Jack Clarke’s first game under his new boss, Lee Johnson at Sunderland, was also his last. Sunderland were joint top of League One heading into Saturday’s game at 15th-placed Bolton. Three days after joining on loan from Tottenham, Clarke came off the bench in the second half with Sunderland already losing 3-0. Bolton scored three more goals with Clarke on the pitch, and Johnson was sacked the next day after fourteen months in charge. The Athletic report Little Lee was sacked having ‘fallen short’. Sunderland may be sitting just a point away from the automatic promotion places, but they have played four more games than second placed Wigan and two more than leaders Rotherham. Fans aren’t exactly sad to see Johnson leave:

OFF YOU FUCK https://t.co/XVK0jcfwDU

— Andy Dawson (@profanityswan) January 30, 2022

Johnson’s last decision as Sunderland boss could be instructive for a few Leeds players right now. Clarke was one of three subs Johnson turned to, alongside Patrick Roberts and Alex Pritchard. All three were once considered among the brightest attacking prospects in England at different times. All three are now waiting to rejuvenate themselves at a rudderless club, playing at the lowest level of their careers, paying the price for trusting a manager who thought selling Luke Ayling for £200,000 was good business.

Manchester City paid Fulham £12m to sign then eighteen-year-old Roberts in 2015. During two-and-a-half years on loan at Celtic, he won three league titles, two cups and shone in the Champions League, even scoring and winning man of the match in a 1-1 draw against his parent club. A season in La Liga with Girona ended in relegation, and since then Roberts has been tracking a downward trajectory: another relegation with Norwich, Championship anonymity with Middlesbrough and Derby, a solitary league appearance in France with Troyes. This month he finally left City, but Sunderland were only convinced to give him a six month contract. Pritchard was similarly hyped at Tottenham after impressing for England’s youth sides and on loan at Brentford. His next step was up to the Premier League, but joining Tony Pulis’ West Brom on loan resulted in just two league appearances. Norwich and Huddersfield spent combined fees totalling nearly £20m to sign Pritchard permanently, offering a brief Premier League lifeline before he joined Sunderland in the third tier on a free transfer.

We know all about Clarke, who was so thrillingly unrefined when he broke into Leeds’ first team under Marcelo Bielsa. When Tottenham signed the winger, a Spurs fan I worked with at my old job asked me what to expect. He could be anything, I told him. By that I meant it wouldn’t have surprised me if he was playing for England in five years’ time, or a League One club. There are still two years to earn a phone call from Gareth Southgate, but it looks like Clarke might have surpassed my expectations for all the wrong reasons.

Maybe it didn’t have to be this way. When Clarke joined Spurs, Mauricio Pochettino was still manager. In the first half of Pochettino’s time at Spurs, he preferred to keep his most exciting young prospects close to the first team rather than sending them out on loan to the Football League. Harry Winks, Josh Onomah and Cameron Carter-Vickers were name checked as players they had rejected loan bids for. Teenager Kazaiah Sterling was told he would learn far more training alongside Harry Kane than playing with plodders in League One — like, say, Steve Morison. “When you give those players the opportunity to train with the senior squad, that is an even better experience [than going out on loan],” Pochettino told ESPN in March 2017. Less than a year later, he had changed his mind. Tottenham’s young players were too comfortable with the “luxuries” of playing for a Champions League club. “Sometimes you need to realise that life is not like we provide here,” he said in January 2018. “Sometimes it’s tough to achieve your dreams because you need to suffer. You need to fight to achieve them and to create your life in a good way.” Onomah, Carter-Vickers and Sterling were allowed to leave on loan, putting in place a policy Spurs are still following. Switching to Sunderland is Clarke’s fourth loan move, halfway through his third season since joining Spurs. His Sunderland debut makes a total of 778 minutes of league football, the equivalent of fewer than nine full matches, the majority during a loan spell at Stoke cut short by an achilles injury.

Pochettino’s change of heart and Clarke’s career since overdosing on Red Bull at Middlesbrough show how delicate the development of a young player is, how there is no right or wrong way to guarantee they reach their potential. Of the aforementioned Spurs players, only Harry Winks, the one not sent out on loan, is currently a member of their first team squad. That’s not to say that was even the right decision; prior to the appointment of Antonio Conte, each transfer window began with the assumption it really was time for stagnating Winks to leave permanently. Kazaiah Sterling experienced both approaches, training with Harry Kane and being sent on loan to League One on three separate occasions (including once to Sunderland). He has still ended up playing in the seventh tier for Potters Bar Town.

This month Cody Drameh and Crysencio Summerville have been trying to get their heads around a similar problem at Leeds United. Both players are part of the group of Under-23s closest to the first team, leaving them in the awkward position alluded to by Charlie Cresswell’s agent Hayden Evans on The Phil Hay Show. Being on the fringes of the first team means their minutes in the U23s have to be managed, which means weeks can pass when their most competitive game is a midweek murderball session. Bielsa has detailed exactly why he thinks this process will help Leeds’ best young talents in the long term, but he accepts that if developing players still want to leave it is the fault of his plan and not the player.

“Footballers are the ones who have the least opinions in the management of their careers,” says Bielsa, so if Drameh thinks a relegation scrap under Steve Morison at Cardiff is the best move for his career, Bielsa is happy to let him find out for himself. Drameh’s Instagram cull of any trace of association with Leeds was a bit embarrassing, but maybe he deserves credit for trying to take ownership of his career trajectory. There’s also the pandemic factor that gets overlooked too often. Both Drameh and Summerville moved to Leeds as teenagers, leaving friends and family in different cities and countries while their new home was in various stages of lockdown. Robin Koch, a senior international, found it difficult, so it must have been tough for two kids. Now life has opened up again, Summerville can’t eat out without being disturbed. It must be hard to deal with all the frustrations of being in the public eye without any of the fun bits of being in the public eye, namely playing at Elland Road on a Saturday afternoon.

The main question I’d like answered about the decisions of Drameh and Summerville (whose future is yet to be decided at the time of writing) is: what were they expecting? When Pochettino was explaining his decision not to loan out players at Spurs, he mentioned a two-year process similar to what Angus Kinnear alluded to on The Square Ball podcast ahead of the current season. After a year in the U23s, both Drameh and Summerville were beginning to appear in the first team. Halfway through their breakthrough season with the seniors, Drameh has made five Leeds appearances and Summerville eight. We can’t predict the future, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest they would have doubled those tallies by the end of the campaign, given the injury curse shows little sign of abating. Drameh came on in the FA Cup against West Ham and would have been an option for the league game, while Summerville has been unavailable recently due to a shoulder injury. If both players ended the season with double figures for appearances, wouldn’t that be a solid foundation to improve next season?

Summerville is yet to go full Drameh and burn his bridges, although there were signs of discontent a couple of weeks ago when he was posting cryptic messages to his Instagram stories. One was a reminder to trust in God during a test of Summerville’s patience, which could have been a reference to his injury, but the other was very much along the lines of ‘don’t fuck with me’. Given he once got his big brother to settle a training ground fight, he makes a fair point. Hamburg have been most heavily linked, but according to Phil Hay they are not his most likely destination, amid interest from a number of clubs in Germany and his native Netherlands. Hamburg provide a telling warning for Summerville, however. 5th in Germany’s second tier, they have space in their squad for a winger after loaning out Xavier Amaechi to Bolton. Amaechi was a highly rated England youth international when he left Arsenal for Hamburg aged eighteen, turning down a new contract in North London as well as approaches from Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Inter because he was promised regular starts in Germany. He has made three league appearances in three years at Hamburg, and didn’t even get to join in with Bolton’s thrashing of Clarke and co due to injury. If Hamburg can’t be arsed to develop their own young winger, why would Summerville trust them with his own career, when Bielsa has already explained how much he wants to keep his best prospects?

Appearing on Leeds United’s official podcast, Jack Harrison revealed another aspect of the education young players get at the club. Harrison says he is trying to mentor Summerville, knowing the difficulties and problems a winger is likely to face on and off the pitch. “I want to make sure that the young guys can come to me and talk about anything,” Harrison said. “I spend a lot of time with Cree Summerville as well. He’s a brilliant young player, but I try to talk to him about a lot of different things, like mentality and other things, just to try and help him out. As a winger playing in the same position, he is a great young talent and I want to help him as much as possible.” Should Summerville opt to go out on loan until the end of the season, is a fellow winger at a new club going to be as receptive and helpful to some kid coming in to take their place? Who’s doing that for Jack Clarke at Sunderland? Patrick Roberts?

The problem with youth development is it asks so many questions that can only be answered in hindsight. Part of Pochettino’s change of policy was realising the young players he had such high hopes for were not going to be good enough to improve a side he had turned into regular Champions League qualifiers. Promotion has already prompted a similar process at Leeds. Bielsa spent nineteen hours watching videos of Alfie McCalmont in lockdown, trying to spot the skills that could make him a Leeds United player, then decided a loan move to Oldham in League Two was his level. “The fact that Gotts is not here, Stevens is not here, Alfie is not here, Hosannah is not here, I live it as a failure, all those players who were close to the first-team but didn’t manage to get there — it’s a failure of my job,” Bielsa said earlier this season. Drameh and Summerville should take encouragement from the fact Bielsa thinks they are good enough to contribute and reach the required standard. For Bielsa, a six month snapshot loan is not much use in a process that takes years of dedication, from a quick peek at fourteen-year-old Pochettino’s legs one night to handing him his Argentina debut thirteen years later. But when one successful loan is all it can take to change a player’s immediate fortunes, they can’t be blamed for taking the risk. When there is no way of telling what choice will be right or wrong, I’m just glad I’m not the one making the decisions. ⬢