"He's another Coutinho-type. Young Luis is exactly the same - a talented, very highly rated young player when he was at Sevilla but obviously spent last season at Barcelona B.”
That was Brendan Rodgers talking about Liverpool’s new €7.5 million arrival, Luis Alberto. On loan at Barcelona B last season, the Catalans did not take up an option to sign him, despite impressive performances.
So he went back to Sevilla who sold him to the highest bidder.
Yet just a few years ago the Andalusians may have rebuffed offers for him and integrated him into their first team at least for a couple of years.
In Ireland, perhaps there isn’t a great deal of knowledge about the brilliance of Sevilla’s academy over the past decade. But if you list some of the names – many current or former Spain internationals - to have emerged from it in the past 15 years, and a few eyebrows will be raised Carlo Ancelotti-style:
Carlos Marchena, Jose Antonio Reyes, Sergio Ramos, Jesus Navas, Antonio Puerta (who tragically passed away in 2007) and Diego Capel are among the top players to have emerged and earned international caps, while the likes of David Prieto and Kepa Blanco got first team opportunities initially.
Sevilla’s academy is well structured and includes age groups ranging from U8s to U19s and many of the aforementioned players passed through most of those age groups.
"Everyone has their price"
Reyes and Ramos might have left the club early on (the former has since returned to the Sanchez Pizjuan), but Navas and Capel were both key men in the first team when I was living in the city in 2008/09. And in the cases of Reyes and Ramos they played at least one full season for their hometown club before departing.
Yet in the last couple of weeks, Sevilla has chosen to sell some promising youth players. While Alberto has gone to Liverpool, Aston Villa swooped to acquire 22-year-old left-back Antonio Luna last week, while starlet Jose Campaña is said to be on Real Madrid and Barcelona’s radar given his status as a new Santi Cazorla of sorts.
The Alberto and Luna deals would have raked in a shade under €10 million. It seems a rather paltry figure for players with potential but when you see how much debt Sevilla are in and shrinking size and value of their squad, it partly explains the desperation to flog academy talent to the highest bidder.
At the end of the season, the club’s controversial President Jose Maria Del Nido claimed that every player in the squad had a price and just this month club icon Jesus Navas was sold to Manchester City after spending most of his life in the shadow of Sanchez Pizjuan.
In addition, half the squad were owed 10 per cent of their wages amid a backdrop which has seen debts of €15 million piled on annually. A sad situation for a club that was one of the few debt free teams in Spain when I was there.
And from now it is a slippery slope. Continuously selling off talented academy products, while down-sizing the first team squad can only end badly for Sevilla.
