Ipswich struck gold offloading star who’d be worth £21m in 2024 money
Ipswich Town cashed in on this former academy product at the best possible time.
Ipswich Town will want to just enjoy their first season back in the Premier League season since the close of the 2001/02 campaign, hopeful of bucking the worrying trend of the last few promoted sides going up to the top flight.
Luton Town, Burnley and Sheffield United all fell back down to the Championship after just one solitary season in the top division, with the Tractor Boys praying they don’t succumb to the same underwhelming fate.
It doesn’t look as if the Ipswich squad is going to be dismantled and picked apart, however, even with the club’s meteoric rise to the Premier League putting the Suffolk-based outfit firmly into the spotlight, but they could face a losing battle to keep Kieran McKenna in the dug-out.
They won’t be waving goodbye to any homegrown products such as Luke Woolfenden though even with the manager’s future up in the air, knowing that his sale of a former academy star, on the contrary, was the best possible call to make back in 2011 with hindsight on their side.
Connor Wickham’s time at Ipswich
Connor Wickham’s rise up the Ipswich ranks would be nearly as quick as the Suffolk club soaring all the way up to the Premier League in the present day, with the teenage sensation securing a major move to Sunderland off the back of just two full seasons in the men’s team.
The young starlet would set the Championship alight in his last full campaign donning Ipswich blue, finding the back of the net nine times, which included this sumptuous solo strike against Sheffield United that saw the entire Blades defence watch on stunned and perplexed.
Winning the EFL Young Player of the Season off the back of this breakout season, Wickham would also be rewarded for his goalscoring heroics with a move all the way up to the Premier League with Sunderland for a price in the region of £8m.
Gaining such a sizeable amount for their homegrown talent at the time would have felt like a justified price to part ways with, with that only heightened when you consider how much the 6 foot 3 forward struggled away from Portman Road.
