It should take time to adjust to the harsh reality of a loan move, but Dane Scarlett has made an immediate impact at Portsmouth. As Fratton Park rose to hail the Tottenham Hotspur loanee’s double against promotion rivals Peterborough United, it is easy to forget that Scarlett is just an 18-year-old on his first temporary…

At 21 years of age, Gonçalo Ramos is the latest Benfica striker that is attracting interest from various Premier League sides and other European giants. Following the departure of Darwin Núñez to Liverpool, the forward has already bagged goals including a hat-trick in the Champion League.    Ramos came through the youth setup at the…

From Neymar to Vinícius, from Gabriel Jesus to Antony, Brazilian football continues to produce more and more talented attackers who are capable of making the leap to a premium European side, and the next talent to follow their footsteps could be 17-year-old Vitor Roque.   Born in Timóteo, Minas Gerais, Roque joined América Mineiro’s youth…

When Celtic or Rangers are playing in a crunch game against each other or in European competition, there is a natural response to pinpoint key senior players. Graeme Souness in his capacity as a Sky Sports pundit regularly references the need for teams to have ‘good senior professionals’ if they want to be successful in…

Callum Hudson-Odoi is a player on the crux of a dilemma. Uncertainty surrounding the futures of Hakim Ziyech and Christian Pulisic offers a potentially fruitful pathway as the wide man tasked with taking Chelsea – the club who have nursed him back to fitness after bringing him through the academy, into a new era. But…

If I were to choose a movie to describe Granit Xhaka, it would have to be the Clint Eastwood classic, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966). Love him or loathe him, since his transfer to Arsenal, Xhaka has been a mainstay in the starting XI but not short of critics. When he arrived…

Aleksandar Mitrović is the prototypical number 9, an old-fashioned, physically imposing striker who is capable of holding the ball up with his back to goal and getting into goal-scoring areas. The 27-year-old left his native Serbia in 2013, joining Anderlecht for a then club-record fee of €5 million, with Mitrović spending two seasons in Belgium…