Tottenham Hotspur may still be working on getting new faces into the first team, but they’re doing a hell of a job getting their young talent out on good loans. The latest comes out of Germany and Croatia, and says that Tottenham’s towering 18-year-old Croatian central defender Luka Vuskovic has been given the “green light” to join Hamburg SV on a “dry” loan until the end of the season.
I know there are a lot of Spurs fans who are puzzled by why Vuskovic is heading out on loan at all, when he looked incredible on loan in Belgium last season and impressive when playing preseason matches with Spurs. If you accept the premise that Vuskovic is a player with an immense ceiling who might not quite be ready for Champions League and Premier League football, but would probably be already among the better defenders in the Championship, then a loan to a bottom-half Bundesliga club is pretty much an ideal destination for him.
Germany is a top tier league. Hamburg is a pretty bad team, finishing 2nd in the 2. Bundesliga and promoting back to the top flight this season. That’s a pretty enticing recipe for a player like Vuskovic, who will get the biggest challenge of his career up to this point and should get plenty of first team minutes. He’ll get to play against some of the best players in world football a couple of times next season when Hamburg play Bayern Munich, Dortmund, and Bayer Leverkusen, and will also play a bunch more teams that probably aren’t significantly better than Hamburg. If he can succeed as a defender in the Bundesliga next season, I will have no problems at all believing that he’s ready to be the next Dean Huijsen in the Premier League.
As good as he is now and as high as his ceiling probably is, making him Tottenham’s 4th/5th CB and relegating him to spot or cup minutes probably won’t do him as much good as playing every week in the Bundesliga. I like this loan a LOT and think it will be better for Vuskovic’s development than sticking around.