Some slightly sad news if you’re a Tottenham Hotspur Youth Watcher™ — 18-year-old attacking midfielder and academy graduate Tynan Thompson has been sold to Manchester United.
Thompson is one of the academy’s more promising players in recent years, and his sale price and clauses reflect that view. £4m plus an equal amount in incentives, a 20% sell-on clause and matching rights is significant and actually reflects excellent value on a young player whom Spurs clearly didn’t want to sell.
But if what Gold says is accurate, this is about more than football. I don’t know what happened in Thompson’s personal life that might have precipitated this move, but it seems like a family decision to get a fresh start away from London and in Manchester. And well, you have to respect that. Sometimes the best thing for a young player is to let them go and establish themselves somewhere fresh.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a pathway for young players to break into this current Tottenham Hotspur side at the moment, and I can understand if that also factored into Thompson’s decision to leave Spurs for another club. I’m not sure he’ll have a better pathway at United than at Spurs, though.
It’s sad when you lose a promising young player to another club, but that’s football. I’ll keep an eye on his development over the next couple of years and hope he’s able to establish himself.