After a few years in the relative wilderness, England’s Under 21 squad is once again looking in rude health, containing more household names, known quantities and “future captains” than it has for a good while. But, as history shows, they will not all go on to fulfil their potential. Sport.co.uk looks back at the Top Ten Unfulfilled starlets…
1. Freddy Adu – Championship Manager? A positive message from a fortune cookie? An agent shouting literally from the rooftops? Whatever it was that launched the ‘Freddy Adu is the new Pele’ festival of hyperbole, it’s left the young American as possibly football’s foremost example of, you know, this kind of thing. Spent last season on loan at Monaco from Benfica but clearly did not pull up any trees, if his continued not-quite-Pele-ness is anything to go by.
2. Francis Jeffers – Soon after joining Arsenal, at some point, Francis Jeffers must have been struck by lightning. What happened so suddenly to the excrement-off-a-shovel dynamism he displayed as a youngster at Everton, where his goals, movement and touch prompted Alan Hansen to compare him to Dennis Bergkamp and Arsene Wenger to part with £10m for him? He couldn’t even score in the SPL with Rangers. That’s pretty poor form. See also Danny Cadamarteri, Michael Branch and Billy Kenny, although none of them even made it to their first big money move before fizzling out.
3. Richie Humphreys – For a man who was always harping on about erectile dysfunction, Pele was very premature in (apparently) proclaiming Humphreys to be the new Van Basten when he scored 3 admittedly impressive goals for Sheffield Wednesday in the opening 4 games of the 1996/1997 season. Humphreys has since been voted Hartlepool United’s Player of the Century, so maybe the Brazilian legend wasn’t so hasty after all.
4. Cherno Samba – It seems like only yesterday that the former Millwall prodigy was on the backpages of the redtops reportedly about to sign for Liverpool, where he would score lots and lots of goals and live happily ever after. Samba is now at Finland’s FC Haka, whom he joined from Plymouth Argyle. Chalk this one down to Championship Manager (again) and the fact that he has a really cool name. Perhaps his touted fame owed itself to wishful thinking on the part of our nation’s subeditors.
5. Sonny Pike – In his day, Pike – nephew of former Spurs and QPR striker Mark Falco – was sort of the Charlotte Church of football. At the age of just 7, he attracted publicity when he was offered a place at the Ajax academy. The following few years brought about a number of TV appearances, and the widely-held assertion that he was one of the greatest young talents ever to emerge from these shores. Sadly, all this pressure at such a young age took its toll – he suffered a nervous breakdown and ended up studying psychology at Dundee University instead.
6. Javier Portillo – Portillo broke all of Raul's scoring records in the Real Madrid youth teams and is now appearing at…Ossasuna. Whom he joined from Gimnàstic de Tarragona. In the end, he was dragged down by a surname which is destined never to be cool or popular.
7. Lee Sharpe – By far the most successful name on this list, given that he won trophies and played 200-odd games for Manchester United. But this just made the revelry-fuelled descent into nowhere, via mediocrity, all the more remarkable. Anyone who was playing against Garforth Town around 2004 might well have come across a scruffily-bearded, aging pretty boy who claimed that he once scored a backheel against Barcelona in the Champions League. And what they may not have realised is that he actually did.
8. Sinama Pongolle and Antony Le Tallec – Although these French cousins have since gone on to forge careers in Spain and France respectively, their failure in the Premiership with Liverpool rather confounded their billing as “definitely the two best young players, ever, just you wait”. Joined by Bruno Cheyrou and countless others on the scrapheap of reject “new Zidanes”.
9. Seth Johnson – The poster boy of the Peter Ridsdale regime, Leeds United paid Derby £7m for the young midfielder in 2001, as well as handing him a £30,000-a-week contract (even though, as legend has it, Johnson’s agent went into negotiations hoping to hold out for £13,000-a-week). It’s fair to say that the transfer didn’t really work out too well for all concerned.
10. Darren Caskey – Captained the England side that won the Under 18 European Championship in 1993, even scoring the winner himself in the final against Turkey. He was all set to be a major player at Tottenham. Instead, he went on to be a decent player at Reading and Notts County, before embarking on a monster tour of the non-leagues.