Tottenham have reportedly signed 15-year old Wigan starlet

Tottenham Hotspur have reportedly made a signing! According @lilywhite_rose, a Twitter account that closely tracks Tottenham’s youth activities and the academy, Spurs have secured the permanent signing of 15-year old defensive midfielder Alfie Devine from Wigan Athletic. The fee is suggested to be just £500,000.

Devine is the first in what’s probably going to be a huge outflow of talent from Wigan. The Latics are likely to have a 12 point deduction levied upon them this season by the Football League for going into administration, after their new owners basically committed financial malfeasance. That deduction has not yet been confirmed — it is being appealed — but if it goes through it means that Wigan are very likely to be relegated to League 1 and will result in whatever talent is at the Latics to probably leave for greener pastures.

You probably haven’t heard of Devine, and that’s okay — he’s a 15 year old kid playing in the academy of a Championship club. But he’s considered one of the brightest young stars at Wigan right now. A defensive midfielder, Devine hasn’t quite cracked the first team at Wigan but had played for the U23s as a 15 year old and has represented England at the U16 level.

At Tottenham, he will likely jump right into Spurs’ academy. Don’t expect to see him anywhere near the first team for a while yet, but he does appear to be a player that with time and training could be a very good player. These are, especially in these After Times, the young players which Spurs absolutely should be trying to scoop up whenever possible — talented youngsters for absurdly cheap prices that could turn into the stars of tomorrow. Devine might be a first team regular for Spurs, or he could flame out completely. It’s absolutely worth £500k to figure out which.

However, there’s news of another young Championship player that isn’t quite so good for Tottenham. According to the Athletic (£), there are two Premier League clubs who are leading the race to sign 22-year old QPR attacking midfielder Eberechi Eze, and despite Spurs being strongly linked with Eze earlier this year, Tottenham are not one of them.

David Ornstein claims that West Ham and Crystal Palace are the two clubs that are close to the signature of Eze, who has scored 13 goals for QPR this season. Spurs had been sniffing around and there was even talk of using Luke Amos as a possible makeweight, but Ornstein doesn’t even mention Spurs in this writeup, which is a bit weird. Maybe Spurs have decided that their attacking options are good enough without a player like Eze hanging around the first team, or maybe they’ve just moved on to other targets. Either way, it doesn’t appear that Spurs are going to sign Eze, like, Sunday morning.