Ipswich Town & Norwich City may have transfer regret after recent Wolves developments | OneFootball

Wolverhampton Wanderers have completed the signing of Fer Lopez, seven years after unsuccessful trials at Ipswich Town and Norwich City.

Wolverhampton Wanderers have recently announced the signing of Fer Lopez from Celta Vigo for relatively big money, and it is a transfer that will leave both Ipswich Town and Norwich City filled with regret.

It has been reported that the 21-year-old has moved to Molineux from Galicia for a fee in the region of £19.6 million, with Wolves able to spend a decent fee having sold the likes of Rayan Ait-Nouri and Matheus Cunha to Manchester City and Manchester United respectively this summer.

Lopez only made 17 appearances in La Liga last season, earning a promotion from the B team mid-way through the campaign, but showed enough promise to earn himself a move to the English top-flight.

East Anglian rivals Ipswich and Norwich will therefore likely now be regretting their decision to reject the Madrid-born attacking midfielder after he had trials with both clubs.

Fer Lopez’s English connection

In 2018, Fer Lopez trained with local club Bacton United 89 in Suffolk during a three-month stint of living in England and attending school in Great Finborough.

During his time in the county, both Ipswich and Norwich took him on trial but, as reported by Alan Nixon, via his Patreon, neither club deemed him good enough to offer a contract to.

He eventually returned to Spain and immediately went back into the Celta youth setup, where he had been growing up from U10 level, going out on loan to lower league side Rapido de Bouzas in Galicia just a year after the rejections from the Canaries and the Tractor Boys.

Now, as he embarks upon his first season in the Premier League, there will be a sense of ‘what if’ for both Norwich and Ipswich, who have potentially missed out on a near enough £20 million prospect.

Fer Lopez’s continued emergence

He eventually earned himself a professional contract at Balaidos in 2022 and immediately went out on loan to affiliate club Gran Pena, before returning to the Celta B team setup a year later.

After a couple of years in the second team, former B team coach Claudio Giraldez eventually stuck to his principles of trusting the youth and Fer Lopez was one of the players promoted to Celta’s first-team for this season.

He made his La Liga debut with a five-minute cameo in a 1-1 draw against Deportivo Alaves in August, but the minutes that he was granted continued to grow by the week, and he began to catch the eye of clubs by the turn of the year.

He eventually started four of Celta’s final six games of the season, and scored twice in the final couple of months of the campaign, too, in victories against Real Mallorca and Villarreal.

There is an expectation that he will begin on the fringes of Wolves’ first eleven this summer, but the outlay that they have put into him, and the openings in attack now with the departure of Cunha, mean that he may well grow into the side much like he did at Celta last year.

About seven years ago, ‘Old Farm Derby’ rivals Norwich and Ipswich passed up on bringing him into their respective academies, and now he can be described as a big-money Premier League player, with those two clubs set to do battle in the Championship once again.

It's one of those "what-if?" cases that we so often see.