until 2014, but would wait over three years to make another appearance after that initial match at Middlesbrough. Loan spells at Leyton Orient, Peterborough, Bristol City and Watford and permanent switches to Millwall, Colchester and Chesterfield make Briggs a well travelled footballer. That roll-call, though, suggests he’s also an unfulfilled talent.

Currently playing for Danish club HB Koge, he is still desperately searching for the stability that has been sorely lacking in his peripatetic career. Now, working with the Twelve football consultancy – which involves the likes of ex-Everton and Celtic defender Alan Stubbs and former Rotherham boss Ronnie Moore – Briggs is hoping that his experience can help others thrown in at the deep-end and expected to swim immediately.

In between he’s looking forward to watching some former team-mates perform at Euro 2020 before doing his best to help navigate Guyana – the country of his grandmother’s birth – through qualification for the 2022 World Cup. All without being burdened with the tag that has followed him throughout his career.

“It was bit bitter sweet when the record got broken,” he says. “Part of me was sad to see it go after having it for 12 years but when he broke it, all the pressure went. It was a relief.”

If Elliott ever needs any advice, then Briggs should be his first port of call.