Young talent has only played 284 minutes on loan at Aston Villa this season and appears to have no future at Anfield either
Harvey Elliott went to Aston Villa this season in search of more gametime to allow him develop the talent everyone around him knows he has. It’s safe to say that hasn’t quite worked out.
He has played only 109 Premier League minutes and 284 minutes in all competitions for an entire season at Villa. He made just one league start, against Fulham in September, where he was substituted at half-time. Villa manager Unai Emery described the situation this week as “embarrassing for everyone involved”.
The loan deal came with a £35m obligation to buy if Elliott played up to 10 league games. He has only played four, because Villa did not want to activate that clause. Then they decided that Elliot should return to Liverpool in January but both sides could not agree on a deal.
And nobody involved in the entire episode is comfortable with it.
“My apologies for Harvey Elliott are, every day, in my mind,” Emery said. “How the season has gone has been difficult.”
Difficult and embarrassing are reasonable enough assessments after one of Anfield’s brightest talents was chucked away in storage for an entire year, just after he captained the England U21s to the European Championship, winning the player of the tournament.
To put this into perspective, another player in that England youth side was Elliot Anderson, who is now a regular for Nottingham Forest, a shoo-in for England’s World Cup squad, and a £100m-priced talent on Manchester United and Manchester City’s radar this summer.
Arne Slot said Elliot would return to train with Liverpool in pre-season, even though the rumour is that he has no future at the club.
“He’s contracted to us so he will be with us in the start of the season,” Slot said. “I think for him, for everyone, it didn’t work out as he wanted it, as we wanted it and probably also how Villa wanted it, because you usually sign a player or bring him in on loan to use him.
“That hasn’t happened a lot. That’s not for me to answer why that is. But of course, it’s never nice for a player not to make so many minutes, especially after the season he had with us, where he made, I assume, even more minutes with us than these 280. He went over there to get more playing time, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.”
“And for such a talented player that did so well in the U21 Euros, you want a player like that to get more and more playing time. He went to a very, very good team as well, where they also have a lot of good players.
“I don’t know why he hasn’t made the minutes he was expecting. That’s not for me to answer. But it’s always a pity if a player hardly plays for two years, let alone a player of that age that has shown during the Euros that he’s such a good player.”
