Watching Premier League teams go through pre-season rituals can be a laborious task, and the amount of real, useful information you can extract is severely limited. As managers will often stress, the summer exhibition matches are almost solely designed for fitness purposes, with excellent individual showings often serving as misnomers due to the casual nature of the games and, often, the regrettable skill level of the opposition.
But pre-season matches do drop the odd nugget here and there, and one thing you can identify by perusing the squad lists and watching the action is which academy players are on the verge of the first-team.