We all know that Nathan Patterson will have decision to make at some point in the next couple of years, if he hasn’t made it already.
The Scotland international has a very bright future and as the most promising academy graduate since Barry Ferguson, the right-back will, one day, make Rangers an awful lot of money.
At £5million though, Everton have no chance, with Steven Gerrard laughing off the Premier League side’s bid for the 19-year old, however, one man who made a big money move south himself, Alan Hutton, knows all to well the questions that Patterson will be asking himself, as told to Football Insider:
“He has to play football. Patterson needs to develop as a player, but to do that you have play football.
“The thing is he’ll be desperate to play. He’s got a taste of it, he knows that feeling, he wants more of it. He’s starting to get into the Scotland setup.
“He’ll know he has to play football, it’s as simple as that. He’s doing everything possible.
“By all accounts, he is a very hard trainer. He puts everything in. Whenever he’s called upon, he has been outstanding.
“The next movement for him, moving forward, is playing regular football. It’s going to be difficult. I’ve wracked my brain about this. What do you do as a player in his position?
“The possibility of a move, it is a big decision he’s going to have to make.
“Does he sit there and fight for his place against Tavernier? Or is the option of moving a better one? It’s something that he’ll have to consider.”
Hutton is right but we also have to be patient, we know how good a player Patterson, it’s just an issue that he has the club captain in front of him, it’s good problem to have but a problem nonetheless.
The biggest difference, for me, between players like Patterson, Glen Middleton and Stephen Kelly, is that he is still only a teenager, there is no rush for him to play 50 games a season, only a desire to see him reach his full potential.
As we saw across the city though, there are no guarantees that youth players will stick around forever, even if they did come up through the academy, the only compensation is that the club could land a club record transfer fee – as they did with Hutton some 13 years ago.