Tottenham Hotspur have always been a club good at identifying and nurturing exciting young talents.
The likes of Gareth Bale and Harry Kane are perhaps the most prominent examples of this over the last decade or so, with the former joining the club at just 17 years old before leaving for £85m six years later and the latter joining at 11 years old and eventually leaving for £86.4m last summer aged 30.
Even today, the likes of Mikey Moore and the lesser-talked-about Lucá Williams-Barnett look set to develop in North London before hopefully becoming first-team stars, and if they do end up leaving, they would likely go for massive sums as well.
However, with every club, there are those youth players who slip through the gaps and move on to become stars elsewhere, and that is the case with a former Lilywhites academy gem who left in 2018 and is now outscoring Son Heung-min and Dejan Kulusevski while being compared to Bukayo Saka.
Spurs' 2018 departures
So, before we get to the player in question, let's look at some of the other players who left Spurs in the summer of 2018, starting with someone who went on to be sensationally successful, Kyle Walker.
The England international joined Spurs from Sheffield United in 2009, but eight years and 229 appearances later, he joined Manchester City for a whopping £50m plus add-ons, which was a record fee for a defender at the time.
At the Etihad, the Sheffield-born star won everything there is to win in the club game, including six Premier Leagues, four League Cups, two FA Cups, a FIFA Club World Cup and the UEFA Champions League, which was the centrepiece of an exceptional treble.
However, not all of the Lilywhites' departures that summer have been so successful since leaving N17.
For example, Clinton N'Jie enuring a mixed career in six years since that has taken him to France, Russia, Turkey and now Romania, where he is struggling to find form with Bucharest-based outfit FC Rapid.
However, while both of these players are now on the wrong side of 30, the club's academy also lost an incredibly exciting prospect that summer, a prospect starting to show his worth with a rival side and winning comparisons to Saka.
The Spurs gem who got away
Okay, so to get straight to the point, the former academy star in question is Noni Madueke, who left Spurs' youth set-up in 2018 to join Dutch side PSV Eindhoven, where he would eventually make his senior debut and earn a £29m move to Chelsea in January 2023.
However, before getting to his form this season, let's address this comparison to Arsenal's Saka and where it has come from, for that matter.
It primarily stems from FBref, which compares players in similar positions in Europe's top five leagues, the Champions League and Europa League, then creates a list of the ten most comparable players for each one, and in this instance, has concluded that the Gunners star is the ninth most similar attacking midfielder or winger to the Blues ace across the last 365 days.
The best way to see where this comparison has come from is to look at the underlying metrics in which the pair ranks closely, metrics including but not limited to non-penalty goals, shots and shots on target, successful take-ons, tackles won and ball recoveries, all per 90.
With that said, how has the 22-year-old fared compared to some of Postecoglou's attacking stars this season?
Well, with five goals to his name so far, he is being outscored by just Dominic Solanke and Brennan Johnson, is level with James Maddison and comfortably ahead of Son, Kulusevski, Werner and Richarlison.
Ultimately, it's impossible to keep a hold of all the promising talents in an academy system, but based on his form this season, we reckon Spurs wish they had been able to keep a hold of Madueke.