The recent departure of young talented striker Patrick Bamford is a sad indication of what has happened at Forest.
OK, so we have sold young players for a profit before, but they have always broken in at first team level and made progress in the team. Reid, Dawson, Jenas, Prutton, they all came through and started to make a name for themselves before we had to sell, and at the time for good prices.
But now we are losing talented youngsters who have played just a few minutes, and this illustrates how far we have slipped. We held on to Lascelles from Arsenal last season, could we do the same now?
That £1 million or so could help the whole team out and potentially save us from relegation, but it also robs us of a talent we nurtured and could have got a good year or two out of. But it’s the sad state these days that clubs at the very top can cherry pick youngsters for relatively low fees and store them in their youth teams.
No ends of other players have been poached in this way, indeed Paul Anderson in our own team was taken from Hull to Liverpool at a young age, but never made the grade. But the fee’s are so low at this stage that it makes fiscal sense, rather than buy these players for vastly higher fees later.,
Maybe Bamford will make it, maybe he won't, but £1millto Chelsea is nothing. To us these days it is so much more. We haven’t been a selling club in a long while. Now we have lost 2 players, one first team and one youth team member in quick succession.
We offered a very lucrative contract apparently, but no doubt whatever we could afford Chelsea could quadruple without even thinking about it, and who can blame a young lad wanting to get those huge wages and to work with Drogba, Lampard etc.
What it does show is we are slipping and become one of those clubs which sells its youngsters before they ever get anywhere. And that with the new Premier League rules coming in that makes it easier to poach youngsters, so this will become easier and cheaper for top clubs to do.
What I'm saying is get used to it.
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