Newcastle United academy manager Steve Harper has admitted that he was very disappointed to lose exciting young talent three years ago.
Newcastle are really looking to ramp up their development of the academy and bring through some top young players, but that hasn’t always been the case.
Speaking to the i, Harper shared how Newcastle had lost one of their most promising young players three years ago when another Premier League rival came swooping in for him.
Harper says there’s nothing Newcastle could do
Bobby Clark, son of Lee Clark, had spent seven years at Newcastle’s academy where he had gained a lot of recognition as being a very talented young player with the potential to play for the first team.
However, in 2021 before the PIF-backed takeover of the club had gone through, Newcastle sold Clark to Liverpool when he was just 16-years-old for a fee believed to be around £1.5m.
Since making the move, Clark has gone on to play for Liverpool’s first-team and featured in the Carabao Cup final helping Jurgen Klopp’s side to lift the trophy at Wembley against Chelsea.
Harper knew that Newcastle were losing a serious talent in Clark but that there was very little they could do given the current market and how important it is for clubs to have homegrown players in their squad.
On Clark, Harper said: “With Brexit everyone is looking at the same group of players so the internal academy recruitment market has got mega competitive and with the rules set up to encourage people to develop their own and sell them on it’s become even more competitive.
“It’s a sad development and it’s counterproductive. You don’t want a transfer market at U14 or U16 because you want kids learning on their doorstep in the right environment.
“I was in interim charge when Bobby [Clark] left. He was a big fish in a small pond. We did what we did to try and keep Bobby but I can understand why he wanted to leave at that time. He’s gone to an excellent academy at Liverpool under a top-drawer academy manager in Alex Inglethorpe and he’s gone on and won the League Cup which wouldn’t have been possible here.
“Unfortunately, we do everything we can to mitigate against that but the truth is every academy is losing players because of this internal transfer market and it’s something we do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
What could have been for Clark at Newcastle
Clark, of course, made what was the best decision for him at the time, but had he waited a little while longer Newcastle would have been in a completely different position to what they were in 2021.
Just a couple of years later and he could have found himself playing for a Champions League club breaking through into the first-team under Eddie Howe just like Lewis Miley has done this season.
It’s more of a blow for Newcastle and Harper who had been training him up all these years in the hopes that he would either go on to be a key player or garner a huge fee for the club in the future, but he was let go for very little.
Newcastle’s new owners are unlikely to make that same mistake again and instead have made huge strides to improve the academy and make sure that the best young players have no reason to go elsewhere for the better of their career.
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