It has been almost 40 years since Campbell and Cavan Chapman were the last pair of brothers to line up for the Wolves first team.
That wait will go on a little longer despite the impending arrival of Noha Lemina. He will join big brother Mario at Molineux on loan from Paris Saint-Germain with the option of a cut-price permanent move in the summer.
But while the 18-year-old winger is set to train with the first team from day one at Wolves, the club plan to tread carefully in terms of throwing him in alongside his elder sibling in the Premier League. “He is an exciting young talent who is maybe not expected to impact the first-team group instantly,” says head coach Gary O’Neil.
“But that doesn’t mean that he won’t, because he does have some fantastic attributes. He’s powerful and fast and is a good lad who is willing to work hard. Obviously, he has Mario here to help him settle as well.
“So it’s a good one for the club, definitely, because he has the potential to progress into an extremely talented player “And who knows, if he’s able to settle in very quickly and impact things fast, we may see them in and around some first-team games. If not, it’ll be a very good signing for the club.”
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Noha Lemina is a player who needs a senior breakthrough — one which he hoped to get in the first half of the season at Sampdoria.
He joined the club, who are currently in the Italian second tier and managed by Andrea Pirlo, in August. But Lemina managed just 16 minutes of first-team action before returning to PSG frustrated.
Yet Wolves have seen and heard enough — including from the popular Mario — to take a chance on the teenager. If they chose to make the deal permanent, it would cost around £1.7million ($2.2m).
It is certainly possible that Noha could get a taste of first-team action in the remainder of the season.
For now, though, he might have to be content with training alongside his brother while getting his match minutes for Wolves’ under-21s. “I envisage him being around the first team a lot, training-wise, unless at some point we decide it’s better for him to be involved elsewhere,” said O’Neil.
“If he was playing a lot of games for the under-21s, for instance, and we felt like being with us and then just dropping in with them was causing him a problem, then we may look at mixing it up a little bit.
“But the idea at the moment is, if it gets done, he comes straight into the first team group to be assessed in and around it to see where he’s at and what impact we think he can have.”
The signing of another Lemina will inevitably seem strange — not least as Mario has become an increasingly pivotal figure within the Wolves setup. If Max Kilman is the calm, measured figure growing impressively into the role of captain, then the elder Lemina is arguably the vocal, galvanising force in the Wolves dressing room alongside Matheus Cunha, who signed alongside him last January.
But if observers pigeonhole Noha as a signing designed to please a key first-team member, O’Neil has some news. Noha was being monitored by Wolves while his brother was still plying his trade for Nice in Ligue 1.
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“Noha was on the list of targets long before I arrived,” said O’Neil. “There was a lot of work done on him not this summer but the summer before because he had the sort of athletic profile we were looking for in attacking wide areas.
“And then, of course, Mario’s a decent reference to find out all about him. Mario is honest enough not to try to oversell him, I’m sure.”
While the younger Lemina has yet to make his expected senior breakthrough, his talent has been highly regarded for almost a decade.
Having begun his footballing journey at AF Garenne-Colombes to the west of Paris as a child, the winger was snapped up by PSG as a nine-year-old and has remained with them ever since. He impressed enough to get an early promotion to the under-19s in 2021-22, when still 17, and last season he chalked up a goal and six assists for the side, as well as four goals in five appearances in the UEFA Youth League — contested by the youth ranks of clubs in the group stages of the Champions League.
By then he was already training regularly with PSG’s first team, bringing him face-to-face with Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. The star-studded squad also included, for the first half of the campaign, current Wolves forward Pablo Sarabia.
His youth-team colleagues also included current PSG first-teamer Warren Zaire-Emery and he was selected to travel with the first team on their pre-season tour of Japan and South Korea alongside fellow youngsters Ilyes Housni, Ismael Gharbi and Ethan Mbappe — younger brother of Kylian.
Lemina started for PSG against Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al Nassr on July 25 and performed well, catching the eye as an unpredictable winger, with quick feet and a low centre of gravity.
But Bradley Barcola arrived late in the summer from Lyon to join fellow new arrivals Randal Kolo Muani, Marco Asensio and Lee Kang-in. With Gharbi and Housni already ahead of him in the PSG pecking order — both have made senior competitive appearances — Lemina opted to join Sampdoria in the hope of accelerating his education.
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It did not work out as planned and now he is hoping that a switch to Wolves, where his older brother has quickly become part of the furniture, will provide him with the environment to thrive.
Wolves believe his raw talent is worth their investment in terms of wages and time, but they have given themselves a get-out in the summer should he not perform sufficiently. Lemina, meanwhile, will have a new set of colleagues to impress — and one who already knows him well.
“It’s a good fit because he’s a talented young boy and he has experience of coming through a top academy,” said O’Neil. “The tricky part of moving at a young age to settle should be made easier because of his brother being here.
“All signings come with a risk, of course, and they’re not all successful, but this one feels like it has a very good chance of working out well for all parties.”
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