Manchester United and Liverpool snooping for Patrick Roberts

[Frankie-Peter Taylor]

Price quoted at £1m, which I feel should be rejected for both the good of Roberts and the club.

http://www.goal.com/en-gb/news/2896/premier-league/2013/03/28/3859242/manchester-united-and-liverpool-chase-fulham-starlet

[cmg]

...and so it begins!

[A Humble Man]

This is the catch 22 of having a good academy the top teams steal or your best players.  

Look at the players Southampton have lost over the years.

[TonyGilroy]

But for good money. We raid lower league teams for their young talent.

There's a food chain - young players too good for us will be captured by bigger clubs whilst we do the same to our inferiors. The more money we have the higher up the food chain we can hope to go.

[Jack Fulham]

this kid is going places. Hopefully he will decide to finish his development with us though, would like to see him in first team before he does leave.

Interestingly someone said on Tiff as we're now classed as category 1 academy by EPPP, it will be harder for clubs to poach our players.  No doubt there is plenty of scouts at the Dallas Cup considering that the teams are from all over the world. Thankfully Roberts is away on England duty so he couldn't go.

[filham]

The s1ngle failure in the MAF years is that our academy has failed to produce a good premiership player for our 1st team.This is not going to be rectified if we allow other wealthy clubs to cherry pick our top young talent.
To have good home grown players is so good for the fans, remember how we all loved Sean Davies, imagine a team with two or three players like him .

Absolutly essential that we see off any club poaching our developing talent.

[TonyGilroy]

The s1ngle failure in the MAF years is that our academy has failed to produce a good premiership player for our 1st team.

Very true but this has been addressed and we're seeing the evidence in Dallas. Self evidently it takes years of investment to create Premier League quality players but there seems to be a real prospect of top quality players coming through the academy and hopefully with some ready for next season.

[JackyFulham90]

It's key we keep Roberts and get him in the 1st team or our academy ambitions are pointless

[MasterHaynes]

Winning the dallas cup and Jol getting young players involved early in the first team training will hopefully persuade most, if not all the youngsters they are better off staying put for a while

[Burt]

I suspect that the viability of continuing to develop and grow our academy in part hangs on the ability to sell on some of the talent it produces to other clubs...

[fulhamben]

I suspect that the viability of continuing to develop and grow our academy in part hangs on the ability to sell on some of the talent it produces to other clubs...

one million now or wait a few years and possibly have a first team player for free.

[Barrie]

The club will do everything in their power to keep him.  Hopefully he's happy here and can see a clearer route to the first team with us.  I just worry that the others might try and tempt the kid and his family with financial gifts that we might not be able or willing to match.

[JackyFulham90]

Yes going Man Utd & Liverpool is what all players want to do but we are an attractive Premier League club now also with the factor of London & the quality of 1st team players we have I see no reason why he would want to leave until he is clearly ready to move on to a top team (Dembele)

[Andy_M]

Personally I don't believe a word I read on goal.com anyway

[SouthfieldWhite]

Firstly don't believe everything you read secondly Pat Roberts is a well grounded young man with good people at Fulham who he knows will only improve him so doubt he will go anywhere just yet

Filham you keep on how our academy don't produce first team players, and as I said to you in another post you are right but we now have some very good people at the club and I'm very confident we will start producing players, but it don't happen over night, our academy has come on leaps and bounds these last few years,

Keep the faith

The futures bright, the futures black and white

[JDH101]

With our survival pretty much guaranteed, can we not give him a few games in the first team? Show we mean business with his development and who wouldn't enjoy getting to play with players like Berbatov, Ruiz and Baird?  :005:

[HatterDon]

I wouldn't mind if someone stole my car AND my house and gave me a million quid in the process.

[Rupert]

Half a mo, didn't we have a thread a couple of days ago claiming the academy had produced nobody good enough for the Premiership? And now we are concerned that we may be offered a million quid for an academy player? I wish people would decide what they want, an academy producing players the big clubs will want to buy, or one that does not.
Could be worth doing a poll.