What happened to Jack Clarke after his £10 million departure to Tottenham Hotspur?

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After rising through the ranks at Leeds United, Jack Clarke quickly became one of Elland Road’s hottest commodities.

Clarke wasn’t really playing for the Whites in the first half of Bielsa’s debut season in English football, but as the season progressed, his name became increasingly more known as he began to appear fleetingly in the league.

His first real chance to make an impact was on matchday 20 against Reading, in which his side won 1-0 and he played the full second half. This appearance started a stretch of 13 league appearances that saw Clarke turn the heads of the Elland Road faithful.

In this run, Clarke announced himself as a young player to watch. He could dazzle defenders with his footwork, breeze by them with his speed and create chances for his team to score with an attacking prowess that was quite beautiful to watch.

He notched two goals and two assists in those few months, but in a game against Middlesbrough at the Riverside, he was taken to hospital at half-time. It would be over a month until he next featured for Leeds, and despite such promise, he never seemed to get back to his best.

This wasn’t a major deterrent as many teams were still looking at Clarke as a promising player for the future. Eventually, it was Tottenham who convinced Leeds to sell and the forward departed for London in July 2019, not even a year after his first-team debut.

BREAKING: @SpursOfficial sign winger Jack Clarke from @LUFC for an undisclosed fee.

— Sky Sports News (@SkySportsNews) July 2, 2019

The fee was rumoured to be around £10 million and Clarke would be immediately loaned back to Leeds for the following season. Six months after his move, the now 20-year-old’s loan was terminated, having made only one appearance in that time.

Over two years after his departure, Clarke is still struggling to make an impact for Spurs and has been loaned out to Queens Park Rangers and Stoke City. It looks likely that he will be loaned out once more with a multitude of Championship clubs reportedly having shown interest in the winger.

So, what exactly happened? On the face of it, you could assume Clarke was just another of the plethora of young English talents that endure years of loan spells before being given the chance to shine for a Premier League outfit but was he ever destined for such footballing stature?

Again, after his illness at Middlesbrough, Clarke never looked like himself. He was sluggish, slower to react and the flair that he had made himself known with had all but vanished.

It’s unfair to outright assume that the illness, which remains undisclosed, played no lasting impact on Clarke’s form. That being said, it also seems that a fair idea to ponder is whether or not Clarke just had an elongated hot streak that finished when his minutes decreased.

Was he ever a 10 million pound player, or was he just a youngster on form whose value skyrocketed through the inflated market of English players?

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It’s almost certain that such an answer will never be determined, but something that does stand out from the entire situation is that £10 million for Jack Clarke remains one of, if not the best, transfer fees received for a Leeds player in recent history.

Clarke left at a time where fans had become all too accustomed to departures. More often than not, Leeds would bring a player in, that player would perform poorly, and would be gone after a season. Slightly rarer, but all the more painful, were the instances in which a player would come to Elland Road and perform like a superstar, before departing for the Premier League for a price tag that was scarcely half of what they were worth.

It was as though Clarke, along with Ronaldo Vieira, were two of the first players that both Bielsa and owner Andrea Radrizzani felt could be sold for a fair price and replaced by someone better and cheaper.

Perhaps, in hindsight, the 20-year-old’s sale was one of the early indicators that Leeds would reach a level of stability and ownership that they had strayed so far from in the earlier years of the century.

For Clarke though, it may well be that he made a big move too soon. The winger is still only in his early 20s and has more than enough time to make a big impact in his career, but it’s growing increasingly hard to envision that he will again reach the captivating heights he saw in his career beginnings in West Yorkshire.

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