Bukayo Saka and Cody Gakpo truly blown away by player Tottenham allowed to leave for free

Tottenham Hotspur have made quite a name for themselves on the youth transfer front, signing top talents who go on to become first-team stars.

For instance, Spurs signed Destiny Udogie and Pape Matar Sarr in recent years, and both are now key players in Ange Postecoglou’s setup.

Lucas Bergvall, Archie Gray and Wilson Odobert also look like future stars, while Yang Min-hyuk looks like he could be exciting when he arrives at Tottenham.

However, there will invariably be those young talents who slip through the net, and one player who left Spurs several years ago has now gone on to new heights.

Indeed, the likes of Bukayo Saka, Cody Gakpo and Jadon Sancho have now taken to Instagram to praise the Tottenham academy graduate.

Tottenham academy graduate Noni Madueke excels on England debut

The player in question is Noni Madueke, one of the brightest young talents in the Spurs setup back in the mid-to-late 2010s.

Madueke left Spurs in 2018 to join PSV Eindhoven on a free transfer, and within a year, he was playing senior football for the Dutch giants.

The 23-year-old has since gone on to sign for Chelsea and, in 2023, he told Sky Sports News he originally made the move to PSV as he didn’t want to get “lost in the system”

Now, Madueke has made his England debut, coming on off the bench in the Three Lions’ 2-0 win over Finland in the Champions League.

Indeed, the Tottenham academy graduate provided the assist for Harry Kane – another player with a Spurs connection – to score his second of the game.

After the match, Madueke took to Instagram to celebrate his debut, and many of his peers responded with praise and complimentary emojis.

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Tottenham in ‘ridiculous’ homegrown player situation

Although Tottenham have made advances when it comes to signing young players, there hasn’t been much in the way of players breaking from the academy into the first-team in recent years.

Whenever a player leaves an academy and becomes a star elsewhere, like in Madueke’s case, it’ll always be a bitter pill to swallow.

More recently, Spurs raised some eyebrows when it came to picking their Europa League squad for the group stages, which was a culmination of their struggles on that front.

Not only did Djed Spence fail to make the cut, but Spurs could only name 23 players in the squad, because four need to be club-trained.

UEFA rules say club-trained players are those who were on a club’s books for three entire seasons (i.e. the period between the first and last official match of the relevant national championship) or 36 months between the ages of 15 and 21.

Tottenham do not have enough club-trained players, having seen Oliver Skipp, Harry Kane and Japhet Tanganga all leave in the last year and a bit.

As a result, just Brandon Austin and Alfie Whiteman – both goalkeepers – were included in the Europa League squad.

Tottenham expert Alasdair Gold has described it as “poor squad management” and said it was a “ridiculous” situation for Spurs to be in.

Gold said: “Spurs stuffing themselves completely by poor squad management, really, over the years of just not having any now outfield senior club-trained players in their squad, which is a ridiculous situation to get yourself in.”