It’s hard to imagine a scout turning their nose up at one future England international, let alone three.
But this is the case for Southampton‘s head of academy recruitment, Chris Robinson, who counts Dele Alli, Jadon Sancho and Joe Gomez among the players he passed up the chance to sign as youngsters.
With over 30 years’ experience in the English game, Robinson has seen plenty of top talents at the start of their football journeys.
After a career in non-league, first as a player and later a manager, he made the transition into scouting, spending 11 years with Chelsea‘s Academy as head of integration and scouting between 2012 and 2023.
It was here that Robinson was tasked with unearthing youth players of future potential, but that isn’t to say there weren’t some high-profile misses during this time.
This includes former current Blues winger Sancho, ex-Tottenham star Alli, and Premier League-winning Liverpool defender Gomez.
Joining talkSPORT following the launch of his book ‘The Scouting Game’, which details his experiences of top-level football scouting, Robinson opened up on turning down the trio, who now boast a combined 75 England caps between them.
He told White and Jordan: “A while ago I was watching England play and one of my sons phoned me up and said: ‘You realise there are three players playing for England that you said no to?’
“I thought: ‘It shows what I know about the game!’.
“So the three players were Jadon Sancho, Dele Alli and Joe Gomez.”
Having first caught the eye as a skilful winger in the Manchester City academy, Sancho then cemented this reputation in senior football at Borussia Dortmund, who he joined in 2017.
But it could have been different story, with City poaching the winger from first club Watford at 14, after Robinson passed up the chance to bring him to Chelsea’s youth ranks .
GettyJadon Sancho joined Chelsea on loan from Manchester United last summer[/caption]
He explained: “I watched Jadon play for Watford when I was at Chelsea and we knew he was probably going to Manchester City.
“He was 14. I didn’t think he was better than what we had. He was a different sort of player than he became, to be fair.
“He was more of a striker, more of a nine and he was a good player, but he wasn’t the tricky winger that he became.”
Next up was Alli, who established himself as one of football’s brightest young talents after joining Spurs from MK Dons in 2015.
Despite a blistering start to life in the Premier League, winning the PFA Young Player of the Year award in 2016, the Englishman now plies his trade with Serie A side Como with a series of fitness issues and mental health struggles hampering his progress.
On a young Alli, Robinson said: “I watched Dele Alli at MK Dons when he was playing in the first team at a young age.
“And he was, again, a different build and a different type of player. I said in my reports that we had two players at Chelsea, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Lewis Baker, who I thought were better than him.
“Now, I still stand by that, in the sense that, at that time, I was right. I couldn’t perceive that he would go to Spurs.
“There was loads of clubs looking at him and they would make him into a different sort of player and he’d have all the impact that he had.”
As for Gomez, who has made over 200 appearances for Liverpool since his arrival from Charlton in 2015, Robinson admitted to having doubts over his technical abilities.
He explained: “[The third was] Joe Gomez at Charlton.
“I went to watch Joe and I thought he was a good athlete. I didn’t think he was a great footballer.
“As a scout, you have to be brave and you have to be ready to make decisions and make recommendations, and they’re not always going to be right.
“If you don’t like that, then you shouldn’t do it. You have to try and learn from it and crack on.”
But there is one up and coming talent that Robinson was determined to get hold of.
When asked for the biggest name he had scouted, the Saints talent spotter pointed to a current rising star at Chelsea, Shumaira Mheuka, who he first brought to the club from Brighton as a 14-year-old.
Last month, the 17-year-old forward became the youngest player to start for the Blues in Europe when he played in their 2-1 Europa Conference League victory over Copenhagen.
On his top recruit, Robinson said: “Shumaira Mheuka made his debut for Chelsea in the Premier League a couple of weeks ago, and who is the youngest player to play for Chelsea in a European tournament.
“I tracked him from when he was nine, and we finally signed him at 14 from Brighton, and his lovely family are still in touch to this day and still talk to me.
“His dad talks to me regularly about what a great process it was, and how persistent I was, and I kept going back and I kept trying to find ways that we could get him for one club to the other, and we did it eventually.
“So I take great pride in him. Great lad, great talent going forward.”
