Championship Clubs Chase West Ham’s Reece Burke
As one of the main features of our West Ham youth prospects article a few days ago, Reece Burke has been subject to interest from a number of Championship clubs.
West Ham have long been regarded as one if the top academies in the country, even if the production line has dwindled slightly in the past few years, and one if the leading members of the most recent generation is without a doubt Reece Burke.
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Reece first started to make a name for himself when he appeared in a few Premier League games for West Ham at the end if the 14/15 season under Sam Allardyce, where he showed a lot if maturity and strong defensive intelligence.
The fact that such a defensively demanding manager thought he was up to the task of Premier League football in itself shows how highly thought of Burke is at West Ham.
He was on loan at Bradford last year in order to get regular game-time and due to his outstanding performances the club finished 5th in League One and he was awarded Bradford’s player of the year award, always a great achievement for a player on loan.
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As such it is not a surprise that West Ham have received offers from 6 Championship clubs asking for the young defender on loan for the season, intending to claim his signature before the season begins and integrate him into the first eleven.
However it looks as though Slaven is set to reject all six of the offers in order to keep him around the club and rotate him into action, especially in the Europa League if we manage to make it through the qualifying rounds this time.
His ability means he is almost guaranteed to be a West Ham regular in the coming years and may even see a run of games this season if injuries take hold in the Hammers back line. We all know how injury prone Winston Reid is and James Collins is unfortunately not going to be around forever at the age of 32.
I for one am glad that we are not just loaning out our talent and letting other people do the development work like some other clubs (Chelsea I’m looking at you here) and I think Burke’s inclusion could be a benefit to the squad and the whole club in general, especially as we’ve seen another academy product in James Tomkins sold to Crystal Palace this transfer window.
Is this the return of the glory days for the Academy of Football?