There is a vocabulary the European press uses when a young African player joins a top club, and that vocabulary costs the player years.
Words like raw. Words like athletic. Words like needs developing.
These words are not used when an Argentine teenager joins from River Plate. They are not used when a Norwegian striker joins from Salzburg. They are reserved for players from Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and increasingly Morocco and Egypt when the player is dark-skinned enough for the word to feel applicable.
The cost is not abstract. Scouts read the same press. Coaches read the same press. The framing influences how the player is deployed, what role they are slotted into, whether they get academy time or first-team time, whether they are described as a project or as a finished asset.
Raw means you will play fewer minutes than the Spanish kid who arrived the same week. Athletic means you will be used wide, where your perceived strengths can be exploited without trusting you with the ball in central areas. Needs developing means the club gets to delay your contractual progression.
The language is not malicious. It does not need to be malicious to do damage. It is reflexive, inherited, and rarely examined.
Mané at Salzburg was raw. Mané at Liverpool was a striker who scored 23 goals in a Premier League season. The player did not change. The language describing him did.
Until the press examines its own vocabulary, the careers will keep being shaped by it.