Behind the current academy graduates lie a fine crop of emerging young stars of the future: Fearon, Golambekis, Kanté and Josh Landers are all emerging into fine young players within the Hammers u21 side.
Behind them and under the spotlight today is West Ham youngster Martin Peychev, identified in todays Guardian.co.uk by Jacob Steinberg and included in their feature on the ‘next generation of the best talents at premier league clubs’.
Whilst Peychev is a name unknown to most of us – me included- he’s predicted to have a great future and finally be ‘the one’ who makes it from academy to first team regular.
According to Steinberg:
“The 16-year-old is a technical box-to-box midfielder who is making waves. From Southend, Peychev has represented Bulgaria at youth level. He is admired for his passing, vision, creativity and dribbling ability. The question is whether he can push on at West Ham, the club he joined at Under-9 level. Not many youngsters have established themselves in the first team in recent years.
Declan Rice seems an outlier at the Academy of Football. Others have made fleeting appearances at senior level but there appears to be a shortage of homegrown talent in east London at the moment. West Ham will hope that Peychev can buck the trend. “
You’d have to take issue with Steinberg’s suggestion that there’s a shortage of homegrown talent: Four academy graduates are on the cusp of becoming first team regulars with the four mentioned above all just a couple of years behind.
What it does highlight is the quality of coaching available at the Hammers Academy: Under Mark Noble’s direction and with a very high calibre of coaches – who’ve now moved upon to the senior squad- the Academy would seem to be in pretty good shape. Finding a new group of coaches to maintain that high calibre of player produced may well prove to be a challenge.
This may be a break from the past, given the standard of young players emerging from the Academy, because they were champions and also those currently in the senior squad were each congratulated on their loan seasons last year, in the Championship and League One (for Marshall). Not sure about Scarles?
This takes some doing, can’t congratulate the lads enough and it’s why everyone hopes they can make it and become fully fledged squad members fully involved in this coming season. Those who know, will probably say several seasons needed for some to make it. It is one of the most exciting aspects of this club and watching their U18, 21 games.
Congratulations to the Academy staff also recruitment scouts I guess and for sure, whoever they bring in, they’ll have to be bloody brilliant!
I wouldn’t say what Steinberg said was anything to take issue with.
As he said other Academy graduates have only made fleeting appearances in the first team. The only one you could take issue with is that, other than Rice, Ben Johnson made over 100 first team appearances. But outside of those two, only Grady Diangana made over 20 first team appearances.
So with only three Academy graduates in almost a full 9 years making over 20 first team appearances, I’d say “fleeting appearances at senior level” regarding the others is a pretty fair summary of it.
All sounds very good until I read that one of our brightest under 18 talents was just signed by Chelsea. Ebho is a talented right-back who joins Chelsea from West Ham United I read.