Prodigies

Twenty-year-old American midfielder Luca de la Torre — a native of San Diego, California — scored his first competitive goal for Fulham on Tuesday in the Cottagers' 3-1 win over Millwall in the League Cup. Not only did De La Torre bag Fulham’s second of the day, he also assisted Joe Bryan on the first and Cyrus Christie (#COYBIG) on the third.

Here’s his first for the club. 

It’s been a rough road for Bayern Munich midfielder Renato Sanches ever since his massive transfer from Benfica to Germany in May of 2016. After making the breakthrough at his boyhood club during the 2015-16 season and carrying that superlative form into Portugal’s historic Euro 2016 triumph, Sanches’ career abruptly hit the wall.

In the end, Shakhtar Donetsk’s trusted strategy of supplementing its Ukrainian core of players with a bunch of Brazilians proved, once again, a masterstroke — this time in spoiling the appearance of the youngest manager the Champions League has ever seen, Hoffenheim’s 31-year-old whizkid Julian Nagelsmann.

For the first time ever in a men’s senior-level competitive match, the Canada national team started three teenagers. 

Well, the match wasn’t that competitive. 

Canada, with teens Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David and Liam Millar in the starting XI, throttled the U.S. Virgin Islands 8-0 in a Concacaf Nations League qualifying match on Sunday in Bradenton, Florida. The eight goals marked a record for the Canada national team. 

When 18-year-old phenom Timothy Weah takes the pitch on Friday for the USMNT’s headline friendly against Brazil at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, it’s likely that he’ll see three of his Paris Saint-Germain club teammates opposing him. With 90 caps to his name, Neymar is the most experienced of Brazil’s PSG bunch, but Thiago Silva (who’ll captain the side) isn’t far behind on 76, and defender Marquinhos has already represented the Seleção 27 times at the tender age of 24.

Cristiano Ronaldo Jr. set the Italian youth league on fire this weekend, bagging four goals in the Juventus U-9’s 5-1 win against Lucento. The youngster, repping the No. 7 shirt of course, notched two goals in each half, darting past the legs of outstretched defenders in seamless fashion, much in the way his old man does.

18-year-old Brazilian wunderkind Vinícius Júnior appeared in his second match for Real Madrid Castilla (Real’s reserve team) against Atletico Madrid B today. The Madrid Derby in Segunda División B (Spain’s third division) ended in a 2-2 draw with Vinícius Jr at the center of everything for Real, scoring a brace while also getting his head munched on by Atletico captain Alberto Rodriguez.