Eberechi Eze Was Rejected by Four Academies Before England Sent Him to Face Ghana

Four academies looked at Eberechi Eze as a boy and decided he was not worth keeping. Arsenal let him go at 13. Fulham kept him for two and a half years and then said no. Reading watched him train and never offered a contract. Millwall held on to him for two years before telling him, once again, that he was not needed. By the time he was a teenager, Eze had been formally rejected by more professional clubs than most players are ever scouted by. On Tuesday afternoon in the United States, he walks out for England against Ghana as one of the most gifted attacking players Thomas Tuchel has at his disposal, a man who scored more World Cup qualifying goals than anyone in the squad bar Harry Kane.

It is a story that should be told every time a 13-year-old is released and convinced his life in football is over. Because the player England now lean on for invention was, for years, the boy nobody wanted. The fact that he is here at all, wearing the Three Lions in a World Cup on a continent away from the south London streets where he learned the game, is one of the quiet triumphs of this England squad.

The boy who kept being told no

Eze grew up in Greenwich, the son of Nigerian parents, playing the kind of cage football that shapes a footballer differently from any academy drill. The skills that now make defenders nervous, the drop of the shoulder, the change of pace, the close control in a tight space, were sharpened on hard surfaces against older boys who did not care about his potential. What the academies kept seeing was a slight, slender player who did not yet have the physical maturity to match his touch. What they kept missing was that the touch was the rare thing, and the body would catch up.

Arsenal released him first, at 13, from the Hale End academy that produces so much of the club’s best young talent. Fulham came next and invested two and a half years in him before deciding he did not fit. Reading offered a trial that led nowhere. Millwall took him in, kept him for two years, and then released him as well. Each rejection arrived at the most fragile age for a young footballer, the years when confidence is brittle and the line between making it and drifting away is desperately thin.

Plenty of boys do not survive that. They take the hint, drift into non-league or out of the game entirely, and spend the rest of their lives wondering. Eze did not. His father pushed him to keep training, to treat every release as a verdict on a moment rather than a verdict on a career. The young Eze chose to read the rejections the same way, as information about where he was rather than where he could go.

Queens Park Rangers and the slow climb

It was Queens Park Rangers who finally gave him a foothold, and even there the path was not smooth. He was sent out on loan to Wycombe Wanderers in League Two, the fourth tier of English football, to toughen up against grown men who would happily kick a fancy young winger into the advertising hoardings. He came back harder and sharper. By the time he was a regular for QPR in the Championship, the player the academies had discarded was the most watchable footballer in the division.

In the 2019/20 season he scored 14 Championship goals and was named in the Professional Footballers’ Association Team of the Year. Crystal Palace paid to take him to the Premier League, and over the next five years he became the heartbeat of the side, scoring more than 150 appearances worth of moments and providing the kind of individual brilliance that keeps mid-table clubs in the headlines. The defining one came in the 2025 FA Cup final, where his goal won Crystal Palace the first major trophy in the club’s history. The boy nobody wanted had delivered silverware to a club that had waited 120 years for it.

What strikes you watching Eze in those Palace years is how little of his game depends on the physical attributes the academies were assessing when they let him go. He is not the fastest player on the pitch, nor the strongest. His value lives in his feet and his vision, in the half-second of disguise before a pass and the ability to glide past a challenge in a phone box of space. Those are precisely the qualities that are hardest to spot in a 13-year-old, because they mature slowly and reveal themselves only when a player is given the freedom and the minutes to express them. Reading, Fulham and Millwall did not have the patience to wait. Crystal Palace did, and they were rewarded with one of the most distinctive footballers in the country.

The return to the club that let him go

The twist that no scriptwriter would dare attempt came in August 2025. Arsenal, the club that had released him at 13, came back for him. They hijacked a pending move to Tottenham Hotspur and signed Eze for a reported 67.5 million pounds. He chose his boyhood club over their north London rivals, walking back through the doors of the institution that had once decided he was not good enough. In his first season he won the Premier League title. The rejection had become a homecoming, and the homecoming came with a winner’s medal.

There is a religious thread running through how Eze talks about all of it. He is a devout Christian, and he has spoken about praying before games and crediting his faith for keeping him steady through the years when football kept slamming doors. He famously prayed for the hat-trick he scored in his first north London derby against Tottenham, then went out and got it. Whatever a reader’s own beliefs, it is hard not to see the value of something that held a teenager together through four rejections before he had even left school.

Why Ghana makes this personal

There is an extra layer to Tuesday’s fixture. Eze is of Nigerian descent, and in 2019 the Nigeria Football Federation president Amaju Pinnick personally met him to try to persuade him to switch his international allegiance from England to the country of his heritage. He chose England. Now he faces Ghana, Nigeria’s great West African rival, in a World Cup group game, a reminder of how thin the lines of international football identity can be. Many of Ghana’s squad were themselves shaped in the English game, products of Premier League and Football League academies, which makes this a meeting of two footballing cultures that have been feeding each other for decades.

For England, Eze has become more than a luxury option. In World Cup qualifying he scored in the 3-0 and 5-0 wins over Latvia and again in the 2-0 victory over Serbia at Wembley, finishing as the team’s second top scorer behind Kane. In a squad where Tuchel left out Phil Foden and Cole Palmer, Eze’s form earned him a place that once looked improbable for a player who spent his teenage years being released. He offers the unpredictability that tournament football so often hinges on, the ability to produce a goal from a moment that has no obvious source.

What his story says about the system

Eze’s path is a warning to academies and a comfort to every released kid. The modern talent factory is ruthlessly efficient at sorting players by physical readiness at 13, 14 and 15, and it is far less good at predicting who will still be improving at 20. Late developers slip through. Players who need a different environment, more touches, less pressure, a loan to a lower division, get lost. The four clubs that released Eze were not run by fools. They simply could not see far enough into the future, because almost nobody can.

His career is a useful corrective to the idea that elite football is a meritocracy that always finds the best. It finds many of them, eventually, but only the ones stubborn enough to keep going after the system has told them no. For every Eze who comes through, there are dozens of similarly gifted boys who took the rejection as final. The difference is rarely talent. It is the refusal to accept someone else’s verdict as the end of the matter.

There is a lesson in it for the academies too, one the smarter clubs have started to absorb. Several Premier League sides have since invested in tracking released players, keeping tabs on the boys they let go in case a late developer blossoms elsewhere. Eze is the cautionary tale they cite, the 67.5 million pound striker who slipped through four nets before the fifth held. The cost of getting it wrong has never been higher, and the players who prove the scouts wrong have never been more valuable.

So when Eze takes the field against Ghana, watch him with the full story in mind. Every drop of the shoulder, every disguised pass, every moment of invention was honed by a boy who had every reason to quit and chose not to. England are fortunate that four academies were wrong, and that the player they discarded refused to agree with them.

WRITTEN BY

Jarrod

Jarrod Partridge is the Founder of Futbol Chronicle and an accredited journalist with over 30 years of experience following international football. A member of the AIPS International Sports Press Association, Jarrod has covered matches at stadiums around the world, bringing first-hand insight to every match report, player profile, and tactical analysis he writes.

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