"Had been a fear" - West Brom praised for Tom Fellows stance amid Ipswich and Southampton advances | OneFootball

West Bromwich Albion have been commended for managing to retain Tom Fellows this summer despite Premier League interest

This article is part of Football League World's 'Terrace Talk' series which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…

West Bromwich Albion have been backed for dismissing late advances from the Premier League for Tom Fellows, who has already started the 2024/25 campaign in a rich vein of form.

Fellows became a regular for Carlos Corberan's side in the back-end of the previous season, where he began to impress at the back-end of the Baggies' push towards the Championship play-offs.

The young winger excited the Hawthorns faithful with his direct speed and crossing ability and finished the season with four goals and three assists throughout league action, poising him for a significant 2024/25 season.

Fellows has begun proceedings in blistering form by registering three assists from his side's opening four matches in what has been a hugely promising start to the season for the Baggies, who are one of just four sides yet to face defeat thus far.

His early-season form, however, has not gone unnoticed and speculation was rife in the dying embers of the summer transfer window.

Last week, it was reported that West Brom had rejected a £10m offer from newly-promoted Premier League side Southampton, while Football Insider had also claimed the forward was in "advanced talks" with Ipswich Town, although the Baggies were unwilling to sanction a sale and Fellows' admirers seemingly could not meet the club's asking price.

Carlos Corberan's Tom Fellows reveal at West Bromwich Albion

West Brom supporters had been concerned that the club could let Fellows leave for a fee beneath his genuine valuation, although such fears were swiftly quashed by Corberan in his press conference on Friday afternoon.

The Spaniard stated that West Brom no longer need to make the "wrong decisions" when it comes to offloading talent, saying that mistakes had been made in the past under the club's previous ownership before Shilen Patel's takeover.

He said: "We are very happy to have him in the squad. Sometimes probably in the past this club when I was here we didn’t have the possibility to say no to things that were not the right things.

"Probably in the past when you are in a more emergency financial situation you need to make wrong decisions that are the right decision for the moment.

"Right now this club doesn’t have to make wrong decisions because we are not in this emergency financial situation.

"It allows you to make the right decisions in terms of the player that you bring or in the players that depart from the club."

Verdict given on West Bromwich Albion's Tom Fellows transfer stance

The retention of Fellows amid such interest represents a significant positive for the club as they look to continue their positive start to life this season, and they have been lauded for keeping hold of the talented winger by Football League World's resident Baggies fan pundit Callum Burgess.

"There was a lot of good business done by West Brom this summer, from being able to get money for players in the last years of their contracts - [Okay] Yokuslu, Conor Townsend and then Brandon Thomas-Asante - to then being able to bring in the likes of Mikey Johnston and Torbjoern Heggem to the club, but also getting some good loan deals done for Uros Racic and Mason Holgate," Callum told Football League World.

"But one bit of business that has delighted every single West Brom fan this summer is the ability to keep hold of Tom Fellows.

"But in his press conference on Friday morning, Corberan stressed the importance of Fellows by saying how important it is under this ownership that we no longer have to make the wrong decisions that were previously being done by Guochan Lai [former owner].

"Fellows is an academy graduate who every single West Brom fan loves, so if he has another good season we will see where we can finish.

"If it can be another good season that ends with us in the play-offs and having a real go at trying to get promotion to the Premier League, otherwise we will be looking at a really big fee we can receive for a player hopefully off the back of another really good season."