West Brom ‘busy’ in offering academy contracts – Ron Gourlay
West Brom are hoping to stop the exodus of academy players to other clubs this season as Ron Gourlay offered an update for fans.
The 2021-22 campaign saw highly-rated left-back Lino Sousa leave The Hawthorns without playing a game to join Arsenal and top-scoring youth striker Reyes Cleary also left the club when his contract expired in June.
The West Brom academy is also close to being dropped down to category two from next season but there is an audit before then which should see the Baggies remain in category one.
“We’ve tried to stop the leaking of players leaving for other clubs,” Gourlay said, as quoted by the Express and Star. “There’s a lot of young players coming through now and we’ve got to make the space for them to develop.
“We took some big decisions on that, involving taking some young players into the first-team squad who are really developing well.
“It’s nice to see Caleb Taylor and Zak Ashworth look as if they can hold their own. We’ve been quite busy with the young players making sure they are on long-term contracts.”
Critical
At a time when we are unsure how much money we are going to be able to spend to improve the first team, we need the academy to be producing quality players to help Steve Bruce out.
We saw last season with Taylor Gardner-Hickman that the talent is there, ready and waiting to be unleashed onto the Championship as long as the manager believes in them as Bruce did with the 20-year-old.
Both Ashworth and Taylor got their senior debuts towards the end of the 2021-22 campaign and would love to be involved even more this time around but we could do with even more knocking on the door for game time.
Cleary is the one who got away really after he scored so many goals in the youth teams but we never gave him a chance and instead played Andy Carroll up front to little effect.
As soon as we get that clear pathway to the first team established, we won’t have any issues in keeping our best talents but that requires the trust of the manager who isn’t renowned for his playing of youth prospects.
In other West Brom news, Albion have launched a wild £10.6million bid to sign a Brazilian midfielder this summer with Norwich City rivalling them.
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