It was with considerable excitement that Crystal Palace signed Marc Guehi, one of the most exciting defensive talents in the country, for £18 million in July. For a player of Guehi’s potential to choose the Palace project, after years in the Chelsea academy, was rightly regarded as a sign of the club’s ambition as they embarked on a drastic rebuild this summer.

There was also, however, a hint of annoyance. For Palace do not want to be paying £18m for players who, they believe, should have been theirs in the first place. Guehi is a product of the Chelsea academy in Surrey, but he is a south London boy who grew up in an area, Lewisham, which Palace considers to be their territory.

A year earlier, Palace spent around £20m on Eberechi Eze, who joined from Queens Park Rangers. Again, Eze is a south Londoner, from Greenwich. Again, there was a sense that Palace should not be buying these local lads from afar, but recruiting them and developing them within their youth ranks.

It is both a blessing and a curse for Palace that they are situated within the UK’s most impressive hotbed of talent, described by chairman Steve Parish as the “best catchment area in the country”. A blessing because the streets and cages of south London are currently producing an astonishing amount of professional footballers (in 2020, 14 per cent of the Premier League’s English-born players came from within 10 square miles of south London), and a curse because the biggest clubs in the land are also searching the area for new recruits.

The scrap for talented youngsters is as fierce as it has ever been, and this weekend Palace face another club with a dog in the fight. Palace’s rivalry with Millwall may have cooled on the pitch, with the teams not meeting each other since 2013, but the two south London clubs remain locked in an endless battle when it comes to identifying and signing the best young players on their patch.

For Millwall, especially, it is hard to compete. They do not have the resources of the London-based Premier League clubs, and in recent years there has also been a growing presence in the area from sides based further afield, who travel down in hope of finding the next Jadon Sancho, Callum Hudson-Odoi or Emile Smith Rowe.

“Everyone is so active,” says Scott Fitzgerald, Millwall’s academy director. “You turn up at a game, which you think not too many people know about, and there are scouts there from clubs who are not even from London.”

For Millwall, perhaps more so than Palace, there is an acceptance that there will be players who either slip through their grasp or never come within their reach. That is the simple reality they face, given their limited financial power. The launch of Palace’s new £20m academy, which opened last year, has only made the task harder.

As with Palace there is still frustration, though, every time a south Londoner makes it to an elite level and he is not one of theirs. “We discuss this all the time,” says Fitzgerald. “But we are going to miss out on players. Everyone does. If anyone from south London goes to another club, we discuss whether we had known about them. There are players we will not know about, because we don’t have the resources to cover everywhere.”

How can Millwall hold their own in this jostle with the giants? They try to do so through networking, intelligence and, most importantly, charm. As a club, they are not often associated with friendliness and warmth, but the historic reputation of Millwall as an entity is hardly reflective of the individuals working behind the scenes.

“The key is trying to get these players first,” says Fitzgerald. “We are trying to recruit as early as we are allowed to, trying to be that first club. It is important that we have nice people, making them feel welcome. That first introduction is really important and whatever is written about us as a club, there are some amazing people working here.”

Despite all of the attention on south London from the biggest teams, Millwall are still able to unearth their own talents. First-team players Danny McNamara and Billy Mitchell are academy graduates, while last week there was a senior debut for 15-year-old schoolboy Zak Lovelace. Also on the bench that night was Nana Boateng, who has been at the club since he was eight. “That is the holy grail for me, to get them early and see them right the way through,” says Fitzgerald.