Liverpool have developed a reputation for having one of the best academies in world football in recent years.
The club has the ability to show prospective additions a clear pathway to the first-team, and the Reds’ senior squad has been littered with academy graduates in recent years.
Trent Alexander-Arnold, Curtis Jones, Harvey Elliott, Conor Bradley, Jarell Quansah and Coaimhin Kelleher are just some of the examples of recent graduates from the Kirkby to have become important parts of the team at Anfield.
The club have adopted the strategy of recruiting some of the world’s most promising youngsters to the academy, and it is clearly working.
Liverpool’s recruitment strategy is clearly working
Lewis Koumas, Trey Nyoni and Rio Ngumoha have all established themselves as important first-team squad players in the early days of Andoni Iraola’s tenure at Anfield.
Koumas is a true academy product, having signed for the Reds at u11 level, but Nyoni and Ngumoha were both signed aged 16.
The pair have absolutely set the example for current academy players, and are proof for any youngsters contemplating a move to LFC that the pathway to the first-team is well and truly open.
Paul Joyce highlighted the effect the young trio are having on Liverpool’s current crop of academy players in a recent piece for the Times.
Joyce revealed ‘high-fives, hugs and handshakes’ between Koumas and the Liverpool u18s who had travelled to Austria for the most recent round of the Champions League and UEFA Youth League.
Similar congratulations were shared between the youth contingent and Nyoni and Ngumoha too, and Joyce highlights the admiration the academy players have for the peers they one day hope to emulate.
Anyone in the Liverpool academy will be looking at the success of Liverpool’s new golden trio and thinking that could one day be them, and that shows Liverpool’s strategy is working.