Record-breaking Liverpool ace is on the way back and Jürgen Klopp just rewarded his talent
Liverpool has a record-breaking teenager still making his comeback. Jürgen Klopp was able to reward him with a place on the bench vs Toulouse in the Europa League.
The development paths for young footballers are rarely the same. Some mature early and some take longer, and Liverpool staff often have to make judgments on who is ready.
Humans are never exactly alike and footballers are no different. Just take Steven Gerrard as an example. Arguably one of the best Liverpool players of all time, he only really started to break into the first team at 19 years old.
If you compare Gerrard with someone like Jude Bellingham, who by that age already had a plethora of international appearances and more than 100 first-team games, it’s easy to see how development varies from one player to the next.
Not everybody can be expected to be a Bellingham or a Michael Owen for that matter. In the case of Gerrard, like many other young footballers who bloom ‘late’, he was also often held back by growing pains. Or more precisely, adolescent musculoskeletal issues.
This is not a rare thing in football. Teenagers often develop and grow at different rates. Gerrard, when he was 17 to 18 years old underwent a big growth spurt which meant Liverpool had to manage him carefully and that delayed his emergence into the first team.
Erling Haaland had to undergo a similar process at Molde back in Norway, when he too experienced a huge growth spurt and the club held him back from playing football. I remember talking to Molde FK scout John Vik for First Time Finish about this very subject.
