My Football Journey: The Road To 2026 is a series following some of the most exciting young footballers in the world through a key stage in their careers.
It will chart the highs, the setbacks and the hard work that they and their clubs are putting in and show how different their journeys are as they dream of making it to the 2026 World Cup. Links to all of those featured can be found here, with this installment being our second interview with young English midfielder Alfie Devine.
Alfie Devine is growing up. The boy who, at 16 years and 163 days, scored for
Tottenham Hotspur live on national television in the
FA Cup, becoming their youngest-ever goalscorer, turned 20 in August. No longer a boy, he is a young man.
Tottenham have sent Devine on loan for a season in Belgium’s top division with Westerlo. He is yet to establish himself as a first-team presence at his parent club but, since
his first conversation in this series, he has made a senior appearance at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, also in the FA Cup; one of many firsts he has experienced.
Still a teenager when this season began, Devine is changing physically and emotionally, as well as geographically, as he moves into adulthood. He is, for example, around 6kg (13lb) heavier than a year ago after putting on “good weight”, as he calls it, and is maturing in the fiercely competitive world of the club professional.
Youth teams games are gone; Devine has progressed through Spurs’ under-21s and under-23s to a loan in
League One, the third tier of English football, with Port Vale and another in the Championship, the second division, with Plymouth Argyle. He has played, and scored, for
England at an Under-20s World Cup. Today he is four games into this loan with Westerlo, who sit sixth in the Belgian Pro League after 10 games.
Devine has seen from the inside of a dressing room post-match what “men’s football” is all about; the desire to win, sometimes the need to win. He speaks of “feeling” and “rhythm” and “experiences, good and bad”. He has scored his first league goal, he has received his first red card. He has seen a first manager dismissed while he is at a club, he has endured his first online abuse.
These are all parts of an education he views with notable objectivity.
Devine in action for Tottenham against Vissel Kobe on this summer’s tour in Japan (Yuichi Yamazaki/AFP via Getty Images)
Devine has also been on summer pre-season tours with Tottenham, in 2023 and this year and, while playing on both, at the end he has had “honest” chats with head coach Ange Postecoglou about his development. He has willingly gone on loan.
That meant in August last year, as Devine turned 19, a Zoom call with Port Vale coach Andy Crosby and, soon, a 15-minute debut as the club from the English Midlands tried to see out a 1-0 lead against Carlisle United.
Was this significantly different to what he had experienced before?
“Yeah. Yeah, it was,” Devine says. “I was sort of defending for the whole 15 minutes and, just from those minutes, I knew what it meant to get points in the league. When the whistle went, you hear the fans, it’s definitely a different type of feeling. You feel involved, you play a part you haven’t experienced before. Men’s football — it’s intense.”
The relentlessness of League football is an added personal experience.
One week on, Vale were away against Oxford United. The hosts had a man sent off and Vale took the lead six minutes after Devine’s introduction from the bench. Vale sought a second consecutive 1-0 win, then Oxford equalised three minutes into added time.
Devine reacted by passing to Ben Garrity, who was fouled in the Oxford penalty area. Devine was not prepared for what happened next.
“It was a penalty,” he says. “They were down to 10 men and it was 1-1. I was just happy we had a pen and I’d played a part. I didn’t know who the penalty taker was — I just assumed it was someone who’d been there a long time or one of the strikers.
“It didn’t cross my mind that I’d be anywhere near in contention to take it. I was just stood around and no one was getting the ball. Then the manager shouted for me to take it, and you don’t really have time to process you’re taking a penalty in the last minute.
Devine wearing Port Vale’s colours (Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)
“From when I put the ball down to taking it, it felt like about 20 minutes. I hadn’t even taken a penalty, not for the 18s or 21s. In nets was
James Beadle, who was at the Under-20s World Cup with England, and each day after training we’d practise penalties. So I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, he knows where I go. Do I change or stick?’.
“In the end, I changed; went to the ’keeper’s left — and if he’d gone that way he would have saved it because it wasn’t in the corner. At the end, he came up to me and said, ‘I swear you always go to the other side’.
“I told him, ‘I normally do, but you’ve just given me the reason why I didn’t’.
“It was good — another feeling and experience that I’d not had before. All very new. It’s a memory I’ll always have.”
Life was good, Vale were in an early-season promotion spot and Devine had settled in. But then they started losing and Devine saw another side of professional reality. The situation affected him.
“You can definitely feel a difference,” he says of the older players around him. “It’s right after the game in the changing room, you know more what it means to them when you lose.
“There was a long period where we didn’t get a win. Then I was left out. There were two games where I was brought off after 45 minutes. I was thinking this was going horribly, horribly wrong. It knocks your confidence a lot. Especially in those leagues, you need to get into a rhythm of playing and playing and playing. That’s when you play your best.
“Then we played Cheltenham at home and I started and scored. Then we had Mansfield away in the last 16 in the Carabao Cup. I started and scored again. Looking back, that goal against Cheltenham brought the confidence back. From then onwards, I was playing my best stuff. I was in the centre of the pitch, where I am much more comfortable, not out wide cutting in. I was one of the No 8s or deeper and I enjoyed it.
“Even if we went 1-0 down, I was enjoying the feeling of being on the pitch and trying to do something about it, being and feeling confident in my rhythm.”
Devine rose a level in January by joining Plymouth in the Championship (Adam Davy/PA Images via Getty Images)
Devine was focused on staying at Vale for the full season but, come January, Ian Foster, who had been his England coach, was appointed manager of second-tier Plymouth. Devine sent him a good luck text. Just under a fortnight later, Foster returned the contact and, within 24 hours, Devine was on loan at Plymouth.
“It didn’t cross my mind to go there,” he says. “I was very much set on finishing the season at Port Vale. I was now playing every week, and in a position I was enjoying. Then I got a call from ‘Fozzy’ and it happened within a day. I didn’t need a Zoom call. I already knew the manager; how he played; what he wanted, around the building and in training. I’d been with him for almost three years.
“For Tottenham, it was me getting a step up to the Championship.”
It seemed a neat fit, but it went wrong quickly for Foster. On April 1, after a 1-0 home defeat by
Bristol City, he was sacked. Devine started that game, but was shown a yellow card and then, 12 minutes from time, a red.
“You feel awful,” he says of his first sending-off. “Many players go through it, but the sort of time Plymouth were in, it was definitely not what they needed. I thought I was playing one of my best games in a while. Then one moment of losing concentration, a bit of frustration… it was a second yellow, but I was going to win the ball.”
Devine digests receiving his first red card (Harry Trump/Getty Images)
Was he in the dressing room on his own?
“Yeah. It was 10 minutes until the game finished. It felt like an hour. You realise what you’ve done, what’s happened and you can still hear the game going on. It’s not a nice feeling.”
Plymouth were by then in a relegation battle. For a club’s players and staff, wages and jobs are on the line. Devine was witnessing professional stress up close. It is not a relaxed environment.
“The mood is going to be like that if you get beat. If a player isn’t like that, then unfortunately the job isn’t for them,” he says. “Losing is not a nice feeling. The good thing is that, in League One and the
Championship, if you get beat on the Saturday, you generally have a game on the Tuesday to put it right. You can be disappointed for a bit, but you can’t be disappointed too long. And you’re not going to win every game.
“But having those bad feelings, you learn 10 times more from them. Don’t get me wrong, you need the good feelings in football, but the earlier you have bad experiences, the better you’ll deal with them.”
On the season’s final day, Plymouth, one place above the relegation zone at kick-off, were at home against a
Hull City side trying to make the promotion play-offs. Devine was selected in the starting XI by interim manager Neil Dewsnip. He played 83 minutes of a 1-0 win that kept Plymouth up.
There was joy and relief all around, although Devine describes the day as “weird in a way”.
Born in Warrington, between Liverpool and Manchester, in August 2004, he is part of the first generation to have lived their entire childhood in the grip of mobile phones and the intrusion of social media. Even before the red card a month earlier, he had seen some online negativity; following it, criticism increased. Now, in Plymouth’s biggest moment of the season, he was chosen to start.
“I didn’t expect to,” he says. “I hadn’t started since the red card. After it, I played 45 minutes, then five minutes (in the next match). I didn’t think there was a chance I’d be starting.
“But leading up to the game, I’d had a really good training week. Then the manager told me he was going to start me. It was just excitement then.
“But going through those periods, as a footballer going into that Hull game, it’s not just the game. You see what’s happened with
Brennan Johnsonrecently — he’s taken himself off social media and he’s scored five goals in as many games. He was getting criticism he nowhere-near deserved. Footballers do see stuff, even though you don’t want to. I saw so much and it does knock your confidence.
“The manager trusted me to play. It was the most important game I’d played in. I was playing in the position I wanted to play in and I felt it was the best game I played for Plymouth. After, the main feeling was happiness for the club, fans, team-mates. Plymouth deserved to stay up — I think it’s an amazing club. But, also, there was a bit of, ‘Well, I’ve proved a few people wrong. They said I couldn’t perform like that’.
Loanee Devine and Plymouth stayed up on the final afternoon of last season against Hull (Steven Paston/PA Images via Getty Images)
“It’s another thing you learn. What I’ve realised is that you can have a really good game and there’ll be loads of people say you haven’t. You can have your best game and someone can go online and say, ‘I never want this person to play for the club again.’ You realise you’re in a completely different football world. You’re not in the 21s where, if you have a bad game, people aren’t going to go online and say you should never play for the under-21s again.
“It’s weird — they’re showing how much it means to them, but in the wrong way.
“Unfortunately, every footballer will have to accept it, because it’s not going away, is it? I have an Instagram account. I don’t have a Twitter account (as such), but I still have an account to look at it. You tell yourself you’re not going to look. Unfortunately, you do, because that’s the way we are.”
Devine played his first game for Westerlo, based in the northern Belgian town of that name, a fortnight after his 20th birthday. It was against Anderlecht of Brussels and he was a half-time substitute.
Aston Villaloanee Leander Dendoncker was up against him in midfield. In his second game, against Royal Antwerp, former Spurs defender Toby Alderweireld played and scored twice, the second a 90th-minute winner. Devine didn’t think it an occasion to reminisce about Tottenham together.
Last Friday, he had another 90 minutes in an eventful 2-2 draw with Beerschot. There was another Spurs connection — Westerlo’s two late goals were scored by Luka Vuskovic, a 17-year-old defender on loan from Hajduk Split of Croatia; Vuskovic
has already agreed to join Tottenham next summer for a reported £12million ($15.7m) fee.
Devine is impressed with Westerlo, both the club and the town of around 25,000 people an hour’s drive east of Antwerp. He has an apartment on his own 10 minutes from the training ground and his family have been over to visit. As he points out, he has lived away from home since he joined Spurs from
Wigan Athletic at age 15 and Plymouth, in the far south-west of England, is a six-hour drive from his parents’ house, so independence and travel have been major pieces of his young life already.
Devine, playing for Westerlo, challenges Standard Liege’s Filipe Kuavita (Bruno Fahy/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images)
Going abroad was in his head this summer. And for Spurs? “For them, it’s all about football, about development. It’s not about living abroad. It’s different: you’re going abroad, but it’s still football. Every decision will always be a football decision.”
There have been no shocks, though one football surprise has been the amount of running in training.
“I knew a bit about the league because it has some big clubs in it, but I didn’t really know how different it is,” Devine says. “Other players said there’s a lot of running and, when I’ve played, I realised the games are end-to-end. When you get your data back, you realise how much you’ve done in terms of mileage.
“There’s loads of tactical stuff as well, a good balance; there’s tactics behind the running. Positionally, it’s similar to when I was at Port Vale, where I was playing as one of three centre mids with a back five, a 5-3-2. Here, without the ball, the midfield goes man-for-man, not just at a goal kick, but in open play. That’s something new for me. It means concentrating.”
He is not anticipating another January transfer intervention, as happened at Vale in this year’s winter window: “No, it’s a season-long loan. I have no intentions of coming back (to Tottenham) in January and going somewhere else. I just want to keep playing and keep improving and, so far, Westerlo are giving me that opportunity.”
Devine is still targeting an impact at Tottenham (Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images)
Both Dendoncker and Alderweireld weigh almost 80kg and Devine has felt a need to add some bulk, though not to “smash the gym”. He laughed at the recent
Bernardo Silva YouTube clip with
Manchester City team-mate
Ruben Dias.
“You learn more about your body and what you need to perform your best in men’s football,” he adds. “Speaking with Tottenham, from the end of last season I’ve put muscle on, put weight on — good weight — and you feel the impact. Some players don’t need that. Everyone’s different. When I weigh myself here, I’m around 72kg. It’s a mix of gym work and diet. My body fats are similar.
“When I was 66kg, it wasn’t where my body needed to be. It’s natural when you’re playing and training that you’ll put on muscle. I didn’t do it as much at Port Vale and Plymouth. I spoke to Tottenham, I knew it was something I hadn’t kept an eye on. I was just all about playing, playing. I’m not going to go to the gym all the time and get massive — that’s not what I’m thinking. But as you mature and grow up, you understand what your body needs.”
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