Norwich City may always wonder ‘what-if’ with 6-minute player - Tottenham deal fell flat | OneFootball

When Marcus Edwards went to Norwich in 2018 he only played 6 minutes, but he went on to win the Portuguese league and play in the Champions League.

When young players go out on loan from the biggest clubs things can not work out, as Norwich City found to their cost in 2018, leaving them asking "what if?"

The raw talent in Marcus Edwards was visible from an early age. Put into the academy system at Tottenham Hotspur at just eight years old, by the time he signed his first professional contract with the club in 2016 at 17 years of age, it was in the face of a mountain of interest in him from elsewhere.

But when Edwards was sent out on loan for the first time, to Norwich City, things couldn't have gone much worse for him. He ended up barely even playing for them before returning to White Hart Lane amid a level of criticism that was unwarranted, given that he was only 17 years of age at the time, but given the progress that he's made since Norwich, fans may be forgiven wondering what might have happened had he stayed longer with them.

Marcus Edwards' loan at Norwich City from Tottenham was an unmitigated disaster

Born in Enfield, just a short distance from White Hart Lane, Marcus Edwards had the chance to be "one of our own." But expectations were high from an early age. Shortly before he made his professional debut for Spurs against Gillingham in the EFL Cup in September 2016, for example, the Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino said of him, "His qualities … it’s only looks - his body and the way that he plays — remember a little bit from the beginning of Messi." By this time, his nickname at Spurs was already "Mini Messi." No pressure then, Marcus.

That match against Gillingham, but this turned out to be his only appearance for the North London giants. By the January 2018 transfer window, he was considered ready to go out on loan to fine-tune his obvious natural talent, and Norwich City was his destination.

But three months later, Edwards was back at White Hart Lane, his loan spell curtailed amid suggestions of an attitude problem. On the pitch, he managed just six minutes of football for Norwich City, and it took two months before he even got onto the substitutes bench for them. His sole appearance came at the end of March 2018, when he played the final six minutes of a 2-0 home defeat to Fulham which left them in 13th place in the Championship.

In the middle of April, he returned to White Hart Lane for ‘personal reasons.’ There had been criticism of his time-keeping, that he had been repeatedly been late, and that he hadn't been willing to integrate with the rest of the Norwich players. The viewpoint from Spurs was that Edwards was highly introverted.

But it was clear that the "next Messi" tag applied to him at White Hart Lane had not helped him. Admitting the loan to have been a failure, Spurs waived the remainder of the fees that would have been payable for the last few weeks of his time at Carrow Road.

Marcus Edwards truly found his feet in Portugal after Norwich City stint

In September 2018, Edwards was sent on loan again, this time to the Dutch club Excelsior, and despite the fact that they ended the season by getting relegated from the Eredivisie, he had a reasonably decent time of things, running up 25 appearances and impressing across the board.

But his time in North London was also coming to an end. The following September, he was transferred to the Portuguese side Vitória de Guimarães, and here he truly found his rhythm, making 95 appearances for them in all competitions before transferring to the Lisbon giants Sporting in February 2022. By the following September, he was playing Champions League football, and marked this by scoring an equalising goal for Sporting against Spurs in a group match.

He won the Portuguese Primeira Division in 2024, but returned to England the following January, signing for Burnley on loan. Having made 14 league appearances as the Clarets returned to the Premier League, it was confirmed that he would be signing for the club permanently. But his Premier League career at Burnley so far has almost matched what happened at Norwich. At the time of writing, he's made one league appearance for them from the bench so far this season, which lasted for nine minutes.

Marcus Edwards has had a stop-start career so far, and for Norwich supporters looking on at how things have been progressing for him since, there may well be a feeling that they could have got more from him than they did. One word that comes up a lot when reading about him is "misunderstood", and it may be that professional football doesn't have much understanding of or time for introversion as a character trait.

But that natural talent, the ability that got him compared to Lionel Messi in the first place, still exists, and it may be that he can get back to scale the earlier heights of his earlier career. It's just that it's unlikely to happen at Carrow Road, and in the unlikely event that it does, they may need more than six minutes to get the best of him.