Cast your mind back to 2015, a time before Brexit, before Trump, and when Reece Oxford looked like being the next big thing at West Ham United.
Aged just 16 years and 198 days old, he made his first-team debut in the Europa League, becoming the Hammers’ youngest ever player in the process.
Not long after, he was doing the same thing in the Premier League, putting in a man of the match performance in West Ham’s 2-0 win over Arsenal on the opening day of the season.
It was a Premier League debut that was up there with the best of them and had plenty raving that the West Ham youngster would be a regular for club and country before too long.
Five years on, though, and things are not going well for Oxford. After several loan spells, Oxford left the London Stadium permanently last summer in a £1.8m move to Augsburg.
He’s made just eight appearances since then, managing 315 minutes in total, and now faces the prospect of playing in Germany’s Regional League to get game time.
That’s according to Kicker, who report that Augsburg were keen to send him out on loan in January as that would have given him a chance of getting minutes.
That never happened, with manager Stefan Reuter confirming they ‘would have been willing to talk’ had there been a good offer.
There wasn’t, leaving Oxford training at Augsburg for the rest of the season and ‘possibly collecting game practice’ in the Regional League, the fourth tier of German football.
That would represent a massive fall for the former West Ham man who, unlike several other youngsters, has found Germany isn’t the place to ignite his career.
