TOM DAVIES
Boyhood Blue Tom Davies joined Everton's Academy aged 11. He has gone on to make almost 100 senior appearances for Everton, despite only turning 21 in June 2019. In August 2018, Davies became Everton's youngest ever starting captain when he led out the Blues in their 3-1 Carabao Cup victory over Rotherham United at Goodison Park. Tom has been a regular for England at age group level and now plays for Young Lions' Under-21 team
TOM'S TESTIMONIAL
The Academy is the reason I’m a professional footballer with Everton today.
Joining as an 11-year-old and learning the philosophies of the Club and getting that way of playing and mentality instilled was important for me. Being a local lad and being a supporter of the Club, it was a dream come true.
Everything I have been taught by coaches has helped. I’d say technically I have improved a lot since I was a kid with the drills that we used to do, getting a lot of training in. I moved school so that I could train on the full-time model. That increased coaching time helped me get better on the ball and physically stronger, too.
If I hadn’t made those decisions back then, I wouldn’t be the player I am today. All parts of my game have improved during my time in the Academy. I think it’s just the mentality, the hard work and being first on the pitch and last off, doing everything properly and I think without that I wouldn’t have developed as much because it would have been easy to not do the extras or not work as hard in training. With the coaching and everybody at the Academy, the focus is always to do things the right way and that helped my make the first team.
That’s the mentality at Everton. If you come here you know you have to work hard and in training it is always intense, you do everything at 100 per cent and that’s what gets the best results.
