We really need to talk about Phil Foden…

Dave Tickner
Phil Foden celebrates after scoring in the Champions League for Manchester City at Sporting

Phil Foden is young, English, brilliant and a crucial player for the best team in Europe. But he plays for Manchester City so no-one cares.

 

Given the long-established trope for the excessive and giddy over-hyping of young English footballers, is it not a bit weird that we don’t talk more about Phil Foden?

Yes, it’s a bit rich that we spend our whole time rolling our eyes about the the over-hyping and are now complaining about under-hyping, but we never promised to be consistent.

We should be shouting from the rooftops about him. He’s f**king brilliant and he’s ours. He’s 21 years old and an absolutely integral part of the best team in Europe, frequently playing the role of nominal striker in a team that has evolved beyond such archaic fripperies.

And here, of course, lies the problem and the reason. He is simultaneously at the best possible club under the best possible manager to become the best player he can be, but the worst possible club to get due recognition of those things. Which is in itself perhaps a good thing. But let’s muck that up anyway.

Manchester City players simply do not get the credit that others do. Sergio Aguero – a man who now cites Foden as his favourite player – never did. And did you know, for example, that Riyad Mahrez has scored nine goals in his last nine games for the club? I didn’t until looking up Foden’s own stats for this. Now that’s in part because I’m an idiot who doesn’t pay attention, but I can’t imagine a world in which a Manchester United or Liverpool or even Spurs or Arsenal player could be on that kind of run without everybody talking about it.

Manchester City Pep Guardiola with Phil Foden

There’s a couple of reasons for this. First and most obviously, despite their success, Manchester City still don’t have the same fan presence as the other big clubs. They don’t shout about themselves as loudly either, and they don’t read or watch or listen to as much as fans of other clubs. So they aren’t written or spoken about as much. And they have even fewer fans among the ageing demographic of newspaper football journalists. They don’t have the media cheerleaders that even West Ham can boast.

Second, people still think City are succeeding on easy mode thanks to all that lovely, lovely money. Clearly, they couldn’t have achieved anything like what they have without it, but it didn’t guarantee this level of success. They won the lottery, but boy have they capitalised on it. Nobody is better at buying £50m players – a market in which City are still competing with the rest of their direct rivals.

But back to Foden, who isn’t even a ‘cheat’ of a purchase. He’s an academy grad. We love that stuff normally. It should tick all the boxes.

The other problem with being at Manchester City and thus the best possible club to be at is that it means there is zero transfer mileage in Foden. He’s going absolutely nowhere and everyone knows it. There was far more coverage of Foden when he wasn’t a regular City player. Back then there was mileage in talking about him. Back then he was being held back by silly Pep Guardiola who didn’t know what he was doing and should have loaned him out. Now he’s actually doing all the things that everyone was so excited about him doing and… tumbleweeds.

The two best English players in the Premier League this season have been Foden and Declan Rice. Now ask yourself which one you’ve read more about this season. And that’s because there’s a narrative there. Rice’s performances are helping to propel West Ham toward something unexpected and, whether we like it or not, more newsworthy than another title and tilt at the Champions League for Manchester City. Bigger than that, Rice is infused with the accepted media wisdom that he should be at one of the acceptable big clubs and they will thus do all they can to get him there, as they have with Harry Kane and so many others before.

No value in that with Foden, which just leaves a brilliant footballer achieving brilliant things in a brilliant team that will never attract the same quantity of eyeballs as Liverpool or Manchester United. What’s the point in talking about that?