Fulham U21

Ryan Sessegnon came through the Fulham academy and Harvey Elliott and Fabio Carvalho followed the same route out of Motspur Park. That pipeline is the point of the U21 side. It is not a club in its own right — no separate badge, no separate constitution, just the development arm of the Fulham first team, using the same crest and the same white shirts and black shorts.

The parent club was formed in September 1879 out of a church Sunday school in west London, which makes it the oldest professional club in the capital. The U21s carry the nickname that came with all that, The Cottagers, though they play nowhere near the Thames.

Home is Motspur Park in New Malden, the training ground rather than a stadium — a couple of thousand at most, and on most matchdays a good deal fewer. Players who have spent the week there in front of nobody go out on a Saturday to be watched by a few hundred, which is roughly the arrangement across Premier League 2.

That is the division the side competes in, Division One, alongside the Premier League International Cup and the occasional run in the EFL Trophy. Chelsea U21 is the fixture that fills the touchline; Arsenal U21 comes close.

The honours board is bare. Fulham have never taken the Premier League 2 title, and the closest the academy came to the FA Youth Cup was the 2014 final, lost at U18 level. Nothing since has matched it.

The measure of the season is not the table. Josh King, Martial Godo and Jonah Kusi-Asare are the names being watched now, and the job at Motspur Park is to get one or two of them into the first team before the next intake arrives.