Kian Flanagan won Crystal Palace’s U23 Player of the Year in April but he still hasn’t made his Premier League debut for Roy Hodgson.
Young midfielder Kian Flanagan has hit out at Crystal Palace, telling London News Online that he felt the time was right to leave Selhurst Park on loan over the summer months.
At the age of 20, Flanagan is yet to play a single second of football at senior level. And despite winning the U23s Player of the Year award in April after finishing the 2018/19 season as the club’s joint top scorer, he still has a long way to go before he is considered a threat to the likes of Luka Milovojevic in Roy Hodgson’s first team plans.
Flanagan is now in his fourth season in Crystal Palace’s youth ranks, a point the man himself was keen to make, and he obviously feels that a chance to prove himself elsewhere, perhaps at a Football League club willing to give youth a chance, would have been far more beneficial to his development.
“This is our fourth U23 season. We really shouldn’t be here this season. We should be out on loan, honestly,” Flanagan said.
“Even Shawsy (U23 coach Richard Shaw) said it should just be two seasons. See how you progress from there, then look to get into a first team. When it gets to three or four seasons it just gets repetitive.
“It’s a bit of frustration. Partly it’s our fault, partly the club’s. At the end of the day, we just have to come in and do what we do.”
Flanagan can take some belief, however, from the rapid rise of Croydon-born right-back Aaron Wan-Bissaka.
Just a year after being catapulted into the first-team thanks to an injury crisis, Wan-Bissaka was on his way to Manchester United for £50 million.
But sitting around and waiting for Milovojevic or James McCarthy to have a spell on the sidelines is not how Flanagan would have wanted to spend his season.
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