Mick McCarthy may be scouring the transfer market for the players he wants to bring to Wolves.

But Academy boss Chris Evans finds himself scouring the training ground to protect the ones already there.

Evans, the man who has shaped Wolves fruitful and successful recruitment of young players, is fighting a one-man war against the “agents and predator clubs” wanting to cash in on the next generation and has banned them from the club’s training ground.

Never has his watchfulness been more important. Wolves are about to announce the biggest take-up of 16-year-olds in Evans’s memory – some 13 players – and among them, he reckons, are some talents who are the equal of the best who have gone before, including Robbie Keane.

Most of the Premiership, for example, have cast envious eyes over 16-year-old central midfield player Kyle Bennett, the younger brother of youth team winger Elliott, who is himself highly promising.

“My staff took the group on a short tour to Belgium recently and I told them ‘Look, whatever you do, don’t take your eyes off Kyle. Not for a moment,’” says Evans.

“They didn’t – except for one afternoon and that was all it needed for an Italian agent acting for another club to approach him. I’ve got his card he gave to Kyle in my files now.”

In short, and with the Molineux board’s full backing, Evans has made the Compton training centre a no-go area for the vultures circling the prized pack of Wolf cubs who are paying an increasingly key role in the re-generation of Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Armed with a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie, Evans prowls the training ground touchlines or peers from his office balcony on the look-out for “intruders” – agents trying to get to some of the young gems being polished for future sparkle or scouts from rival clubs trying to tempt them away.

It’s led to some unpleasant confrontations and, most recently, even the sight of Evans frog-marching one agent, with known contacts to a major Premiership club and with young Bennett the target of his attention, out of the training ground.

But the 44-year-old Welshman, who has been running Wolves Academy for 17 years, is determined his proteges will be protected from the kind of influences which he believes can send impressionable young players off track.

Spend a couple of hours in the company of one of the men who make up the backbone of Wolves and it becomes clear that not too many agents are on his Christmas card list.

He has long been campaigning against the kind of malpractices which are currently under such fierce scrutiny from Lord Stevens. Three years ago, he made a presentation to the blue chip agency SFX, which he still keeps on his PC and which reads like an early draft for the script of last year’s Panorama expose.

“I do not see the need for them until a player has a first team profile,” he says. “I have known these boys through 2,000 coaching hours from eight to 16.

“I will offer my advice and gladly provide it. If not, I will put them in touch with the PFA who have top, top people who have been screened and can be trusted.

“But I have yet to meet an agent who has anything to offer a boy before he is a making his way in the first team because, until then, they are not marketable.

“So they are not welcome here and i have the full backing of the board to tell them to leave if I see them. As far as I’m concerned, the club does not just take responsiblity for a player’s football education when they come to us. I am given a duty of care which ensures they are safe and properly dealt with.”

As all Wolves fans will know, the flow of young talent is ever more vital to the club even as owner-in-waiting Steve Morgan brings the promise of heavier transfer funding.

But the club are enjoying their new, leaner and meaner approach to business and the striking progress this last year of Mark Little, Wayne Hennessey and Stephen Gleeson, following on from Daniel Jones, Lewis Gobern, Carl Ikeme and Kevin O’Connor earlier in the campaign, was warmly embraced by supporters.

Wolves’ intake remains 100 per cent local but the influence from overseas is still making an impact. Three of next month’s in-take are Congolese who arrived in the country as asylum refugees; another will be the first representative from the local Asian community.

And behind that age group, Evans knows the football grapevine is already buzzing about another youngster, of east European heritage and still of school age, who has settled in the area after his family sought asylum.

“What he can do with the ball . . .,” says Evans excitedly, “well, he is simply out of this world. And there are a few more too.”

But he asks me to keep their personal details to a minimum, partly not to burden the lads with over-expectation, partly to keep to a minimum any helpful intelligence to all those “predators.”

You understand why.

“Honestly, you would not believe it, but I have seen prominent ex-international players hop in their cars to follow our lads out of the training ground, to the railway station and intercepting them there to try to get to them,” he says.

“I have watched them approach parents or grandparents to try to find a way in. They offer promises of kit deals and mobile phones which can turn the head of impressionable youngsters but in reality amount to nothing.

“They do not care about them – until, that is, one of them makes it big. And then they want their pay day having done nothing for the lad at all. That’s not right for the player and that’s certainly not right for the club.

“I don’t enjoy the confrontations and I know they don’t like me. But my conscience is clear. The fact that I still hear from Joleon, Robbie and Lee Naylor and so many more suggests we did right by them. Whenever I do leave this job, I will be able to walk away with my head held high.

“In the meantime, agents know to stay away. When we’ve got games on, there is no need for them to be here.”

Report by Martin Swain.