Lookman hat-trick wins Europa League Final for Atalanta

The Europa League Final, the competition when several weeks ago, thousands of hotel bookings in Dublin were cancelled! 😄😄😄

Haha, Tony, all the RS crying tears of misery!!

Nutmegs one defender, then curls the ball into the far corner from about 20 yards.

On fire: 2 goals… what could've been?

How long is long enough before a player who does something good after leaving Everton doesn't attract derogatory comments towards the club?

Yes, he has obvious skill but you have to be consistent and be seen to make a contribution.

He has been loaned out three times which is a pointer to his effectiveness with the clubs he has been with.

No doubting he has 2 fine goals today and has done better at Atlanta than anywhere else.

Good luck to the lad.

Didn't he play for Everton and who chased him out of the club?

Do you mean' Did he play for Everton'? as you have written?

In 48 appearances for us he scored 4 goals, two of those in the dead rubber Europa League game in Cyprus. It's great seeing him do well in a European final, playing in a settled team with a well established manager in Gasperini.

I think they were two of the last goals we scored in Europe.

7 December 2017 — A 3-0 win away to Apollon Limassol.

Pity he wasn't good enough for us…

Brilliant!!

Another missed opportunity.

They should simply look at Atalanta and see what they've been doing right.

No big stars and about to win a major European Competition. Most people couldn't even name what Town or City they are from...

We signed him when he was around 20 years old, in January 2017, and then sent him on loan twelve months later, before finally selling him in July 2019.

He wasn't really given much of a chance.

You've proved all your doubters wrong. Class.

You make good points but I'd also point out a few other things.

Firstly, he wasn't homegrown we signed him for a tidy sum.

Secondly, he seems pretty self-confident and impatient. Sam wanted him to go to Derby to toughen him up for English football, Lookman defied him and went to Germany where he shone under his first manager but his failings showed up when a new boss came in.

Another thing to remember is he won the Under-20 World Cup with England then was pretty young when he switched allegiance to Nigeria. I don't know if he would have made the full England team as Southgate seems to have an aversion to players playing overseas unless they're called Harry or Hendo, but the point is that he switched pretty early on.

So, from an Everton perspective, I'd say it was a perfect storm of failure. We sign him for a lot of money then have managers terrified to blood youngsters and all that coupled with his self-belief and impatience means he's really not “one who got away”.

After that tournament, as I said at the time, Everton had a future star in Lookman, but that he needed to be given the confidence and freedom to take players on and take shots at goal - even if it didn't always come off. That is his entire game - he needed to be given creative freedom. But that didn't happen, and instead Lookman was never given a proper run in the team, and was overlooked in favour of underperforming established professional who were underachieving in our first team. No wonder he got the hump and wanted to play elsewhere.

We made a series of errors with how we developed Lookman, and while he has not exactly gone on to become the dominant player at the top level that I thought he would, he definitely has the talent to kick on now and find a new level of prominence. And seeing how delighted his Atalanta team-mates were for him tells me that they know how special he is too.

Serie A suits him.

We don't invest in talent unless it's big, strong, hard working.

You might call those minimum requirements, but that's not the reality of all players who can develop into the sort of players who can change games.

I don't know how we find a balance between the romanticism and idealism of Roberto, and the 'pragmatism' of a succession of managers. It's odd to think that guy isn't out there.

I agree on Solanke he was a passenger in that team. But while we had Lookman for a minute or can't overlook the fact we spent millions to get him and he was gone soon.

In other words I wouldn't put him in the Rooney, Rodwell, Ball, Jeffers & Barkley category of homegrown sold too soon.

I also seem to remember, there were rumours of him having an attitude problem.

I agree with Andrew that he is another example of young talent mishandled while terrible senior pros were allowed to steal a living off the club.

His attitude stemmed from him having an independent mind. He rejected Allardyce's demand that he go on loan to Derby and chose Leipzig instead. Fair play to him.

I think he is technically as high quality player but physically perhaps not suited to the premier league. He has seemed to do better at Leipzig and Atalanta where the leagues are less high speed, frenetic and physical.

Don't get me wrong, I think he's a good player. I think better suited to playing on the continent. I think Tom Davies would too.

Your last paragraph says it all. Totally agree.

The Italian game is very tactical, but slow. Like you say it probably suits him.

I followed him at Fulham and Leicester and it was similar. He scored some brilliant goals for them but they both let him go.

Made up for him and maybe Serie A suits his game where he can play in bursts of energy and use his undoubtedly skill and guile. The hat-trick was absolute quality but I loved his nutmeg on the touchline approaching the end of the game that had McCoist wetting himself.

Marco Silva tried to help him but he didn't want to know:

Ademola Lookman leaves Everton with potential unfulfilled there — The Guardian, 25 July 2019

He flashed his talent briefly at Leipzig, then failed. He flashed his talent briefly at Fulham and then Leicester, and failed. Finally, at 25, he found maturity. It just takes some players longer to grow up than others. Materazzi was another, Barkley a third, Geri a fourth. (And yes, I think the latter's "partnership" with Rom was vastly overblown by many here, that it was far more Rom than Geri.)

I'm happy for Lookman that he finally matured. The fact that he couldn't do that at Goodison at 21 doesn't mean that Everton failed him, anymore than his other clubs. As you lot say, the penny finally dropped.

Lookman never got more than a few hundred minutes in any season at Everton and often they were mostly from the bench. It was only at Fulham that he had over 1000 minutes in a season and he did pretty well there with 4 goals and 4 assists in a fairly average team. He struggled a bit at Leicester but still managed a goal every 2/3 matches in his one season. And then settled at Atalanta.

Players need time on the pitch and regular starts. This is why Beto has struggled at times this year and perhaps why Patterson has not developed as we hoped, though he did manage 1274 minutes in his first season.

I think the best thing for Patterson would be a season on loan next year in the Championship where he can play every single match (if fit). We need to buy a new RB and Young/Coleman can act as backup for one more season with a (hopefully) reinvigorated Patterson returning next summer to fight for the shirt and he'll still only be 23.

We are often too hasty to judge players at too young an age.

Just like other walks of life, people develop later in life.

I'm pleased for the player. He did the right thing moving to the continent.

We seem to have made decent money for once out of the sale of Lookman so not all bad.

Atalanta are a good side, beat us 8-1 on aggregate in what I assume was our last foray into European football. Lookman was in our squad then. Atalanta must have been on his radar, just took a few moves to get there.

There are no street footballers anymore, with the closest thing they have now being kids playing in cages. I think it's very popular in South London and it's no surprise to hear that a few of these kids learn a lot better skills in the cages rather than the academies.

There's nothing wrong with good coaches teaching children but I've always considered the best talent to be natural, self-taught so to speak, and maybe this is why Lookman has struggled to produce what he was undoubtedly capable of while trying to fit into the team.

Spot on assessment, mate!

He also didn't succeed at Leicester, Leipzig and Fulham.

Should we bash all those clubs too?

Everton have been a disaster of a club for longer than most care to acknowledge. But that doesn't necessarily mean that every player's "failure" is on the club.

I think in Allardyce he was more interested in work rate than talent, and wanted Lookman to go on loan to Derby; from that moment on, the lad lost all interest in playing for Everton.

I am glad he has found a manager and a club that are getting the best out of him.

Comments about Lookman's attitude in training etc are all conjecture from people looking in; what we do know is that he didn't get enough time on the pitch in a settled team/position.

That's not Everton's fault necessarily but it's something to bear in mind when players are moving up a league or to a new country don't hit the ground running. It's one of the reasons I'm loathe to write off Beto yet, as many on here already have.

As others have said, Lookman was obviously talented but very hit and miss and unreliable and was never realistically going to get picked ahead of players like Walcott and Bolasie at the time.

For me the bigger issue is how we organise as a club so that talented young players have a route (or routes) to the first team.

The more interesting thing for me about last night's final is who contested it and how they got their. Both have used an exceptional buy to sell strategy alongside youth / academy development. To put it another way, they do not get too stressed out when a star departs because they are prepared to nurture the next one (and will often already have that next star on the books). Neither club spends much money at all on transfers.

Atalanta also have the major disadvantage of being surrounded by much richer clubs – AC Milan, Inter Milan and Juve, but still do very well with their academy – and supplement that with teenage acquisitions (eg, Amad Diallo and Dejan Kulusevski) and low-cost talents with high potential (like Koopmeiners and, yes, Lookman).

Both Leverkusen and Atalanta are a good lesson to whoever next owns Everton as to how to compete despite lack of funds and heavy competition in their domestic leagues.

'Comments about Lookman's attitude in training etc are all conjecture from people looking in'.

Not sure if you are suggesting there are assumptions being made about Lookman's attitude in training without any real evidence. Didn't Marco Silva infer and go public with there being an issue with his training?

That's football. How long do you want a club to keep a player when they're not producing the goods, or if they want guarantees of a place in the team when you can't give that?

Lookman was taking up a place in the squad at a time when he wasn't ready for the top level. Good luck to the lad, he's had a brilliant night and I'm sure he deserves it.

Maybe if he'd stayed at Goodison, someone like Anthony Gordon wouldn't have got his chance? We got a lot more for Gordon than we did for Lookman.

Excellent points!

Multiple managerial changes, three DoFs, no clear Academy structural pathway for a young player to the first team squad, no clear playing style for the teams at all levels. Placeholders given jobs at all levels of football operation based on sentiment.

Do we think it is a coincidence that Liverpool have promoted 5-6 players through to their first team while we have promoted almost no-one?

I suggest we re-engage with reality.

They sent him out on loan, and eventually sold him for €9M to Atalanta, so we can't say he's one that got away.

We loaned and eventually sold him to Leipzig. They loaned him to Fulham and Leicester and then sold him to Atalanta in 2022. Obviously the various clubs he's been at didn't see him as a good prospect anymore than we did and, just like us moved him on. He's now 26 and appears to have found a club that suits him. Sometimes it takes a young player time to settle down.

The real problem clubs like Everton have in signing very young players is an inability to provide them with medals. Young players are always in a hurry for success. It happened with Rooney, Barkley, Stones, Gordon and now Branthwaite, tempted away by bigger wages and a better chance of winning cups. Not to mention our constant need to sell.

Until we get these things sorted out, we are better off signing settled players and leave the flashy youngsters to clubs that can afford to take the risk on them not living up to their early promise.

It's taken time but it looks as if he has found a good for himself at Atalanta.

It's also worth remembering that another scorer in that 4-0 win against Man City all those years ago was Tom Davies.

For us he was too lightweight to play right mid. He looks stronger and is playing in his most suitable role. Tony mentioned Salah above, he was never played in a forward 3 at Chelsea whilst De Bryune never got to play attacking centre-mid as Jose had others in front of him.

I fancied Atlanta to beat Leverkusen last night. Different styles but in a final I would take an Italian team 9 times out of 10, they know how to win stuff with team tactics rather than having the best players.

Would we have Lookman back now? Probably not, the Premier League is too fast for him.

I might be wrong but I think he was only ever given 3 consecutive starts in the Premier League - and those came in his first season after he arrived in January from Charlton aged 19. In total, he only started 7 Premier League games for Everton, and played a total of 1040 minutes for us in the Premier League.

As I laid out in my earlier post, this was a young player whose mercurial brilliance led England Under-20s to a World Cup triumph. His development should have been a major priority at the club, as the potential upside was known to be huge – after all, we'd paid £11 million for him as a teenager!

I think it must have been very demoralising for Lookman to not be trusted by the club hierarchy, and only to be occasionally drip-fed minutes off the bench in an underachieving team.

I have said before on here that some players achieve excellence by hitting levels in training that they look to maintain come game-time, and others have a different sort of wiring and only hit a higher level of excellence when the game kicks off.

It was apparent to me from his early appearances that Lookman was that type of player – someone who had the ability and imagination to go up into gears that other players struggled to find. Crucially he is quick over 5 yards, and has that ability to move the ball quickly and get a shot off on either foot.

I just think we missed out massively by not nurturing his natural confidence and ability and giving him the freedom to go out and make things happen -– especially at a time when we were lacking players with his levels of invention and vision.

And I'm sure there are going to be questions asked internally at Leipzig, Fulham and Leicester too – but at least those clubs played him!

Maybe Serie A and the set-up at Atalanta were the conditions he needed to unlock his potential. But when Lookman left, I always believed he would rise to the top at some point, and even though he left under a cloud, I still felt a real sense of pride watching him last night.

And while our recruitment has been rightly criticised over the last 8 years that was definitely one the club got right – it was just his development that we got badly badly wrong.

This was at a time when Unsworth and Dunc were here, and some of the fanbase was excited about the whole Everton way of doing things.

Lookman had pace in a very slow team.

Some / all of them may (as some are suggesting) have shown a bad attitude while on our books - but possibly as a result of being demoralised by a lack of trust or obvious role in the team / squad.

Hopefully we are doing better with Chermiti – maybe our closest comparable player – but that probably remains to be seen.

That's a really good point about Gordon... I never would have thought of that.

I doubt he had an impact on Gordon's time with us, especially if Gordon was considered better.

What is blatantly apparent is that in recent seasons we've been putting out teams that lack pace, players who can score goals on their own with a bit of guile and trickery, and players who can score from outside/edge of the box. Lookman ticks all those boxes.

Anthony Gordon has twice the talent and much better attitude to working hard and learning.

I do not regret letting Lookman go for one minute and, on the basis of what he has done since, I think we got good money for him.

Comedy gold.

Lookman, Vlassic, that Henry kid (who was mentioned on this thread earlier) were probably the best three signings of the Koeman/Walsh era, alongside Pickford, even though they probably played less than 30 games for Everton between them.

That era of waste, put the club back at least ten seasons.

Hence issues at other clubs.

Colin Cantona was the same except he liked punching people on the nose at the various clubs he attended before settling at Man Utd.

Hope fully he's found his spiritual home

Tony #72, again, that's true NOW. But Gordon's first half season after we sold him was miserable, and we got a good price for him. Good on him for topping it.

Steve #71, not sure what you're laughing at. Gordon had 11 goals, 10 assists this season in a much tougher league at age 23. Want to bet against him leaving Lookman in the dust when he's Ademola's age?

If we could get an effort that doesn't test the rest of what is in place, Everton could be a place where that talent can be developed. Silva faced problems that Lookme's contributions were not solving. Perhaps that is unfair to burden the player with club circumstances of that weight but all signs indicated he needed another location.

This player regret stuff should instead be a window to how certain special players view Everton. We can be a decent stepping stone for special players and make some money in the process. It has to be done without sacrificing the foundation. We made a decent return and his trajectory with us was limited and all parties knew that. Without him making the commitment and sacrifice, it was not going to develop under Silva.

This is a long way of saying how lack of mutual investments can prevent the optimal outcome from happening. Both sides were at fault and Silva made the right gestures, Lookme was looking elsewhere for a solution to his part of the problem.

after reading some of the stuff on here I typed his name into TW search box expecting to see weeping and howling over the news he had departed.

79 posts. Quite a few were happy to see the back of him. Some thought we might have gotten a bit more in the current climate and some wished him good luck. I didn't notice many posts lamenting his departure or saying we would live to regret it.

Fair play and congratulations to him. A night he will never forget but, some of these comments are priceless.

It took Calvert-Lewin a good two to three seasons before we started seeing a better player, it does not happen over night, a lot of these players now that have been with previous managers are suddenly upping their game under Dyche, you could even throw Pickford into the mix, took a couple of seasons of poor mistakes before the mistakes became less and less.

I am not going to jump on the Lookman bandwagon, but I thought both he and Vlasic given time could have added something to our squad.

Even now outside Everton, they will be saying need to sell Branthwaite, Pickford, Onana, take your pick to stop us going over again on our accounts.

We sold Richarlison and Gordon and still got hit with a points deduction.

If I was Everton, I would say not for sale, keep hold of them and take the points deduction.

At this point, Lookman is ahead of Hudson-Udoi, but he is a couple of years older so maybe Hudson-Udoi will fulfill his potential in a couple of years.

I imagine his improvement came from taking responsibility for his own game. Something a lot of young players don't do or don't do enough.

imagine if every club in the premier league said the same thing, sod the Premier League and their PSR rules, we're going to spend as much as we want and keep whoever we want, and we'll take a points deduction.

The Premier League would shit themselves, having to delve deep into all club's accounts, trying to establish how much overspend every club has. It would be like the football magazine Shoot, who had those football league ladders you could adjust yourself on a weekly basis, teams moving around all over the place depending on their points deducted.

It would take Masters and his cronies forever to get round doing every club… but they would still do us first and Man City last!!

Vlasic was truly a player who was mishandled and never given a single chance to play his usual #10 position. We sent him to Russia, where he was spectacular and earned a place in the starting 11 for Croatia at the World Cup.

But he then flopped at West Ham and has now settled in as an average Serie A player for a mid-table team. I think time has eventually shown we didn't miss much with him.

And the Richarlison deal still looks like solid gold. Spurs paid us £60M for him and was rewarded with one goal in his first season. He did much better this season with 11 goals, but Ange still wants to sell him to Saudi Arabia according to widespread reports.

We know with some churning in obvious places that Thelwell could land a couple of decent additions and possibly some cheap understudies. Keeping the main men would certainly give Dyche the ability to comfortably stay up. We would then benefit at the end of the season, covering any short term losses by cashing in at their more justified premium transfer fee.

Could we get by without some new administrative abuse from Masters and Co? It is almost too tempting to dismiss, I hope someone is considering the tradeoffs, it would be a steely response.