Three years before becoming Chelsea's £117m club-record signing, Morgan Rogers watched his value fall to just £1m and questioned whether he would make it at all. For Rogers, the transition from academy football to the men's game was not as seamless as he had hoped and, in his own words, it took a series of "difficult loans" for him to break through. Bournemouth, who Chelsea face at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, were the first of two underwhelming Championship loan spells for Rogers, alongside a later stint at Blackpool, while he was a Manchester City player.
It was a setback for a player who had been a regular England youth international and one of West Bromwich Albion's brightest academy prospects. In a recent interview with Chelsea's club channel, Rogers said that period taught him how to "take knocks". Asked what his rise through the EFL had taught him, he replied: "Everything." After a long pause, he added: "I needed that next challenge, to be taken out of my comfort zone and find the player I was going to be in professional football.
"I think the academy player I was, if you watch me then, is not the same player I am now. I am a completely different player. I had to learn that on loan.
"The one thing I learned when going through these difficult loans is that I couldn't care less what people say about me. I just care about what I can control." "I don't think there's such a thing as a bad loan," Rogers' first loan manager at Lincoln City, Michael Appleton, told BBC Sport. Appleton had worked in West Brom's academy and knew Rogers was one of the most highly rated prospects there.
He made it his mission to bring him to Sincil Bank in League One. He remembers Rogers having a big personality and speaking up in team meetings despite arriving as an 18-year-old. The forward went on to score six goals and provide two assists in 28 appearances after joining shortly after lockdown.
En route to the play-off final, which Lincoln lost to Blackpool, Appleton recalls one moment in particular. "We played Portsmouth away and they had three or four absolute units in the team," he added. "We were setting up for set-pieces and almost running out of players to pick up these giants.
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