Leicester have earmarked Brentford front man Ivan Toney as a potential successor to Jamie Vardy, according to reports.
Toney has lit up the Championship this season, scoring 24 goals for the Bees after joining from Peterborough in August, and the Mirror report that the 24-year-old is viewed as a possible heir to Vardy, who has just turned 34.
That’s not to say that Leicester are planning on replacing the former England international, who was named Premier League Player of the Season in the Foxes’ extraordinary 2015/16 title-winning campaign, any time soon – he’s still operating at an elite level – but thoughts are naturally bound to turn to the future given his age.
While he might not have risen through the divisions in the same meteoric manner as Vardy, who moved to then Championship Leicester from Conference champions Fleetwood in 2012, Toney has had to take the long road towards the top.
Signed by Newcastle from Northampton in 2015, he played barely ten Premier League minutes for the Magpies and spent time away on loan at Barnsley, Shrewsbury, Scunthorpe and Wigan before joining Peterborough in 2018. He earned his move to Brentford after top-scoring in a truncated 2019/20 League One campaign.
If Toney were to make the switch to the King Power Stadium in the summer, he’d become the third Brentford striker to earn a Premier League move in as many years, following in the footsteps of Brighton's Neal Maupay and Aston Villa's Ollie Watkins, who broke the 20-goal barrier in the second tier in 2018/19 and 2019/20 respectively.
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