Jarell Quansah Was Never Liverpool’s Top Academy Prospect, and He Has Already Won Eight England Caps

• Liverpool academy director Alex Inglethorpe says defender Jarell Quansah was “never seen in the top three” of his age group before leaving for Bayer Leverkusen in 2025, and has since won eight England caps.
• Inglethorpe, in his 14th year running Liverpool’s academy, says Harry Kane and Trent Alexander-Arnold were also not rated among the very best in their own youth cohorts at the stages he coached them.
• Under new manager Andoni Iraola, academy graduates Rio Ngumoha, Trey Nyoni, Lewis Koumas and James McConnell have all featured for Liverpool’s first team this season.

Getting Proven Wrong by Jarell Quansah

One of the hardest parts of Alex Inglethorpe’s job is letting players go. Liverpool released eight players from their academy at the end of last season, and the club’s academy director has learned to live with being wrong about who was ready to leave and who still had more to give. “I’ve been proven wrong so many times in the past,” Inglethorpe says. “A good example would be Jarell, someone who was always liked and never in danger of leaving but probably never seen in the top three in the group.”

Quansah left Liverpool for Bayer Leverkusen in 2025 and has since won eight caps for England. “There are no certainties, the point of the academy is to allow them to fulfil their potential,” Inglethorpe says. “Sometimes players need to leave to gain an opportunity. There are lots of lovely examples of boys leaving and having good careers, and I’m not convinced they would have had the same career if they stayed at Liverpool.”

Quansah is not the only name on Inglethorpe’s list of players who defied the early read on their talent. He points to Harry Kane, who was coming through the academy at Tottenham when Inglethorpe was a youth coach there, and Trent Alexander-Arnold, both of whom “weren’t necessarily the best in their respective youth cohorts.” As Inglethorpe puts it: “At that stage, there’s too many unknowns. You can’t predict how players will react to adversity and natural bumps in the road.”

Phones In, Engine Sizes Checked

At Liverpool’s Kirkby academy, phones are handed in each morning, and contracts carry a clause capping the maximum engine size of cars driven onto academy premises. “It comes back to passing your audition. First impressions matter,” Inglethorpe says. “Often before you’ve kicked a ball, the car you drive or the watch you wear can have an impact on how you’re thought of, and that could be first team staff or players looking at you. We’ve believed in the idea of earning the right for some time.”

That culture is being tested by a market Inglethorpe describes as distorted. Manchester United recently signed 16-year-old winger Isaac Konde from Liverpool on a one-year scholarship followed by a five-year professional deal, with the two clubs now negotiating a compensation package. In February, a tribunal ruled Liverpool must pay at least £2.8m to Chelsea for Rio Ngumoha, who left Chelsea in September 2024 to join the Reds and signed his first professional contract a year later.

“It’s always a compliment when other clubs want your players as it means you’re doing something right,” Inglethorpe says. “But I think the market of players at 16 is distorted because of Brexit and because you can’t recruit like you would do before. There’s always been movement of players but it feels a little more extreme now. When there’s a clamour for talent, fees, wages and everything else will shift accordingly, so it’s dealing with what we have and adapting to a new situation.”

Working With Iraola From Week One

Under new boss Andoni Iraola, academy graduates Rio Ngumoha, Trey Nyoni, Lewis Koumas and James McConnell have all featured for Liverpool’s first team this season. “We were fortunate because of how the calendar worked, with players still at the World Cup and a delayed return. Andoni and his staff spent a lot of his first week here watching the academy,” Inglethorpe says. “So we felt ahead, in terms of building a relationship from the outset.”

Asked whether Liverpool need a Scouser in the first team, after Curtis Jones’s summer move to Inter Milan left the club without a locally-born player at that level, Inglethorpe pushes back gently on the idea that it matters where a player is from. “I acknowledge the fact that ideally Liverpool would love to have a team full of Scousers,” he says. “But it is testament to the supporters that if you adopt the characteristics of a Scouser, and you only have to see the likes of Bill Shankly, Kenny Dalglish and others over the years, you can be treated as one of their own. So if you are fearless, passionate, play tough and demonstrate those qualities, then it doesn’t matter if you’ve come from an L1 postcode and got a purple bin or not. That’s the beauty of the club and the crowd.”

The Kids Cup

Next month marks 14 years at Liverpool for Inglethorpe, and he picks out one moment above all others when asked to define success: the 2024 Carabao Cup final, when an injury crisis forced Jurgen Klopp to lean heavily on academy players, with Liverpool fielding a team whose average age was under 22. Klopp called it his “most special trophy.”

“It’s definitely a moment in time. The longer the game went on, Jurgen was taking off the seniors and putting another one of the boys on. It was an incredible show of belief,” Inglethorpe says. With a £20m revamp of the academy facility planned for completion by 2028, and new sporting director Julian Ward described as “hugely invested” in the project, Inglethorpe is already looking past his own tenure toward the next generation standing where Quansah, Kane and Alexander-Arnold once did, waiting to prove him wrong all over again.

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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