Football holds many parallels for teen IPL prodigy

"What were you doing at 13?" Rajasthan Royals's post on X bore a heart in pink, the team's colour, and the name of the youngest player in Indian Premier League (IPL) history: Vaibhav Suryavanshi.

- Dhiman Sarkar

The left-handed batter wasn't born when the league began in 2008. Now, he's been signed on a 1.1 crore contract more than triple his base price of 30 lakh after Royals won a bidding war for him with Delhi Capitals in Jeddah on Sunday.

There's no denying Suryavanshi has what it takes: he made his first-class debut aged 12, three years younger than Yuvraj Singh (15 years and 57 days) and Sachin Tendulkar (15 years, 230 days), scored a 62-ball 104 against the Australian U19s, and aggregated nearly 400 runs in the Vinoo Mankad Under-19 Trophy last year.

But Suryavanshi is also in uncharted territory in IPL's brief history. No one as young as Suryavanshi- and never mind the constant noise about age fraud that forced his father to speak out after the auction - has made a mark in the league.

Not so in football, where young stars, albeit, not as young as Suryavanshi, aren't a novelty. Think the Busby Babes, Fergie's Fledglings. Think Pele winning a World Cup at 17 and Kylian Mbappe at 19. Think Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal. Think Arsenal's Invincibles, which won the Premier League undefeated with an average age of 23.05.

So who says you'll never win anything with kids? Except, of course, Liverpool legend-turned-pundit Alan Hansen who made that ill-fated prediction in 1995, while commenting on Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson turning to academy graduates. Eleven out of 13 of the graduates making it into the first XI isn't bad, wrote Gary Neville, one of them, Fergie Fledglings, in his autobiography "Red."