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Five young Premier League players to watch in 2015/2016; Part 1

By on August 7, 2015

Copa America, the Women’s World Cup and the Gold Cup have all kept football fanatics busy over the summer and in less than twenty-four hours, the Premier League will renew again with the start of the 2015/2016 campaign. Ahead of the upcoming season, Football Every Day’s Alex Morgan takes a look at five young stars to watch out for in the coming season. In part one, Alex features Dele Alli, Gedion Zelalem and Rolando Aarons.  Stay tuned for part two tomorrow.

Dele Alli (Tottenham Hotspur No20, England)

Dele Alli was the 2014/15 Football League Young Player of the Year, a part of the Football League’s Team of the Year and a central-midfield phenomenon for MK Dons, scoring sixteen goals last season.  Oh, and he’s also nineteen.

A strong, 6′ 2″ box-to-box midfielder, Alli set League One alight with MK Dons last season, leading the club to promotion into the Championship.  His talents didn’t go unnoticed, and Tottenham Hotspur quickly snapped Alli up in a £5 million coup on deadline day of the 2015 January transfer window, before quickly sending the Englishman back to Dons on loan for the rest of the season.

Alli rose through the youth setup of at Dons and made his professional debut at the age of sixteen.  His first touch as a professional football goes down in folklore as a back-heel pass, symbolic of Alli’s confidence on the pitch.  Alli became a starter in Dons’ 2013/2014 campaign and with two years’ of professional football under his belt, is clearly ready to make a jump up to the heights of the Premier League.

Of course, it will take some adjustment to compete in England’s top division.  Alli won’t soon be able to put up the figures he did last season in the Premier League and won’t see as many minutes in the near future, but based off of Tottenham’s preseason tour, he has taken the changes in stride.  In an Audi Cup meeting with Real Madrid, for example, Alli nutmegged both Luka Modric and Toni Kroos.

Nabil Bentaleb stands in Alli’s way of first-team football but the two could realistically form a mouth-watering midfield partnership in the coming season or Alli could even wrestle a starting spot from Bentaleb.  Alli has specific talents to offer Spurs this coming season and is hoping to make his Premier League debut against Manchester United this weekend.

Gedion Zelalem (Arsenal No35, USA)

Gedion Zelalem may be only eighteen, but has already been given Champions League and FA Cup experience by Arsenal in the past few seasons. Although Zelalem’s first-team opportunities have been few and far between, the midfielder has featured in Arsenal’s senior squad since impressing in the club’s 2013 tour of Asia as a sixteen-tear-old.

A lanky, 6′ 1″ midfielder known for his technical abilities and vision, Zelalem has the potential to grow into a player of the Cesc Fabregas mould. Already, he is touted as a future US Men’s National Team star after appearing in the US U20 World Cup squad earlier this summer; Zelalem had previously appeared for Germany’s youth national teams but has revealed his desire to represent the US.

Zelalem is still maturing physically but clearly appears to have the talents to make it in the Premier League. This coming season the German-born youngster is expected to challenge for realistic first-team football for the first time and if things don’t work out, Wenger said, per NBC’s Pro Soccer Talk, a loan move may be on the cards for Zelalem. “I always test the players in preseason,” Wenger said. “After preseason I make an assessment on how close they are to the first team. If [Zelalem] is not close next year then yes, he needs to play somewhere.”

Rolando Aarons (Newcastle United, England)

Rolando Aarons was expected to break into Newcastle United’s starting eleven last season after impressing in preseason and scoring a ridiculous, flukey goal against Schalke 04 but was hampered by multiple injuries. The nineteen-year-old maintained his fitness long enough to make his Premier League debut and score, also setting up a goal in Newcastle’s 3-3 draw with Crystal Palace, and is back again this season to seize his opportunity.

The pacy winger has bags of talent at his disposal and has been compared to Manchester City’s recent star signing Raheem Sterling. Indeed, Aarons was born in the same city as Sterling — Kingston, Jamaica — but both have chose to represent England, with Aarons having represented the Three Lions at the Under-20 level. Aarons is left-footed and operates on the left-wing, and finally, the time may be right for him to break into Steve McClaren’s team.

Speaking to the BBC, McClaren said: “I remember watching Rolando playing for England Under-20s…I rang up the next day and said: ‘Alan you’ve got to let this kid come to Derby he’d be fantastic.’

“He is a bit erratic and inconsistent but he’s very young. We are introducing him slowly.”

Homepage photo credit: joshjdss (MK Dons Vs Barnsley), via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.