The links between Swansea City and Manchester City are obvious when Swans sporting director Mark Allen having been the academy director at the Etihad Stadium for eight full seasons until 2017.<\/p>\n
Add to that a close relationship between Swans boss Russell Martin and Manchester City’s Under-23s coach, Brian Barry-Murphy and it is little surprise that there are plenty of links between the Swans and academy talent at the Ethiad Stadium ahead of the January transfer window.<\/p>\n
The Christmas Eve news is that there is a link now between two academy defenders in left back Joshua Wilson-Esbrand and the club’s rising centre-half Finley Burns both of whom could be available for loan moves in the New Year.<\/p>\n
The Swans could well be on the look out for a left back with Jake Bidwell likely to be the subject of an approach from Birmingham and seemingly out of favour with Russell Martin at the moment.\u00a0 \u00a0Add to that the expected return of Rhys Williams to Anfield and it is easy to see why a central defender would be on our radar with several different links already being made in the past few weeks.<\/p>\n
Wilson-Esbrand is described by Ciry as a “Powerful, marauding left-back”and joined the Premier League champions in 2019 from West Ham.\u00a0 He made his first team debut earlier this season in the Carabao Cup against Wycombe.<\/p>\n
Burns on the other hand is described as a “Composed, towering defender” and made his debut in the same game as Wilson-Esbrand, a game that City won 6-1. Both players have won international honours for England at Under-18 level.<\/p>\n
The move for Wilson-Esbrand would seem the most obvious one and feels – based on description alone – that he may be the perfect compliment to Ethan Laird – from City’s cross city rivals Manchester United – at full back.\u00a0 \u00a0 Whilst we are in the market for a central defender, at 18 years old Burns may not be the answer although alongside Bennett and Naughton there could be plenty for him to learn but it would have to be in the first team to make a loan move worthwhile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The links between Swansea City and Manchester City are obvious when Swans sporting director Mark Allen having been the academy director at the Etihad Stadium for eight full seasons until 2017. Add to that a close relationship between Swans boss Russell Martin and Manchester City’s Under-23s coach, Brian Barry-Murphy and it is little surprise that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[293,49,203,295],"tags":[709,708,678,608],"class_list":["post-51684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-team","category-news","category-opinion","category-transfer-rumours","tag-finley-burns","tag-joshua-wilson-esbrand","tag-manchester-city","tag-the-2021-22-season"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}