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Jason Koumas- £2.5m.

Ian Nolan, a cool £2m.

Alan Rogers - a club record breaking £2.7m.

Ryan Taylor £750,000.

Ged Brannan and Kenny Irons, 750k and 500k respectively.

The accounting might have been a little creative for Steve Simonsen, but his transfer fee to Everton was widely advertised as a British record for a goalkeeper.

The common denominator?

All were products of Tranmere Rovers’ celebrated Youth Academy - which will close its doors for good this weekend.

There has been no official announcement yet.

But it is imminent.

Tranmere Rovers’ Academy, which first opened its doors in 1987, is expected to close. Permanently.

The first clue came in a tweet from the club’s SuperWhitesChat account yesterday, which announced that Sunday’s Academy fixtures, home and away against Walsall had been cancelled.

Not postponed, but cancelled.

Not snow, but something more lasting.

It was followed by a message that while age group training sessions take place at Solar Campus on Saturday, there will be a meeting for parents in the first floor analysis room.

The news is not likely to be good.

Max Power, the last Academy graduate to yield a transfer fee for the club which developed him when he moved to Wigan in 2015 tweeted: “Terrible news that Tranmere’s academy is being closed! Produced so many players over the years. Always given kids from Merseyside the platform to forge a career in football. Sad day!”

Mark Cowan added: “Very sad to hear Tranmere Rovers closing the door on the academy had seven great years there made so many good friends and worked with some truly wonderful aspiring young footballers one of the most productive academies in the region very dark day for Wirral and Merseyside football.”

And Kenny Berry tweeted: “Very sad to hear Tranmere academy is closing down, spent four years coaching some very talented boys and made lots of good friends in my time at the club, Warwick’s legacy has been thrown away.”

Ah yes. Warwick Rimmer.

The former Bolton Wanderers stalwart was the man who made Tranmere Rovers’ Academy what it was.

Invited by the ambitious and forward thinking chairman Peter Johnson to launch an Academy in 1987 he later said: “I went home thinking ‘I’m not sure about this’.

“I knew what football was like, it wasn’t always a steady pay cheque. Of course I agreed.”

He became known as the £14m man - that being the value placed on the players sold on during his time as Academy chief.

But that was just the players moved on - talents like Joe Murphy (£225,000), John McGreal (£650,000) and Clint Hill (£250,000).

The players who flourished at Tranmere became the heartbeat of Johnny King’s celebrated rocket ride to the moon.

Sure, big money signings like John Aldridge, Pat Nevin, Neil McNab and Eric Nixon were enormously influential, as were more modestly priced but equally important captures like Johnny Morrissey and Jim Steel.

But the drive, the enthusiasm, the verve - the very beating heart of that team which won two promotions and banged three times on the door to the Premier League, came from the home grown youths.

Ged Brannan, Kenny Irons and Tony Thomas were all mates - partners in crime off the pitch - but on it they were superb footballers who played a pivotal part in some of the greatest days Tranmere fans have ever known. Then they all generated sizeable funds for the club which grew them.

(Image: Jim Donnelly)

Warwick Rimmer once said: “During the John Aldridge days I used to sit and work out that at least 40 per cent of the team had come through the youth team.”

Then there were the youth players who came back - invaluable club servants like Shaun Garnett who made more than a century of appearances for Rovers during the halcyon years of the late 80s and early 90s - then returned to become a valued club coach.

Garnett was the only YTS apprentice on the books at Tranmere when Rimmer took over in 1987.

He is likely to be one of the few youth coaches who remain when only an Under-18 side is likely to survive under the Academy umbrella.

It is almost certainly a financial decision - ironic given the Youth Academy funds which kept Rovers financially solvent for so long - but a legacy of the demotion from the Football League Rovers suffered in 2015.

Three years on the Youth Academy has gone the same way as Rovers’ League status.

Before his testimonial match in 2016 Warwick Rimmer said: “The hardest part of the job remains the same: explaining to a young player that he is not going to be kept on.”

Now the department he nurtured is set to suffer the same fate.

It’s another sad day for Tranmere Rovers.