Hey, some good news! Just a week after making his club debut against Doncaster Rovers in the EFL Cup, Tottenham Hotspur academy graduate and attacking midfielder Luca Williams-Barnett has signed his first professional contract with the club. Spurs made the announcement on social media and on the club website.
It feels like we say this every time a new player is hatched from the academy, but in this case there isn’t a ton of hyperbole — LWB is one of the most promising players to come out of Spurs’ development program in many years. Heading into this season he has been utterly dominant at the youth level, scoring 20 goals and tallying 12 assists in all competitions at the U18 level. He has been too good for the U18s for a while, and has been more than holding his own at the U21 level. The past few weeks he’s been training with the first team and deservedly came off the bench for his debut last Wednesday at home vs. Doncaster. Luca Williams-Barnett is 17.
So to land him on a professional contract as soon as he’s available to sign one is an achievement, because in this day and age it’s no longer a given. It means that we’ve convinced Luca that there’s a viable path from the academy to the first team if he continues to improve and apply himself, something that players like Noni Madueke, now at Chelsea, did not feel they had.
That’s not to say that we should expect Williams-Barnett to come in and start pulling up trees. My guess is he’s going to be in line for a loan in the spring, and possibly next year as well unless he impresses Thomas Frank in preseason training next summer. He would join young players like Archie Gray (already a full-fledged first team member), Mikey Moore, Luka Vuskovic, and Will Lankshear as what could become the next young core of Tottenham Hotspur, if they all develop like Spurs hope.
Either way, this is fantastic news. Hopefully we’ll see more of LWB in the first team in the coming weeks and months.