Football holds many parallels for teen prodigy
Rajasthan Royals signed 13-year-old Vaibhav Suryavanshi, IPL's youngest player, for ₹1.10 crore, sparking hopes despite risks of early promise fading.
“What were you doing at 13?” Rajasthan Royals’s post on X bore a heart in pink, the team’s colour, and the name of the youngest player in Indian Premier League (IPL) history: Vaibhav Suryavanshi. The left-handed batter wasn’t born when the League began in 2008. Now, he’s been signed on a ₹1.10 crore contract – more than triple his base price of ₹30 lakh – after Royals won a bidding war for him with Delhi Capitals in Jeddah on Sunday.
There’s no denying Suryavanshi has what it takes: he made his first-class debut aged 12, three years younger than Yuvraj Singh (15 years and 57 days) and Sachin Tendulkar (15 years, 230 days), scored a 62-ball hundred against the Australian U19s, and aggregated nearly 400 runs in the Vinoo Mankad Under-19 Trophy last year.
But Suryavanshi is also in uncharted territory in IPL’s brief history. No one as young as Suryavanshi -- and never mind the constant noise about age fraud that forced his father to speak out after the auction -- has made a mark in the league.
Not so in football, where young stars, albeit, not as young as Suryavanshi, aren’t a novelty. Think the Busby Babes, Fergie’s Fledglings. Think Pele winning a World Cup at 17 and Kylian Mbappe at 19. Think Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal. Think Barcelona winning the 2022-23 La Liga with their youngest squad of the century, with an average age of 25 years and 169 days. Think Arsenal’s Invincibles, which won the Premier League undefeated with an average age of 23.05.
So who says you’ll never win anything with kids? Except, of course, Liverpool legend-turned-pundit Alan Hansen who made that ill-fated prediction in 1995, while commenting on Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson turning to academy graduates. Eleven out of 13 of the graduates making it into the first XI isn’t bad, wrote Gary Neville, one of them, Fergie Fledglings, in his autobiography “Red.”
But the former Manchester United and England right-back also added: “We were a rare generation, so much so that I honestly wouldn’t speculate when there will be another group like it.”
And therein lies a cautionary tale, for Suryavanshi as much as for Yamal, the 17-year old La Liga prodigy. .
Of all the top scorers in the men’s under-17 football World Cup history, only Cesc Fabregas, Carlos Vela and Victor Osimhen have had success with senior teams.
Several others fell by the wayside.
Remember Rhian Brewster? Along with Phil Foden, Morgan Gibbs-White, Callum Hudson-Odoi, he was one of the stars in the England team that came from behind to beat Spain in the 2017 under-17 World Cup final. After three years and zero first team appearances at Liverpool, the 2017 Golden Boot winner plays for Sheffield United in The Championship, England’s second division. Adriano (top scorer in 1991) couldn’t even go that far.
Search for any version of “Promising Footballers Who Did Not Make It” and pretty much every Google search will throw up one name at the top: Freddy Adu. Before he was 15, they called him America’s Pele and got him to shoot a commercial with the three-time World Cup winner. At 14, Adu played the under-20 World Cup and didn’t look out of place against Marcelo and David Luiz of Brazil or Uruguay’s Luis Suarez and Edinson Cavani. By then, Adu had a million-dollar deal with Nike. Aware that he was in the building, Shaquille O’Neal stopped training ahead of a Los Angeles Lakers game . Adu’s salary of $500,000 made him the Major League Soccer’s highest paid player in 2004.
“He had the same stature as Messi,” former USA under-20 coach Thomas Rongen told The Guardian last February. In 2006, at 16 years and 243 days, he became the youngest to play for the US senior team. That record remains unblemished.
Then, Benfica came calling. The offer to play in Europe was too good to resist. But it began a spiral that never bottomed. That move was the first in a long saga of loans and transfers that unspooled a career promising so much more than 17 internationals and an MLS Cup winner’s medal.
Rongen said Benfica was a step too high for Adu. The man whose mother won a green card lottery and moved to the US from Ghana simply couldn’t deal with the hype and the scrutiny that came with it.
Or take Bojan Krkić, who was younger than Messi when he made his first team debut at Barcelona in 2007. He burned bright, but he burned short. In a nomadic career across continents, Krkić played only once for Spain.
Javier Saviola, Adnan Januzaj, Jermaine Pennant – the list of those whose promise belied performance is long.
And it isn’t just football. Only four – Stefan Edberg, Lindsay Davenport, Andy Murray and Andy Roddick – have won the US Open senior and junior singles titles. Edberg did the double at Wimbledon as well along with Roger Federer, Bjorn Borg, Pat Cash, Amelie Mauresmo and Martina Hingis.
Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja are the only players from the 2008 under-19 World Cup winning squad to have had notable international careers. If, like Martin Odegaard who was a star already at 15 when Real Madrid signed him but whose career was revived only on joining Arsenal in 2021, Prithvi Shaw can find his way back, he would be the second after Shubman Gill to have consolidated a berth in the senior India squad from the side that won the 2018 under-19 World Cup.
It is a trend that makes the quintet from the 2000 U-19 World Cup-winning squad who had senior international careers – Venugopal Rao, Ajay Ratra, Reetinder Sodhi, Mohammad Kaif and Yuvraj Singh – an exception.
A study by the University of Essex last June said that more than 95% of footballers at Premier League academies don’t make it as professionals.
It will have to be seen how Royals provide this boy from Samastipur in Bihar a good environment to grow, as coach Rahul Dravid has promised, in a competition where restriction on retention and auctions can make it difficult for a franchise to do that. But about this they are sure: they have a phenom in pink.
