Tottenham Hotspur’s meeting with Aston Villa on Sunday will see two of the Premier League‘s most in-form young players take centre stage, just three years on from lighting up League One together.
Brennan Johnson, 23, has shrugged off criticism from Spurs supporters to become a key player and leading goalscorer for Ange Postecoglou’s side, netting six goals in all competitions.
Morgan Rogers, 22, meanwhile has emerged as the perfect foil to Ollie Watkins in Villa’s attack and is now one of the first names on Unai Emery’s teamsheet, starting all 12 of their league and Champions League fixtures so far.
The pair have come a long way quickly since starring for Lincoln City in the 2020-21 season in what was a defining period early on in both of their careers.
Johnson joined The Imps on loan at the end of the summer window having made fewer than 10 appearances for Nottingham Forest with Rogers, then of Manchester City, following in January.
They were well regarded in academy circles and highly sought after in the EFL, but Lincoln, in their second season in League One, persuaded the duo that their development would be best served with them.
Michael Appleton, the club’s manager at the time, was key to the sales pitch. He knew Johnson’s father David from their time as youngsters at Manchester United and had a reputation for providing opportunities to young players as a head coach.
Geography played its part too, with Forest close by and both players born and raised in the midlands. So did the persistence of Jez George, the club’s director of football.
“It’s not hard to identify the most talented young players in the country. The hardest bit is to get them to come to you over all the other clubs,” George tells i.
“I must have rung Gary Brazil [Nottingham Forest’s former academy manager] about 50 times during the transfer window and we signed Brennan when the season had already started. I had that dilemma of how long do we wait? Is he worth waiting for? We made the judgement that the squad was pretty solid but that Brennan would give us the X-factor.”
Lincoln had to be even more patient with Rogers. City were unwilling to loan him out in the summer but softened their stance in the winter once it became clear that he had outgrown academy football.
“Sometimes in this world you might not get a target in one window but the work means you might get them further down the line,” George says. “The case study we had with Brennan from the first half of the season when he had done very, very well helped us enormously.”
First loans can make or break a young prospect, either accelerating their progress or sending them hurtling back to square one. Lots of things need to fall into place for a loan to be a success; very little needs to go wrong for it to be a disaster. For Johnson and Rogers, those spells in Lincolnshire helped forge their paths to the top of the Premier League.
“The biggest thing was that they played games,” George says. “Young players need an opportunity to play and they need some backing.
“We can retrofit those two players in that season and think they were absolutely outstanding for every minute of every game but that’s obviously not the truth. They had dips and moments where maybe if they were at a bigger club with bigger expectations they would probably have come out of the team.
“What Michael deserves great credit for is that he kept them in the team. We saw them as match winners, so even if they had a quiet hour or 70 minutes, they could find one moment to score or create a goal to make a massive difference for us.”
A 4-0 thrashing of MK Dons in April, which galvanised a faltering promotion push, epitomised their devastating double act. Johnson scored his first, and so far only, senior hat-trick; Rogers set up the first two and won the penalty for Johnson’s match ball clinching third. Their opponents couldn’t live with them, but few teams in the division could.
“Both of them were just such a massive threat in League One,” George adds. “It’s not just about what a player does in terms of goals and assists, it’s how they make opponents feel and they were threatened by the pace and power of these two. That had a massive impact on how we could play. We were very, very good away from home on the counter-attack.”
Johnson contributed 11 goals and five assists in 43 games, while Rogers managed six goals and two assists in 28 as Lincoln finished 5th, recording their highest league finish in 39 years. They eliminated Sunderland in the play-off semi-finals but a stunning season ended in despair at Wembley when they were beaten by Blackpool.
The tragedy for Lincoln fans is that Covid robbed them of the opportunity to see their club’s best team in decades in in person, their memories of Johnson and Rogers running rings around full-backs formed by watching them on laptop screens instead of from the stands at Sincil Bank.
Nevertheless, Lincoln can justifiably take great satisfaction from what Johnson, Rogers and others including Nottingham Forest left-back Harry Toffolo have gone on to achieve.
“As soon as they arrived you could see that they were good lads, super talented but really humble and they fitted in really quickly,” George says. “They were serious about their football and came with a real focus on delivering. There wouldn’t be one person at Lincoln who’d have a bad word to say about either of them because of that.”
Their success has helped George market the club as an ideal stepping stone for up-and-coming prospects; Lincoln currently have the fourth-youngest squad in League One.
In recent years, they have pivoted away from loaning other top youngsters from Premier League clubs to focus on bringing in players permanently or developing them in their own academy.
“We haven’t got the finances to sign players who have been there, seen it and done it or top players at this level who have played 200 games. So for us it’s future top players that we have to try and sign,” George says.
It’s a strategy that has started to pay off with defender Sean Roughan and strikers Freddie Draper and Jovon Makama all rising through the club’s category 2 academy and into Michael Skubala’s first-team squad.
“The exciting thing for the club is that they are now our players rather than us doing it for another club,” George says.
“With Brennan and Morgan we got the immediate benefit of having two outstanding talents in our team.
“Our aim now is to have outstanding talents who are Lincoln’s and then we can benefit when they develop and reinvest in the club to continue to make it stronger.”