At a complete guess...

...he was a young bloke who hit his peak at a time when other young players hitting their peak had been getting big money moves and huge pay increases. He didn't commit to us (with the hefty pay bump he'd have got) because he wanted to keep his options open.

for a while he was a Bright Young Thing - even featuring as part of BBC's lockdown e-sports thing (he has zero TV charisma). The footballing world probably felt like it was at his feet.

Then it wasn't. Either because no-one came in for him, or because we wouldn't sell at that time. Perhaps a similar situation to Emi?

Club didn't seemed to play hardball over his new contract offer, so as he never took it I guess he's still stuck on his old deal? That must be well below a great number of s**tter players who have come in since.

The evidently he wasn't finding any takers from other clubs, or interest cooled. He'd missed his big chance. He'd have drifted out of our plans.

I suspect he fell to earth with really quite a big bump and suffered as a result of it. There were rumours of family stuff too, which couldn't have helped. At a time he'd have needed a supportive manager/mentor, he'd have been getting cold shouldered from the management team here. So I can imagine he became quite disengaged and it's really really hard to re-focus when employer/employee relationships break down to this extent.

(This is all *complete* supposition but I was going through job disappointment/mental health hell around that time, post-lockdown, and some of the behaviours and comments from him felt a little close to home.)

Posted By: CWC, Jan 13, 12:19:32