Brighton’s teenage talent Evan Ferguson has all the makings of a future Dream Team hero
DREAM TEAM gaffers are inherently a greedy bunch.
This season we’ve been spoiled by the likes of Erling Haaland (£9m), Marcus Rashford (£6.7m) and plenty of other free-scoring forwards and yet the hunger for more potentially prolific poachers never ceases.
Enter Evan Ferguson (£3m).
The 18-year-old is enjoying a breakout season at Brighton having been a first-team regular since December.
On Sunday, the Republic of Ireland forward scored two goals in a game for the first time in his professional club career as the Seagulls made light work of Grimsby to progress to the FA Cup semi-finals.
Obviously there are caveats when a Premier League player comes up against a side in the bottom half of League Two but Ferguson showed his class, particularly with the Bergkamp/Berbatov-esque touch that preceded his first goal.
Solly March (£3.8m) actually scooped the Star Man award when all was said and done but Ferguson banked 13 Dream Team points at the Mariners’ expense for his biggest single-game haul yet.
The talented teenager has scored seven goals and provided three assists in 16 appearances this season.
Those numbers boil down further for an average of one goal involvement every 86 minutes.
To put his efforts into perspective, only five strikers average more than his four points-per-game this term: Haaland, Rashford, Ivan Toney (£6.3m), Mohamed Salah (£8.7m) and Harry Kane (£7.8m).
Needless say, all those assets are at least twice as expensive as Ferguson.
It may be a relatively small sample size but those stats have put the Brighton youngster on the radar, if not for the remainder of 2022/23 then for future campaigns.
It’s not just Ferguson’s raw numbers that have fans excited, it’s the nature of his performances too.
He’s leaps and bounds ahead of most forwards his age in terms of physicality but he’s already shown a deftness of touch that indicates he’s more than a bullying target man.
The stars seemed to have aligned to aid him in the infancy of his career with Roberto De Zerbi encouraging enterprising attacking play that generates plenty of chances and a host of in-form midfielders providing a healthy supply line in March, Alexis Mac Allister (£3.4m) and Kaoru Mitoma (£4.2m).
If the south coast club end up qualifying for a European competition at the climax of this season, something they will feel confident of achievement, then they will have extra fixtures to bolster their schedule in 2023/24.
It’s not unthinkable that Ferguson will be the starting striker for an attacking team as busy as any other fixture-wise next season.
If that’s the case then he’s likely to be a value-for-money option worth serious consideration.