When Nuno Espirito Santo was selecting which players would return to Compton Park for group training sessions last week, he did so knowing this was the group he’d be picking from when football finally returns.
Most of the list picks itself, given that Wolves’ senior squad is so small by modern-day standards — but there was one name which stood out.
The youngest of the 23 he selected — by two years — was a 17-year-old whose name won’t even be familiar to many Wolves supporters. Yet if defender Christian Marques continues the career trajectory he’s taken in the past 18 months or so, he’ll soon become a household name in Wolverhampton and beyond.
There are very high hopes for Marques, the most expensive academy signing in the club’s history who, had Wolves not moved to sign him from Swiss side Grasshoppers in January 2019, could be playing for Benfica or Bayern Munich (a £650,000 fee had been agreed with Benfica but the move fell through, while Bayern also enquired about Marques just as Wolves were signing him).
He’s already captained Switzerland at youth level and skippered Wolves’ under-18 and under-23 sides, as well as joining Nuno’s squad in China for their Premier League Asia Trophy victory last summer.
A series of impressive and accomplished displays for the under-23s this season, as well as regular training sessions with the first team, have cemented his position not just as one for the future but as a part of the senior group. And he only turned 17 in January.
Staff at Wolves enthuse about his composed and assured defensive displays in the “Conor Coady role” — the middle of a back three in the 3-4-3 formation used at youth level to mimic the first team — but also about his vocal leadership qualities.
“It’s rare for a youngster coming from another country to show such leadership,” Darren Ryan, Wolves’ elite player development coach, tells The Athletic.
“When I met him for the first time, it was clear he had those qualities. He just fitted in right away — he’s very driven and he knows exactly what he wants to achieve. He showed that drive and that mentality from day one and it was easy for us to make him captain.”
Marques was born in Portugal and moved to Switzerland at a young age with his family.
He was spotted playing for Switzerland Under-16s by Harry Hooman (now Wolves’ head of UK academy recruitment), who had travelled to run the rule over a couple of Belgian youngsters in a youth international but was immediately impressed by Marques and described him as “outstanding”.
There’s no exact science but a typical timeframe from first spotting a youngster to getting a deal signed and sealed is around three months. Marques moved to Molineux just four weeks after that initial scouting. He was also watched by Graham Clutton (head of European academy recruitment), who reported back that Marques was a “no-brainer” for the Coady role.
Then, Matt Hobbs, who was at the time head of academy scouting and is now the club’s chief scout, went out to run the rule over Marques and concurred that signing him was imperative. Indeed, it’s thought he felt Marques was one of the best European players in that position, at that age, that he’d ever seen.
Not only was Marques a confident, vocal, organisational presence at the back but his range of confident passing also caught the eye, particularly his ability to play “through the lines” or into a No 10’s feet, as well as a pure desire to defend and throw himself at the ball.
Starting attacks, being able to read the game, organise the defence and have ability on the ball are all vital attributes for that Coady position and it was felt Marques had them all.
With competition for his signature hotting up, Wolves knew they needed to move fast and also persuade Marques to join. Given Wolves’ strong Portuguese contingent (eight senior players plus Nuno and his backroom team), a clear pathway to the first-team squad and Nuno’s (and Fosun’s) preference for developing younger players (Morgan Gibbs-White, Max Kilman and Pedro Neto are three recent examples), that wasn’t a problem and Marques joined in January 2019, moving to Wolverhampton to live with a host family. His relatives, including his younger sister, visit regularly.
Financially, the deal was the most expensive in Wolves academy’s history, with Marques costing three times the £120,000 they had paid to sign Kortney Hause from Wycombe Wanderers in 2014, the previous record.
Wolves still can’t compete with the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City in the wages they can offer to young players but their big sell is that pathway. The same reasoning brought another very highly-rated young defender, Nigel Lonwijk, from PSV a few months ago.
“There was big competition for him but you can see the path to the first team,” Ryan adds. “That Coady role is so important in a 3-4-3 or a 3-5-2 but like Coady, he’s a leader, he’s driven and has a great mentality.
“He needs to maintain that now — he’s going in the right direction and he’s trained a lot with the first team. It’s great that he’s in Nuno’s training squad at the moment, also because he can see first-hand Conor playing in that position.
“Nuno is really good with the young players and we always see a benefit from our lads training with them.”
Coady, for his performances and his professionalism, is a role model for every youngster in the academy but Marques will take that comparison much further in that his running stats are directly compared with Coady’s.
One of the improvements the academy staff want from Marques is in his high-speed running, so the sports science team have compared the youngster’s stats to what Coady produces in a Premier League game.
“That has improved since we’ve worked on it — again, he needs to maintain that and develop it,” Ryan says.
“He’s only 17, so there’s a lot more to come physically from Christian and the work the staff have done with him in the past 16 months has been excellent.
“An important thing to note is that when he’s gone up to the first-team squad, or gone to China with them, he’s dropped back to the under-18s at times and he’s still the same person. He still has a first-class mentality and he wants to be the best player on that pitch every single time.
“His passing is excellent, as is his disguised passing. I remember an under-23 game when Rob Edwards was still in charge. Christian steps into midfield and disguises a pass, so much so that Rob and Scott Sellars are looking the other way.
“He can really whip his foot around it. He’s done a lot of work on his weaker foot and hitting that diagonal pass to the wing-backs. Steve Davis (under-18s boss) has done a lot of one-on-one work with him. Steve was a centreback himself.
“We have tried him at right centre-back, to give him that opportunity to be isolated in one-v-one situations. That’s something to work on — if anything, he can be a bit too eager to win the ball at times. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — Steve always says you want a defender to really want to defend — but you need to know when to commit to the ball and engage, or when to drop off.
“We’re delighted with him and his personality has grown off the pitch, too. He’s very humble. He’ll always come and ask questions, we’ll show him individual clips and Steve mentors him a lot.
“For a lad who’s left home at a young age and moved to another country, it couldn’t have gone much better.
“If he maintains what he’s doing, then we’ll be delighted and so will Nuno.”
