Stars Continue To Leave – But Such Riches To Have Savoured!
Pedro Neto….one of many we have loved and lost to other clubs.
Former Wolves players are continuing to blaze a high-profile trail across the game at home and abroad.
We wrote during the first half of last season about Matheus Nunes (Manchester City), Pedro Neto (Chelsea) and Diogo Jota (Liverpool) all featuring regularly for clubs recognised as being among the Premier League elite.
Supplementing that top-end list were Nathan Collins (now around 80 first-team games into his Brentford career), England international Morgan Gibbs-White (Nottingham Forest), Joao Moutinho (Braga), Raul Jimenez and Adama Traore (Fulham), Max Kilman (West Ham) and Ruben Neves and Romain Saiss in Saudi Arabia and Qatar respectively.
Since those words were published, 2020-21 Molineux loan signing Vitinha has won the Champions League with Paris St Germain, Jota has lifted both the Premier League crown with Liverpool and the Nations League title accompanied by various former Wolves team-mates in the colours of Portugal and Daniel Podence has gone from starring in Olympiacos’s Conference League glory to, like Rui Patricio, boarding the gravy train to the Middle East.
Now Gibbs-White may be set for a £60m move to Tottenham and Rayan Ait-Nouri has already played Club World Cup games for Premier League multi winners Manchester City.
On top of that little lot, we will soon have the sight of Matheus Cunha in action in a Manchester United shirt – yet another prime example of a player thriving so much at Molineux that they have been lured away by the richest and most famous.
Disappointing though it often is to wave star men goodbye, there has at least been satisfaction at how their careers blossomed first in these parts.
Wolves derived excellent value from all those players and then generally sold them at high profit, either to clubs higher up the food chain or those with deeper pockets.
Never before have they had so many old boys strewn across the upper echelons of the game, so there should be gratitude that we had the pleasure of their talents before their departures.
The most moving of Molineux sights.
What riches we have had to enjoy here, with a sizeable group of high-quality performers in the opening years of the Fosun era especially and in rather scarcer numbers in more recent times.
*Wolves Heroes’ John Richards and David Instone were at Molineux today to look again at the massive assortment of tributes to Diogo Joto.
Flowers and countless shirts and scarves in Wolves and Liverpool colours form the most moving of shrines to the forward who was killed in a car crash with his brother, Andre, eight days ago.
Liverpool visit Preston for a friendly on Sunday in their first game since the tragic deaths – a match (3pm KO) that is being shown live on ITV and LFCTV and one that will be preceded by a minute’s silence.