Troy Parrott landed in Spain on Thursday afternoon to complete his move from AZ Alkmaar to Real Betis and take the latest step in an intriguing career. The transfer fee, including add-ons, is reportedly €20 million.Trust the guy named Parrott to take Irish football’s most interesting flight.Having been the first Irish player to represent AZ, Parrott will now make the same piece of history for Betis. (Which is not to say the club has no Irish links: Dublin-born Patrick O’Connell managed the club to their only league title in 1935, while current Irish under-21 defender Anselmo García MacNulty started off in the Betis youth ranks.)Forsaking English football has been the making of Parrott. Tottenham found themselves at the head of a long queue of English clubs to sign Parrott as a 16-year-old from Belvedere, and he spent a couple of heady years on the runway to a familiar kind of stardom. He made his senior Spurs and Ireland debuts at 17, and followed it up with a Premier League bow at the same age, at the end of which he was ostentatiously handed the match ball by José Mourinho. The Harry Kane comparisons were so obvious that when Parrott followed him in being loaned to Millwall, journalists were told not to ask him about Kane.But his body was not ready for the cut and thrust of the Championship and injury interrupted this and subsequent loan spells to Ipswich and Preston. His only true clear run came in League One with MK Dons. A loan move to Excelsior Rotterdam precipitated a permanent move to AZ, which allowed him to bloom into Ireland’s hero over that astonishing November week against Portugal and Hungary. Once he established himself in the Netherlands, Parrott spoke with his customary eloquence as to why he got out of England. The style and pace of play in the Eredivisie suited him, while he also got away from some of the external pressure.“Trying to live up to the hype at such a young age, it was never going to happen that early because football isn’t so easy,” he said in 2024. “For me it was more about growing up a bit and trying to block out the noise.” Tottenham Hotspur manager José Mourinho chats with Troy Parrott as he prepares to come on against Burnley. Photo: Ian Kington/Getty Images Parrott has achieved what his compatriots Gavin Bazunu and Evan Ferguson are trying to do: shake off the setbacks of injury along with the burden of expectation. This writer recalls speaking to Parrott at an Ireland training camp in Antalya in 2023. Breathless with excitement about Ferguson’s Premier League breakout, we asked if he had any advice for his new international team-mate. He replied that he was hardly much older than him, and he was right to push back. Parrott was 21 at the time, so we should not have been expecting him to be the wizened voice of experience. West Ham were heavily linked with a move for Parrott this summer but it would have had to have been a wildly lucrative offer to dissuade him against the path he has charted. He is still just 24, and his plan post-AZ was always to stay in Europe – ideally in Germany or Spain – to give himself the best chance of landing at the highest-possible level in England when he reaches his peak at 27 or 28. Real Betis ticks these boxes. This is a step up from AZ in every way. La Liga is a much higher level than the Eredivisie, while he will now be playing in the Champions League having played in the Europa and Conference Leagues with AZ. [ Number of Ireland players in Premier League set for record low this seasonOpens in new window ]Betis, now coached by former Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini, returned to Europe’s top tier courtesy of a fifth-placed finish last season. Parrott should be confident of a regular starting place, even if for no other reason than his transfer fee. The reported total fee of €20 million would make him Betis’s fifth-most expensive signing ever and so Pellegrini will be expected to play him to ensure some return on that investment. He won’t face a huge level of competition for his place, with former Watford striker Cucho Hernández the other senior striker at the club, while he will be surrounded by creative attacking talent in the form of Antony, Isco, Giovani Lo Celso and the highly rated Moroccan international winger Abde Ezzalzouli. Plus, he gets to live in Seville and can look forward to playing at the Camp Nou and the Bernabéu. This seems a much better kind of living than schlepping through Championship matches twice a week with West Ham. Parrott is piecing together a fascinating career, and the Irish international team are among its chief beneficiaries.