Derby County took forgettable gamble on ex-Liverpool wonderkid - Wayne Rooney couldn’t repeat Rams trick | OneFootball

Great things were expected of Bobby Duncan, but after just one appearance for Derby County, he may have dropped out of the game altogether.

When Derby County signed Bobby Duncan in 2020, they hoped that they'd picked up a young talent who'd lost his way. Two years on, the player still seems to be lost.

Professional footballers are not all created equal, and some can lean on relatives in the name of brand recognition. As a cousin of the former Liverpool and England star Steven Gerrard, Bobby Duncan was one such player. But five years on from Duncan signing for Derby, the player seems to have disappeared from the game altogether.

Derby were in a bad way at the time of Duncan's arrival at Pride Park in September 2020, well on the way to a spell in administration that would plunge the club into crisis. But this player's arrival at the club felt like a canny move at the time. This was, after all, a player who'd passed through the academies at both Manchester City and Liverpool, and had also spent the previous year with the Italian giants Fiorentina.

But Duncan's time at Pride Park would only see him play for the club once, and the result of this match would turn out to be one of the most embarrassing in the history of the club, albeit for reasons that were well beyond the player's — and it might be argued his club's — control.

Bobby Duncan's promise was visible throughout his youth career

Bobby Duncan's playing career started locally, before he was spotted playing in the Wigan Athletic academy and offered a place at the Manchester City academy. But the first signs of what could lay ahead came when he left City in 2017 and spent a year without a club over a contract dispute before joining the Liverpool academy instead for a reported £200,000.

Duncan was a boyhood supporter of Liverpool, so this move made sense, but what came next didn't. Initially, it looked like he could be set for great things, scoring a late equaliser in the 2019 FA Youth Cup final for Liverpool against his former club Manchester City, a match which the Reds won following a penalty shootout. At the very start of the following season, he played for them in a friendly match at Tranmere Rovers and scored their final goal in a 6-0 win. It looked like the scene was set for him to come through at Anfield.

But at the start of that 2019-20 season, some extraordinary claims from the player's agent, Saif Rubie, upset any further hopes that Duncan may have had of following in his cousin's footsteps. Rubie accused Liverpool of "mentally bullying and destroying the life" of Duncan, amid rumours that the player could be set for a move to Italy.

Liverpool vehemently denied the claims, and Duncan signed for Fiorentina for a reported £1.8 million a month later, but he didn't make a single first-team appearance in Italy, and just a year following his move there he was on his way back to England, to sign for Derby.

Duncan would later admit that he regretted the nature of his move from Merseyside to Florence, saying: "The way in which the last transfer was facilitated was incorrect and unnecessary and has all proved to be a very big learning experience for me as a player and as a person." Duncan split with his agent shortly afterwards.

Duncan's time at Derby didn't go much better. He made his professional debut for them when a coronavirus outbreak forced the Rams to quarantine their entire first team for a trip to non-league Chorley in the FA Cup. The National League North side won 2-0, and the match turned out to be his only appearance for the club, despite the fact that Derby's financial position was giving then-manager Wayne Rooney little alternative but to give plenty of game-time to younger players - something that, given the circumstances, was actually quite successful.

At the start of the 2021-22 season, he was due to go on loan to Plymouth Argyle, but a dispute over the terms of the loan prevented that from happening and in the summer of 2022 he signed a three-year contract with the Spanish third tier side Real Balompédica Linense. He made seven appearances for them throughout the 2022-23 season, registering neither a goal nor an assist, before returning to England in 2023.

By the end of December 2024, the Liverpool Echo were writing a "Where are they now?" about him, concluding it by saying: "Duncan is currently a free agent without a club, his Instagram account is set to private, and it appears as though he is steering himself out of the limelight." Nothing seems to have changed since then.

Duncan's silence since returning from Spain means that anything said about his last couple of years is speculation. An obviously very talented young player's career has run completely aground, and it may well be that the decision to leave Liverpool for Fiorentina was the point at which everything started to go wrong. The actions of his agent at the time were ill-advised. Any club potentially looking at the player may well have taken notice of his agent taking to social media and badmouthing a club such as Liverpool and decided that he might not be worth the effort and cost.

But it is worth pointing out that at this time, Duncan was just 18 years old, and it's also worth remembering that while players can benefit from being closely associated with an already well-established player, such associations can also come with a burden of pressure. It cannot be said for certain why Bobby Duncan dropped out of the game at such a young age, but the pressures put on his young shoulders from angles cannot have helped, with Rooney unable to work his magic on an undoubted talent.