5 days ago
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Barcelona are growing increasingly confident of sealing the signature of Norwich City starlet Ajay Tavares. The 16-year-old has yet to make his professional debut for the Canaries but he featured for the first-team in pre-season against Volendam. Tavares would become Norwich’s youngest-ever player if he featured this season in the English Championship but negotiations are continuing over a move to Spain.
Typically, English homegrown players are prohibited from moving abroad until they turn 18 but Tavares holds a European passport, due to his Portuguese roots. Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund were also interested in the winger but he’s poised to join Barcelona. The England U17 internationalist will develop in the Catalan club’s famed La Masia academy and play with their U19 club with the view of progressing to Barcelona B in the near future.
Barcelona closing in on Ajay Tavares
Tavares has made seven appearances in the U18 Premier League and two in the FA Youth Cup for Norwich’s youth sides this season. The teenager rose to prominence and caught the eye of major European clubs with a 16-minute hat-trick in a friendly against Malaga. Norwich ideally want him to remain at the club and develop with manager Phillippe Clement recently addressing Tavares.
Clement said: “Ajay is a very interesting one on that list, and I also know that he played in the training camp in the summer with the first team, and he did good stuff there. He's very young. He's still very young. “But, of course, we want to keep our best talents, because that's one of the important things for the future and the things we discussed with the owners are that they also want players out of our academy to grow and to go in the first team.”
