Tottenham academy graduate Harrison leaves club

There’s another young Tottenham player who has now left the club to seek his fortune elsewhere. According to @lilywhite_rose, a twitter account that closely tracks Spurs’ youngsters and academy products, 22-year old striker and reserve player Shayon Harrison has left the club.

We’ve had our eye on Harrison for a couple of years now — he was ranked #7 on our list of Tottenham youngsters back in 2017 — but while he looked like a promising young player, it’s tough work being a young striker in the era of Harry Kane, and it’s always going to be very difficult to break into the first team. As the tweet mentions, he made one senior appearance for Spurs in the League Cup, and spent the second half of last season on loan in Australia with Melbourne City, where he scored 4 goals in about 1000 minutes of action.

Turning down another pro season at Spurs for the opportunity to get better, more quality minutes elsewhere probably makes a lot of sense for Shayon — he’s 22 now and needs to kick his career into gear if he’s going to have one. Shayon clearly didn’t develop in the end stages of his youth career the way Spurs’ coaching staff wanted him to, so this was probably inevitable. The only bummer is Spurs might have been able to get a nominal fee for him if they had sold him as a promising youngster a year or so earlier. Now it looks like he’s walking for nothing.

I always like to track the youngsters that leave the club and I’m sometimes surprised where they end up. I hope Shayon is able to have a successful career wherever he lands.