Sheffield Wednesday confirms new long-term deal until 2028.

•  Bailey Cadamarteri signs a long-term deal with Sheffield Wednesday, extending his contract until 2028.
•  The 18-year-old striker has impressed since his senior debut last season and has been on an upward trajectory in the Championship this season.
•  Cadamarteri’s importance to Sheffield Wednesday’s future is highlighted by the rare length of his contract, which saves the club from spending big on a starting striker and makes him a valuable asset.

Bailey Cadamarteri has signed a new deal with Sheffield Wednesday after breaking into the first-team.

It was announced earlier this week by Wednesday that Cadamarteri had penned a new long-term deal with the club. The length of the deal wasn’t initially known, but The Star has revealed that the teenage striker has received a four-and-a-half year extension on his current deal.

This means that his deal with the club won’t expire until the summer of 2028.

Bailey Cadamarteri enjoys Sheffield Wednesday breakthrough

The 18-year-old has been with the club since he was an eight-year-old. At the start of the season, he quickly reached double figures in the Professional Development League, and his play quickly caught the eye of new manager Danny Röhl.

But his senior debut actually came last season. He played his first senior game for Wednesday in an EFL Trophy match, while current Huddersfield Town manager Darren Moore was at the helm.

Even though his initial break came in the 2022/23 campaign, his true emergence as a first team footballer has come this season, in the Championship. He played in his first ever men’s league match when he came off the bench against Millwall, in the middle of November. Impressed by what he’d seen, Röhl gave him another brief cameo against Birmingham City.

They say that sometimes the best way to test how good a player can be is to chuck them into the proverbial deep end, and the manager certainly did that with Cadamarteri. Against Leicester City, at Hillsbrough, the club’s number 42 started his first ever league match for the club that he’d represented for a decade.

Ever since he came into the first team, he’s just been on an upward trajectory. He’s started in the three games since the match against the league leaders, and has scored in two of them; one in a big win against Blackburn Rovers, and another against Norwich City.

How important is Bailey Cadamarteri to Sheffield Wednesday’s future?

Contracts of that length are rare at Wednesday, especially for a player who has only made seven professional appearances. The only other player at the club that has a contract that comes anywhere near Cadamarteri’s is Djeidi Gassama, and his contract only runs until 2026.

This new deal shows just how important Röhl, and the rest of the higher-ups at Hillsbrough, think the 18-year-old will be in the future of the club.

Good strikers are the hardest players to find, because it’s arguably the hardest position to play in your sport. That makes them expensive, so having a really promising striker come through a club’s academy comes with two major benefits.

Firstly, Wednesday might not have to fork out big contracts and transfer fees for a starting number nine for a long time now. Secondly, if anyone does want to take him away from the Owls, they are going to have to pay a mighty fee to do so.

His attacking smarts, in terms of being in the right positions at the right time in and around the box, are what makes him so exciting; those are instincts that you simply can’t teach. Two goals in six games, of which four were starts, is seriously impressive, and the news of the length of his new deal should be music to the ears of Wednesday fans.