Former Norwich City academy manager Gregg Brought has revealed that Canaries starlet Jamal Lewis nearly joined Brentford, The Pink Un reports.
Lewis could feature for Norwich tonight against former club Luton Town in a belated start to his pre-season preparations.
The 20-year-old left-back was brought to Norwich by Broughton who has previously spent six years with Luton’s academy before leaving in 2012 to become Norwich’s head of academy recruitment.
Broughton has now revealed that Lewis nearly didn’t join him in sealing the switch to Norwich and instead could have ended up at Brentford.
After we lost the (Conference) play-off final in Manchester against AFC Wimbledon because we knew after two years of being outside the Football League, your ability to retain the registration of players expired.
So within 24 hours of that game, 35 of the players in the academy had been approached by other clubs, big clubs in the London area.
Jamal Lewis funnily enough was one of those but we managed to find a loophole in the ruling and went to the FA for a tribunal to go against the Football League and the FA ruled in our favour.
Jamal had actually gone to Brentford at the time, who were spending a lot of money on their academy at that stage, and Jamal came back to Luton on the basis of that ruling because Brentford weren’t prepared to pay a compensation fee.
Lewis eventually ended his time with Luton as he looked to concentrate on his athletics career.
However, he decided to return to football in 2014 and signed for Norwich just as Broughton was just taking over as academy director.
Now Lewis is a regular for City and has been capped at senior level for Northern Ireland.
Lewis’ impressive performances for the Canaries saw him linked with a move to the likes of Bournemouth and Watford last summer, but the youngster instead put pen-to-paper on a new contract and extended his current deal until the summer of 2021.
Broughton, who now works in Norway as Bodo Glimt’s academy manager having left Norwich in October of last year, spoke of Lewis’ decision to pursue a career in athletic before turning back to football.
When he came back he’d lost a little bit of his hunger for football.
He focused heavily on his athletics at that stage, and I’d gone to Norwich by then and after a year I think he had struggled a bit at Luton because he hadn’t gone through his growth spurt and both parties decided it was better if he focused on his athletics.
Then it was the following summer when I followed up on things and Luton hadn’t retained him. So he was a free agent at that stage and that’s when we brought him in.
With Jamal it took a little bit of time, we brought him in initially as a left-back and he found his first week at the club tough, stepping up to category one standard.
But I remember at the end of that first week, he had a really good game at Ipswich which kind of convinced the coaching staff and from there onwards he obviously continued to progress, played a number of positions in the youth team but I think we always saw him as an offensive left-sided player and Daniel Farke’s system allows him to get forward from left-back.
