Everton confirmed the addition of 16-year-old centerback Reuben Gokah from Charlton Athletic, and that the teenager will join the Everton Academy for the upcoming season.
The Academy is an area of the football club that Everton have not been very successful in of late, as it has been a while since the club has seen a player rise up from the ranks of the academy and into the first team.
In fact, recently, it has been more likely that Everton have simply sold off players who made noise in their academy ranks, most recently players like Lewis Dobbin, who went to Aston Villa last summer. Notably, someone like Harrison Armstrong has a chance to be the next player to work his way through the Academy and into the first team, but, if the transfer window comes together, that is likely to take another season in the best case scenario.
As for Gokah, joining a Premier League side this early in his development as a player has to be good news, as he'll have a chance to play relatively high-level football even at the Academy level. It remains to be seen where the player, who was born in 2009, will play this season, but given his profile, it is possible that he could be looking at a loan out to a lower level side sooner rather than later.
Gokah follows in the footsteps of another former Charlton youth player who joined Everton early in his career, Ademola Lookman, a player who is now making a good career for himself elsewhere in Europe despite an up-and-down experience on Merseyside.
But Everton will be hoping that Gokah's trajectory mirrors that of another player they bought young from a lower-level club: Jarrad Branthwaite, who joined from Carlisle United in 2020 and has now made himself one of the best centerbacks in the country.