Brexit means this is not possible, so the 16-year-olds are signing professional deals with their League of Ireland clubs, meaning British clubs are now having to pay much larger sums to bring talent across the Irish Sea.
Last month Mason Melia, a teenage St Patrick’s Athletic striker, was signed by Tottenham for an up-front fee of €1.8m (£1.5m), tripling the transfer-fee record from the League of Ireland (Liam Scales’s €600,000 move to Celtic in 2021).
“The situation in Ireland is new, that the best young talent has to stay in Ireland if they want to go to the UK,” says Clive Clark, Melia’s agent and uncle.
Owing to Ireland’s membership of the EU, Irish players can move abroad to a club on the continental mainland at 16, and clubs across Europe are starting to realise that they can now steal a march on their British counterparts.
With Irish teams going deeper into European competition, and the Republic of Ireland Under-17s reaching their European Championship quarter-final in 2023, those players have also become easier to scout.
