As Josh McEachran departs Chelsea, a stark warning of overhyping emerging English talents

Richard Jolly profiles Josh McEachran - billed as Chelsea's next big hope but now signing for Championship club Brentford.

Josh McEachran spent a season on loan at Swansea City. He made one league start. PA

He was supposed to be the Chelsea Jack Wilshere, the slick left-footed passer who would herald a new generation of English midfielders at the 2014 World Cup.

He was also going to be the precocious anomaly, the first homegrown player to establish himself in the Chelsea side in the Abramovich era.

Or maybe not.

Josh McEachran does not represent the future any more; rather his supposed greatness seems a fantasy.

He may finally get first-team football at a west London club next season but it will be Brentford, who are set to sign him, to bring to an end a 15-year association with Chelsea.

It will bring a definitive end at Stamford Bridge for one who has been a great hope, fringe figure and forgotten man. He debuted at 17 and will be gone at 22.

McEachran’s tale represents a salutary warning to those making bold predictions and also to young players and to clubs who imagine that investing in academies represents a guarantee of players progressing to the highest levels.

There is a sense that emerging English talents can be over­hyped. McEachran certainly was; ludicrously, he was compared to Andrea Pirlo and Liam Brady.

Perhaps Stamford Bridge was not the right place for him.

Carlo Ancelotti was the only Chelsea manager to truly champion the midfielder and he was rarely trusted at a club where short-termism has tended to rule; even expensive imports, such as Romelu Lukaku, were not given extended runs in the team at a tender age.

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Nevertheless, it is notable that while Jose Mourinho is promising to give youth a chance, his attention is focused on teenagers.

They seem the future, just as McEachran did once. Instead his Chelsea career consisted of a dispiriting sequence of loan spells, which highlighted his limitations.

Brendan Rodgers’s Swansea City had the passing ethos to suggest McEachran would be ideally suited to them but he made only a solitary league start. He was reportedly deemed too slow.

When he went to Middlesbrough, he was outshone by Grant Leadbitter, another skilled distributor but one with more bite in the tackle and a greater eye for goal.

McEachran’s meekness, his capacity to be neat and tidy without offering invention or incision, was a microcosm of a greater shift, from street footballers to academy products.

In that sense McEachran is very much a 21st-century footballer.

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An earlier generation, such as Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney, had rough edges and cared little about pass completion rates but were imbued with a determination to personally make a difference.

In contrast, McEachran has never scored a senior goal – like Tom Cleverley, whose inability to decide games brought criticism in his Manchester United career, he never appeared the catalyst.

Elite clubs tend to either require players with defining attributes or who are excellent all-round performers and McEachran has ticked neither box.

He is part of a changing dynamic in the English game in another respect.

In a warning Raheem Sterling ignored, Gerrard talked of young players wanting too much too soon and Danny Higginbotham, in his autobiography Rise Of The Underdog, spoke of money proving a corrosive factor.

“Where it’s gone wrong is with the 17 and 18-year-olds,” he wrote. “They’re getting ridiculous money. They get a big contract because they’re progressing well but they haven’t made the first team yet. A four-year contract takes them up to 22. I’m not saying they all do it, but many take their foot off the gas. It’s the best contract they are ever going to have. At 22, when they have stagnated and drop down the leagues, they take a massive pay cut and get a reality check.”

Higginbotham did not mention anyone by name and it may be entirely coincidental, but McEachran signed a contract reputedly worth £1.5 million a year at 18, when he started dating a soap star.

At 22, he will drop down the leagues, no doubt with a pay cut and presumably to receive a reality check.

Rather than emulating Brady or Pirlo, he will compete with Jonathan Douglas for a place in the Brentford midfield.

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