There is a particular sound a crowd makes when a 21-year-old scores his twelfth goal of the season, and it is not the roar you'd expect. It's closer to a gasp — the noise of people recalculating what they thought they were watching. Brighton's fans made it a lot this past season, because the boy leading their line finished the Season 3 campaign tied at the very top of the ENG Division 1 scoring charts, level with a certain Erling Braut Haaland.

That is the thing about breakthrough seasons. You only notice them properly once they're over.

With Season 4 barely a week old and every table still reading 0-0-0, now is the moment to look back at the players who spent last season quietly rewriting their own stories — the under-23s who stopped being prospects and started being problems for everyone else. England's top flight produced a fascinating crop. Here are three of them.

The finisher: Evan Ferguson, 21, Brighton

Ferguson's career in Soccerverse reads like a slow-burning fuse. Three league goals in his first full season. Six in his second. Then, this past season, twelve — from 33 appearances, an average match rating of 7.03, and 2,580 minutes of top-flight football before his 22nd birthday. The Irishman didn't just improve; he doubled his output for the second year running.

Twelve goals put him level with Haaland (Manchester Blue) at the summit of the division's scorers and clear of a chasing pack that included some of the game's most expensive names. He is rated 87 now, valued by the game at north of 15 million SVC, and — crucially — he has never left Brighton. In a game built on the buying and selling of influence, there is something almost romantic about a striker who simply got better where he already was.

My FM playstyle has always been: Get in a bunch of possible wonderkids. Keep the ones to help you promote. I would never sell the next Messi, just to fund my club to be able to buy some more mediocre talents.

Ferguson is exactly the kind of player that quote is about. Brighton kept theirs.

The tourist: Endrick Moreira, 19, Coventry (on loan from Madrid White)

If Ferguson's story is about staying put, Endrick's is about the opposite. The Brazilian is 19, owned by Madrid White, and has spent the last two seasons being sent out into the world to learn his trade — and what a strange, brilliant education it has been.

Season 2 took him to Italian side Pontedera, where he detonated: 29 goals in 26 games, seven man-of-the-match awards, an average rating of 7.81. That is not a loan spell; that is a rampage. So Madrid White did what elite clubs do with a teenager who has nothing left to prove at that level — they raised the difficulty setting. This past season he landed at Coventry in the English top flight and played virtually every minute available: 37 appearances, 3,129 minutes, seven goals, two assists for a mid-table side.

The raw numbers dipped, of course they did — England is a harder league than the Italian third tier. But an ever-present teenage forward in a foreign top flight is the definition of a player being forged rather than flattered. His rating has climbed 79 to 85 to 87 across the same stretch. Now he's back at Madrid White for Season 4, a genuine asset, his shares among the more actively traded in the game. The kid the market obsesses over grew up in front of us — in the East Midlands, of all places.

The engine: Eloge Patrick Zabi Gueu, 19, West Ham

The best rising-star stories are the ones nobody is telling, and Zabi Gueu's is buried at the wrong end of the table. West Ham finished 17th. Their teenage central midfielder finished the season with five goals and five assists.

The Ivorian is 19 and has already had a career: Season 2 was split between Halle in Germany and Debrecen Red in Hungary. This past season he jumped straight into the English top flight and delivered ten goal involvements from the middle of the park on a team that spent most of the campaign staring nervously downward — 25 appearances, four clean sheets, a solitary man-of-the-match award and, at 39,765 SVC a week, one of the cheapest contributors in the division. His rating is only 78, which in this game is not a ceiling but a runway.

The watchlist

Two more names for the notebook. Senny Mayulu (Tottenham, 20, rated 87) is the prospect the eye-test loves more than the scoresheet does — versatile, expensively regarded, one goal and two assists across 29 appearances, but carrying the kind of rating that usually precedes a leap. And a nod, just outside our age cap, to Nottingham's 23-year-old Elliot Anderson, whose seven assists were the most of any young midfielder in the division.

Why it matters

This is the part of Soccerverse the trading floor understands better than anyone. A young player isn't a static asset; he's a bet on a curve. The transfer channels are wall-to-wall with it — one seller this summer pitching an 18-year-old as "a player destined to become a top-class goal scorer, an investment whose value will only keep rising."

Most of those pitches are noise. But every so often the curve is real, and you get a Ferguson matching Haaland, or an Endrick surviving a top flight at 19. The managers who spotted these three early are the ones smiling now. The rest of us just get to watch them grow — and to make that gasping sound when the twelfth one goes in.