How Manchester United’s sale could leave Socceroos young gun out in the cold

The talent spotter who brought Garang Kuol to the Premier League is set to be poached by Manchester United, further clouding the future of one of Australian football’s brightest young talents.

Newcastle United sporting director Dan Ashworth was placed on gardening leave this week after telling the club that he wants to quit and take up an offer from Manchester United, whose new part-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has made his appointment a priority.

Like many Aussies before him who have headed to Europe, Garang Kuol’s career is being heavily shaped by factors outside of his control.

Ratcliffe’s 25 per cent buy-in was officially approved this week, and the British petrochemical tycoon is planning a major shake-up of the underachieving club. His move for Ashworth, who he has described as one of the best sporting directors in the world, is central to those plans – and it could have significant consequences for Kuol, who is on loan at Dutch Eredivisie club FC Volendam from Newcastle this season.

Ashworth was the key driver behind Kuol’s signing from the Central Coast Mariners last January in a deal that supposedly heralded a new direction for Newcastle’s youth and academy recruitment after their purchase by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

Ashworth had been in the job for less than three months when Newcastle fended off interest from the likes of Barcelona, Chelsea and VfB Stuttgart to secure the teenager, who burst onto the scene with a series of stunning cameos off the bench in the A-League in 2022 and earned selection for the World Cup in Qatar despite never having started a professional match. At 18, he became the youngest player to feature in the knockout stages of the competition since Pele in 1958 and came agonisingly close to forcing eventual champions Argentina into extra time in their round of 16 clash with Australia.

When Kuol returns to Newcastle at the end of the Eredivisie season, his most crucial ally at the club will not be there, and there is no guarantee that Ashworth’s replacement will hold him in the same esteem. Having struggled for game time in his second successive loan spell, partly due to political upheaval behind the scenes at Volendam, that does not bode well for Kuol’s hopes of playing Premier League football in the short or even medium term, or for his prospects of a Socceroos recall.

Kuol’s situation is a reminder of how many factors that can influence a young footballer’s career are beyond their control. It also echoes the warning sounded by Daniel Arzani, the Socceroos’ last “next big thing” who was once on Manchester City’s books, about the pitfalls of being a developing player at an elite club.

Hearts’ Socceroos contingent grew to four when Garang Kuol (second left) joined Nathaniel Atkinson, Cammy Devlin and Kye Rowles at the Edinburgh club.

Ashworth was fully aware that Kuol was an unpolished gem when he penned his four-year deal with Newcastle given that he had only been playing organised football for a couple of years before his emergence in the A-League. With so much physical, technical and tactical improvement needed before he was ready for Eddie Howe’s Premier League squad, the club mapped out an 18-month plan to round out his attributes and expose him to first-team football elsewhere rather than dropping him down to Newcastle’s under-21s – a level he was deemed too good for.

His first loan, a six-month spell at Scotland’s Heart of Midlothian, was thought of as a soft landing pad in Europe: a club where there were three other Aussiesin a country where there was no language barrier to contend with, and only a 90-minute train ride from Edinburgh to his parent club. Kuol’s on-field returns were mixed, which was a disappointment but no great surprise. Hearts’ losing form and their at times peculiar utilisation of him did not help his cause, and some thought it was never the right destination for him.

Kuol began brightly when he was sent to Volendam this season. He started in seven consecutive matches before being dropped to the bench, but the club had been following him for some time, knew he was an incomplete player, and figured that they knew how to exploit his strengths on the field while chipping away at his weaknesses at training.

That was until, just days after Kuol’s last start in a 3-0 loss to Socceroos captain Maty Ryan’s AZ Alkmaar, Volendam’s entire football department quit en masse – around a dozen staffers in total, including Jasper van Leeuwen, the technical director who brought the teenager to the club, and Matthias Kohler, the manager who believed in him. Their resignations were an act of defiance after the club’s entire board – led by the former Ajax, Inter Milan and PSV Eindhoven star Wim Jonk – was dismissed by a separate “supervisory board” in an escalation of a dispute over governance and finances. That plunged Volendam into total chaos.

Garang Kuol has struggled for game time in the second half of Volendam’s Eredivisie campaign, but there’s a reason.

Kohler’s replacement, Regillio Simons, has implemented a defensive low block system without wide attackers, which leaves Kuol, who is a lightly built winger with deficiencies in his defensive game, on the outside looking in for the rest of the season. He has played only 32 minutes so far in 2024.

Time is still on Kuol’s side. He does not turn 20 until September, and is less than two years into his four-year Newcastle contract, but his hopes of actually pulling on their famous black-and-white stripes hinge on Ashworth’s replacement (whoever it happens to be) also valuing his talent, finding him a more stable club to be loaned out to next season, and, once there, playing as many minutes as possible.

In turn, Kuol’s Socceroos career has also stalled. He has not been called up since March 2023, when he scored his first international goal in a friendly against Ecuador, and was left out of coach Graham Arnold’s squad for the recent Asian Cup – partly because he had not done enough to merit selection, and partly in the hope that Volendam would agree to release him in April to play under Tony Vidmar at the under-23 Asian Cup, where Australia can seal Paris Olympics qualification by finishing in the top three.

Having only paid around $500,000 for him, Newcastle can afford for Kuol to be a bust. Australia cannot.

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