Goonerholics Forever

From the moment of his appointment, Mikel Arteta has been the focus of heavy criticism from sectors of the Arsenal fanbase and, but for a brief pause after the FA Cup victory in 2020, occasional calls for his head have persisted. Some criticisms have been constructive, many have been bizarre and sadly, some from so-called fans have been, frankly, vile. At this point, I should come clean. I believe Arteta has done a marvellous job at Arsenal, being the prime mover in the transformation of a club that was in serious disarray both on and off the park and building a team that is, at long last, challenging again for the big prizes. Here I take a look at criticisms that I have seen thrown at him. I apologise if I have overlooked your favourite brick-bat and urge you to fire off in the Drinks to rectify my omission.

1. Arteta is too inexperienced and is learning on the job

This was clearly the first criticism aired. It was a bold move by the Arsenal board to appoint Arteta to the role of first-team coach when his only coaching experience was being assistant to Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and he only retired from playing some 3 years earlier. That decision was all the bolder in that the then sainted (though now somewhat blemished by a recent court judgement over tax avoidance) Carlo Ancelotti was also in the frame and had expressed strong interest in the job. However we now know from Arteta’s many interviews and press conferences that he talks a very good game and his ambition, focus and drive come through very strongly. Indeed, it was observed after the first interview when he lost out to Unai Emery that he had impressed the panel then and would one day be a successful coach. So it has proved and I am certain that the impact of that first interview was a factor in his ultimate appointment. As to learning on the job, I would observe “Who doesn’t?” and the day you stop learning on the job, you might as well retire. As one of my old bosses said, “The only remediable flaw in a candidate for a job is inexperience!”

2. Arteta’s teams play boring football

This was the next criticism I came across, both in the Twittersphere and from some people whose judgement is often quite reliable. I would go further and observe that we were playing not just boring but frankly terrible football at the beginning of Arteta’s first full season (2020-21). Arsenal had a truly awful run of results after a decent league start of 3 wins and a 3-1 away defeat to Liverpool where we scored first but had only 2 more shots on target. After a creditable, narrow 1-0 away defeat to Man City on 17 October (creditable compared to the June 2020 visit when we lost 3-0 and had no shots on target) we lost 0-1 at home to Leicester, achieved a surprising 1-0 victory at the Old Toilet when an Aubameyang penalty separated two poor teams each with only 2 shots on target. Then the show went completely off the rails with a 0-3 home defeat to Villa, 0-0 away draw to Leeds, a 1-2 home defeat to Wolves, a 0-2 away defeat  to ‘That Lot’, a 0-1 home defeat to Burnley (!), 1-1 at home to Southampton and a 1-2 away loss to Everton. One win and two draws in ten games with some absolutely shocking home performances. On 21 December Arsenal sat in 15th place with 14 points from 14 games, 4 points above the drop zone with a goal difference of minus 6. That bad run saw the growth of the ‘Arteta Out’ movement which has never completely died out. The press uniformly observed that, had Arteta not engineered our FA Cup win the previous season, the Board would have given him ‘his jotters’. I am sure that there were internal discussions. Had they sacked Arteta at that point the ‘Arteta Out Brigade’ would have got their wish though I’m not sure whether they’d worked out who they wanted instead. The Board held their nerve and Arsenal turned their results around beginning with a 3-1 Boxing Day home win over Chelsea that is memorable for the performances of Saka and Smith Rowe (who were said by some to have saved Arteta’s job) bringing youthful energy and dynamism to a previously lethargic and pedestrian side. Arteta’s team went on to produce some decent away results but also had further dispiriting home defeats to City, Liverpool and Everton (!) and bore draws at home against Palace, United and Fulham. They finished in eighth place below Leicester, West Ham and ‘That Lot’. Was Arteta lucky to have a patient Board? He certainly was. However, he had sold his vision for the team and the 5 year project it required in his interview and the Board had bought into it. What effect did the Coronavirus pandemic and lock down have on the situation? It’s not clear. I’ve seen it argued that it saved Arteta’s job but also that it delayed his project.

However, Arteta had inherited a squad that comprised a mixture of washed out, lazy and mediocre players with a sprinkling of young talent, in a dressing room riven by difficult personalities and cliques and a prevailing culture of comfort persisting from the latter years of Arsene Wenger: Leno, Martinez; Bellerin, Maitland-Niles, Luiz, Sokratis, Mustafi, Chambers, Holding, Mari, Kolasinac, Tierney; Pépé, Saka, Xhaka, Willock, Torreira, Guendouzi, Ceballos, Özil, Martinelli, Nelson, Smith Rowe; Aubameyang, Lacazette, Nketiah. Spot the survivors. It was clear to anyone regularly watching games during Arteta’s first three seasons where Arsenal finished 8th, 8th and 5th that the players he inherited could not play the system he wanted the team to play. I still have nightmares about those players defending like clowns and playing out from the back like headless chickens. Major surgery was required to deliver the project he had sold to the Board – and they had bought into it and knew that it would take time. We may still have problems with low blocks and have drawn too many games last season but this Arsenal team usually isn’t boring to watch.

3 Arteta doesn’t trust flair players, iced out Özil, Aubameyang and Guendouzi and sold Smith Rowe

There were cries of outrage when Arteta stopped selecting Özil after the 1-0 victory over West Ham in March 2020 and again when the player left on a free transfer. However, the rot had set in when Özil was given a £350k pw contract in January 2018 (the very day we bought Aubameyang) when the club broke their wage structure to ensure that we wouldn’t lose a second marquee player that season after Sanchez engineered a move to United earlier that window. As has been seen before and was to be seen again, the large contract seemed to affect the player’s motivation. The outrage was all the louder because Özil had developed a massive social media following, vastly greater than the club’s. Yet Arteta didn’t freeze out a first choice player. Unai Emery had quickly begun to question Özil’s motivation, used him sparingly throughout his tenure, rarely for a full 90 minutes, and openly raised concerns about his fitness and commitment. Arsenal tried to move Özil on in the summer of 2019 but no-one would take on his salary. It was clear after Baku that the player’s relationship with Emery was poor. On taking over as interim coach, Freddie Ljungberg restored Özil to the team but quickly lost patience with his petulance and dropped him. However, Arteta played Özil in his first ten games in charge. The 1-0 victory over West Ham on 7 March 2020 was Özil’s final game for Arsenal. The final straw for Arteta was Özil’s refusal to display solidarity with his teammates in taking a 12.5% salary cut during lockdown. Arteta saw that as a breach of one of his ‘non-negotiables’ and the German never played for the first team again. Özil was left out of the Premier League and Europa League squads for 2020-21 but continued to train alongside the first team and to court his personal fanbase on social media commenting on the team’s results and his relationship with Arsenal. The club sought an exit strategy and paid the bulk of his remaining contract to allow him to join Fenerbahce on a free transfer in January 2021. A sad end to what had seemed a dream signing, an Assist King for several seasons but his relationship with the club had soured before Arteta took over and sadly it could not be rectified. In Turkey, Özil didn’t exactly find a revived commitment to football.

Arteta was certainly the moving force behind Aubameyang’s exit. Aubameyang was stripped of the captaincy, exiled from the first team and subsequently sold leaving only Lacazette and Nketiah as central strikers though the club did try unsuccessfully to bring in Alvaro Morato from Juventus. Only 16 months earlier, in May 2020, Aubameyang had scored twice to secure Arsenal’s 14th FA Cup by beating Chelsea 2-1, following which Arteta had played a key role in securing the £250k pw deal that Aubameyang signed in September 2020. Aubameyang played his last game for Arsenal on 5 December 2021. Six days later he was exiled from the first team and left out of the squad for a warm weather training camp in Dubai. He left Arsenal “by mutual consent” in February 2022, joining Barcelona on a free transfer after four years at the club. He had shown superb form from debut to Cup Final victory. Aubameyang scored 49 goals from his debut in February 2018 to his brace against Everton in February 2020 (equalling Salah’s tally and beating Kane by 12 goals over that period). However, after signing his new contract in September 2020, performances and goals fell away and he appeared to be a player in decline. The disciplinary issues that forced Arteta to act are clear. As a senior player, let alone club captain, Aubameyang was setting an awful example to the emerging young squad. He had been dropped from the squad for turning up late to the NLD in March 2021, having been reprimanded in February 2021 for a breach of Covid-19 regulations. The final straw was a late return from an authorised trip to France. Arteta said, “What I expect from any person at this football club that is representing this badge [is] that he has passion, that he gives absolutely 100%, that he puts the club in front of any personal interests and is able to do anything to fulfil the badge that we have on that chest. Apart from that, you can listen to the individuals, you can understand the different cultures but that commitment, that passion has to be there and unfortunately it wasn’t.” Later Arteta observed, “I know he is our best goalscorer, he is the club captain, he is the highest earner at the club but for disciplinary reasons I don’t want him at the club!” Once again the Club Directors backed the coach. It was a brave move by a coach with a clear vision and utter conviction who demanded high standards. Aubameyang’s subsequent performances at Barcelona and Chelsea confirmed that he was incapable of reproducing his form from 2018 to 2020.

Guendouzi was another talented footballer whose future at the club was compromised by “attitude and general conduct” and who felt the metaphorical boot of Arteta. The first public indication of a problem was his alleged taunting of Neil Maupay (I know!) about wages during an altercation in which he gripped the Brighton player by the throat. However Guendouzi had crossed the line before. On the first occasion, he was offered an olive branch. He fell out with Arteta during Arsenal’s 2020 winter training camp in Dubai, soon after the Spaniard’s appointment. Arteta was unhappy with the Frenchman’s attitude towards a training session and dropped him from Arsenal’s next match day squad. He was then brought back into the fold, but made just four further appearances before his clash with Neal Maupay. Arteta’s anger did not purely stem from the incident itself, but more from Guendouzi’s refusal to apologise during internal disciplinary meetings. That further breach of Arteta’s non-negotiables signalled the end of the road. His behaviour was deemed to display a lack of maturity and fell below Arteta’s demand for high standards of conduct, discipline and professionalism. Their relationship broke down and Guendouzi was subsequently excluded from the squad, sent on loan to Hertha Berlin then sold to Marseille for £10m in July 2021, significantly below market value.  

On his arrival in December 2019, Arteta repeatedly spoke about the standards he expected from his players and warned that those who opted not to meet them would be shown the door. He was true to his word. To anyone upset by Arteta’s handling of these three players, I would suggest that it’s unlikely that you have ever been or will ever be a key member of a successful team.

Smith Rowe’s Arsenal career was impaired by recurrent fitness problems rather than by Arteta. Arteta admitted that he hadn’t “got the best out of” the player, noted his struggles with injuries and fluctuating form and acknowledged that he couldn’t guarantee the regular playing time that Smith Rowe needed and wanted. Thus he was sold in the 2024 summer window to Fulham for £34m though sadly he hasn’t set the Cottage on fire. When challenged on the sale of Smith Rowe during Ødegaard’s absence last season, Arteta observed, “It was a very tough decision to let Emile go, especially because personally I feel really grateful for what he did for the club and for me in a period of time that I think he was instrumental to change something around it. But at the end, players have to play. He had a lot of difficult moments, a lot of struggles with injuries when we were together and he needed a fresh start. It’s normal, we understood that and we allowed him to go.” He added, “We allowed Fabio [Vieira] to go [to Porto on loan] as well because we wanted to create the room and the space for Ethan [Nwaneri].”

4. Arteta is too controlling, driven, stubborn and intense

Arteta is clearly a driven and intense man highly focused on his project and on making his players and team better and successful. It is difficult for a simple fan like me to say whether he is stubborn or not. He clearly has a group of trusted coaches around him to whom he appears to give a lot of authority and to whose advice he almost certainly listens. The extent to which he is seen as controlling probably depends on one’s own perspective. He has a clear idea of how he wants his team and the individuals within it to play. Watching him on the touchline during a game is quite exhausting and he appears to be constantly telling his players (or at least those that can hear him) where he wants them to stand/move/run if he thinks they aren’t doing what he expects of them. He is clearly more controlling than Carlo Ancelotti or Harry Redknapp both of whom allegedly choose their teams and simply tell the players to “go out and play”. He knows what he wants from his players and has no compunction about telling them. My view is that that is his prerogative as coach and it’s what he’s paid for.

A related criticism is that as a result of Arteta’s controlling personality, his team is too robotic (aka boring). Arteta has been accused of treating the team as if he’s playing a computer game. I think he is a driven guy who spends hours coming up with a strategy to win every game and knows exactly what he wants his players to do at any moment within every game. I really can’t see him changing.

Another related criticism is that as a result of his need to control the team and his risk aversion during build ups, these are too slow and as a result we always face an organised low block that we then have great difficulty breaking down. I think the players we have had in midfield have been a significant factor in these slow build ups and hopefully the replacement of Partey and Jorginho with Zubimendi and Nørgaard will see an improvement in the speed of our transitions and attacks. It’s definitely a problem but I don’t believe that Arteta wants these slow transitions.

5. Arteta doesn’t trust or develop young players

I don’t think this criticism holds any water. It first emerged when Saliba was sent on loan to Marseille for the whole 2021-22 season. He had signed for Arsenal at the age of 18 in July 2019 and spent 2019-20 back on loan at St Etienne then he spent 6 months (because of a cock-up it wasn’t a full season) of 2020-21 at Nice without playing a single first team game for Arsenal. The centre back made his first team debut for Arsenal more than 3 years after signing. Another way of looking at this is that Arteta looked after a promising young defender, ensuring that the young player gained necessary experience out of the English media spotlight and played him when he was ready. Centre back is a position where experience and good decision making is critical and young defenders have to learn through their mistakes. Arteta inherited a defence that was hapless and he knew from his playing days that the Arsenal fanbase had crucified a series of centre backs over recent years. His man management of Saliba was exemplary. 

There are a legion of talented young players whom we have seen play well for our youth teams but who have barely made it beyond the bench for the first team before being transferred or merely released. If you haven’t already done so, you should read CER’s excellent review of the hurdles that face aspirant youth players. Although the fanbase love ‘one of our own’ coming through and have looked eagerly for many prospects to progress to the first team, young players can be psychologically damaged by a poor performance if thrown into the first team too early. The list of nearly-men, though still really boys in first team terms, is long and many fans have bemoaned Arteta’s failure to throw them into the fray when we have had absences or been toiling in games. 

I think Arteta gets the big decisions right. He did not plan to make MLS our first choice left back when he introduced him to the first team last season but he judged him a more reliable choice than Zinchenko who had let him down twice before and whom he no longer fully trusts for 90 minutes. MLS grabbed the opportunity and has made himself first choice in that position. Nwaneri has been introduced to the first team squad and, unlike several other nearly-men before him, has established himself there. He has aspirations to play more regularly – indeed many fans thought he should have done towards the end of last season. However, Arteta chose not to overwork him as had been required of Saka at a similar age and rested him after a couple of games in which he had run out of steam and fallen below the standards he had set earlier in the season. Young players are often inconsistent and progression is rarely (Saka’s was astonishing) a linear ascent. Arteta has indicated that he sees him as a central attacking midfielder, a back-up or successor to Ødegaard, if you will, and, importantly, if Nwaneri has the patience to build up his game time. As we move towards a larger squad with two top quality players for each position, and a greater use of rotation both in starting positions and as games progress, there will be plenty game time. 

Recently, we have seen talented young Academy players like Omari Hutchison, Chido Obi Martin and Ayden Heaven chose to move to Chelsea and Manchester United because they were convinced that their path to a first team place was easier there than at Arsenal. They are undoubtedly talented but from an Arsenal perspective they have been poorly advised. Hutchison played only two games for Chelsea before being sent on loan then sold to Ipswich. Heaven played 6 games for United after his January defection so probably benefited from joining a club with a shambles of a defence while Obi Martin made 5 substitute appearances and became United’s youngest ever starter in their final league game last season as their strikers continued to be expensive embarrassments. So in terms of choosing an easy route to a first team place the latter pair probably made the right decision. Undoubtedly winning a first team place at Arsenal is challenging but only players with self belief and the will to fight for that place will make the cut.

6. Arteta trains players so hard and plays them so often that he breaks them

Last season we had a disastrous injury record, notably hamstring tears, that unquestionably damaged our challenges  for the Premiership and the Champions League. However, in contrast, we had few major injuries and absences during season 2023-24, which may have led to a degree of complacency/optimism that led to the gamble of not signing another striker in either the summer window or the January window. I know nothing about the Arsenal training regime and have to trust that we have taken a professional approach to fitness development. For more information about the modern science of fitness development and muscle injury avoidance you should read Trev’s excellent piece earlier this summer if you haven’t already done so.

The work load on key players like Saka, Saliba, Havertz and Gabriel has certainly been too high in recent seasons principally because of the lack of alternates of an appropriate skill level whom Arteta trusts as well as the congested match schedule. The reluctance to use back-ups is increased by the pressure on the team to win every game because of the standard set by creative accountancy fuelled Manchester City. The club is taking steps this window to address the lack of quality back-ups but it was inevitable as we rebuilt the first team with better players that the backups in some positions would be a significant step down in quality. A measure of the improved quality of the first team over recent years is that two players who were clear upgrades to the first team in 2022, Jesus and Zinchenko, have effectively been left behind by current first choices though the former has been handicapped by recurrent injury.

A legitimate beef with Arteta is the lateness of his substitutions when the team needs to be changed up to try to win a game but that again brings us back to his trust in the quality of the back-ups for the key players whom he expects to create and score to turn draws into wins. We have to trust his judgement as he sees these players every day but he doesn’t always get his decisions right (who does?). In 2023 when we lost Tomiyasu and Saliba in the first 20 minutes of a Europa League match against Sporting SP for the rest of the season Arteta chose to play Holding in Saliba’s place and our title challenge evaporated with a series of draws and defeats against mid-table clubs. Kiwior had joined Arsenal only 7 weeks before those players were injured and clearly had not yet won Arteta’s trust but, using the retrospectoscope (always dangerous), Kiwior’s excellent stand-in performances for Gabriel in big games at the end of last season raises the question of whether the choice of familiar slowcoach Holding over newbie (but faster) Kiwior was the correct one. I should add that there are two further mitigating considerations here: firstly that Arteta has shown a clear preference for playing a right footer at right centre back and a left footer at left centre back and secondly Kiwior’s excellent performances last season were, of course, at left centre back rather than right centre back. Nonetheless the enforced replacement of Saliba by Holding was a major factor in our failure to win the Premier League that season.

7 Arteta buys more left backs and goalkeepers than forwards and signs too many players from Chelsea

In my opinion Arteta has taken a systematic and rational approach to building a competitive team. 

A look at Arteta’s signings window by window shows a tentative first January window, only a few weeks after he commenced his new job, making loan signings of frankly mediocre players in an attempt to stiffen the porous defence which was the team’s major problem when he arrived. In the next three windows he added quality to the defence and stability and creativity to the midfield and then in the summer of 2022 the team was invigorated and turned into challengers with the addition of Jesus and Zinchenko. Subsequent windows have prioritised acquiring quality players to fill gaps in the team with the summer of 2023 being an outstanding window, probably to be bettered by this summer’s business. Indeed, purchases have tended to get progressively more successful with the exception of last summer’s failure to sign a striker (too focused on Sesko?) and desperate last minute loan signings of Neto and Sterling. We do tend to do our business in the summer but the addition of Ødegaard on loan and Trossard were outstanding additions in January windows. 

Of course there have been turkeys. Every signing is a gamble but to my mind the successes beat the turkeys  18 v 11. Actually it’s 7 goalkeepers (mostly turkeys), 4 left backs (1 turkey) and 8 forwards, if we include Gyokeres (3 turkeys). 

As for the chavphobia, I understand that we still bear scars from William Gallas. Arteta has signed 5 players from Chelsea: two have been a success, two were complete failures and one has yet to be tested.

January 2020: Cédric (loan + free), Marí (€8.00m loan fee + €6.00m)

Summer 2020: Partey (€50.00m), Gabriel (€26.00m), Rúnarsson (€2.00m), Willian (free)

January 2021: Ryan (loan), Ødegaard (€2.00m loan fee + €35.00m)

Summer 2021: White (€58.50m), Ramsdale (€28.00m), Tomiyasu (€18.60m), Lokonga (€17.50m), Tavares (€8.00m)

January 2022: Trusty (€1.80m)

Summer 2022: Jesus (€52.20), Vieira (€35.00m), Zinchenko (€35.00m), Turner (€5.90m), Marquinhos (€3.50m)

January 2023: Trossard (€24.00m), Kiwior (€19.50m), Jorginho (€11.30m)

Summer 2023: Rice (€116.60m), Havertz (€75.00m), Timber (€40.00m), Raya (€3.50m + €31.90m)

January 2024: –

Summer 2024: Calafiori (€45.00m), Merino (€32.00m), Neto (loan), Sterling (loan)

January 2025: –

Summer 2025: Nørgaard (€11.60m), Arrizabalaga (€5.80m), Zubimendi (€70.00m), Madueke (€60m), Mosquera (€19.04m) ?plus Gyokeres (€73.40m)

8 Arteta should have won the PL by now in view of the money he’s spent

It doesn’t work like that in a league containing clubs funded by state treasuries. The reasons for our failure to finish first rather than second in the last three seasons are clear. The simultaneous loss of Saliba and Tomiyasu without adequate cover in the run in of 2022-23; an exhausted, overplayed, small squad ran out of steam collecting just 12 points from their final 9 matches in 2023-24; last season a combination of bizarre refereeing decisions that we will never see again and an appalling sequence of serious injuries torpedoed our bid for first place against a Liverpool team that had the luck of the Devil.

9. If Arsenal don’t win the Premier League or Champions League this season, Arteta should be sacked.

This is a mantra currently being recited by hostile pundits on sports channels, snide press hacks and some intellectually challenged Arsenal ‘fans’. I have never heard them name a successor who is guaranteed to do better.

10 Conclusions

I don’t play Football Manager or any other simulator on my laptop so I have no sense of my own brilliance as a manager of a top team and how much better a job that I would do as the Arsenal manager than Mikel Arteta. I just watch the games we play and as a result I think he’s done a bloody good job to date given the scale of the challenge he faced in December 2019. This summer the club is addressing the squad issues that have handicapped our title challenges in the last three years. The team will be stronger but so too will Liverpool, City and Chelsea. Let battle commence! I do know that we will miss Arteta, his drive, his intensity and his tactical ingenuity when he finally moves on. May that day be a long. long way off.

COYG

Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to see many players come through the ranks of the youth team and go on to become undoubted greats.  

I was a little too young to see Charlie George come through but even so, social osmosis for a 5-year-old Islington boy made sure that I, along with everyone else in the playground, was aware of the greatness of Charlie.  A few years later, we had the great Irish contingent to idolise – Brady, Stapleton and O’Leary. In those days, it was normal for top clubs to scout youngsters across the UK and Ireland, with Liam coming over at the age of 15 in 1971.  Islington, and certainly the area around Highbury was very Irish at that point.   In my primary school classroom, it used to take 5 minutes to get from the Mac’s to the O’s in the morning register, so in many ways Arsenal was perhaps something of a natural destination for these lads.  Of course, by this point we already had Rice and Nelson and would go on to add others, such as John Devine.  Aah, happy days! 

After this golden period, there was something of a drought, from memory, until Paul Davis came along. He joined while at school and signed professionally in 1979, making his debut in 1980. He was a lovely languid player, but that laid-back appearance hid a core of steel. His debut came away at That Place, in a heavily changed side, necessitated by the fact that we would play at home to Juventus in the Cup Winners Cup in a game watched by 55,000 at Highbury, which saw us kicked off the park by a team which had so many Azzurri greats in it – Zoff, Scirea, Cabrini, Tardelli, Causio, Bettega and the laughably inappropriately named Claudio Gentile. Gentile can be rendered as “kind” or “fair” in English.  Something he assuredly never was on the pitch. Away in Turin two weeks later was that glorious game in which the young Bermondsey boy Paul Vaessen, another Arsenal youth product, would famously score the winner. Returning to Davis, he was hugely unfortunate to come through at a time when we lost both Brady and Stapleton and were in a transitional period. As a result, he was forced to play in a dysfunctional team and for a while became the butt of a certain amount of barracking from the Arsenal crowd, some of it very unpleasant. Shame on you! On us! 

As the youngest player in a frankly pedestrian midfield, he rightly ought to have been shielded from this criticism, but at the time far too many teammates were just not up to the job and left him out on a limb.  On the other hand, perhaps it was exactly this tempering in the fire that helped make him the fine, strong player he was.  Perhaps it also played a part in his subsequent mentoring, on and off the pitch, of other young Arsenal kids who came through a few years later, particularly the Black kids from South London with whom he shared a common background- Rocastle, Thomas and later Campbell.  This was an undoubted golden era for Arsenal products. A bloke called Adams came through, as did Keown and Merson, along with Martin Hayes who never quite hit the heights of the others but deserves his place in the Anfield ‘89 season pantheon, having scored the crucial winner during the run-in, away at Middlesbrough. More recently, we saw the likes of Cole and then Wilshere, and more recently still, Iwobi, Maitland-Niles and then Saka and ESR.  For sure, it’s a heritage of which the club, and we, ought to be proud.

For every one of the above-mentioned greats, however, there are far, far more players who started with dreams of playing in front of us, only to have those dreams snatched away. A 2023 study by Idsoccer Consultancy indicates that only 0.012% of boys playing in organised youth football will play a single minute in Premier League football.  Less than 0.5% of players signed by professional teams as a whole at under 9 years old – already the cream of the crop – go on to play for the first team. 

As a result of these numbers, it is unsurprising that youngsters coming through such hot-house treatment seek to clarify their pathways, the closer they move towards to key older age groups, particularly at 16 where they receive their first “apprentice” contract.  Then again a couple of years later there is the first professional contract which may be offered. While most of us are suffering this same “culling” at these ages in terms of O (GCSE’s) and A levels in the UK educational system, the cliff edge for boys – becoming young men – is considerably more vertiginous, as shown by the numbers above. If the clubs are essentially culling numbers each year, it is only logical for those potentially on the receiving end to look after their own interests.   By the time they get to youth team level, they will have seen a large number of friends already cut, some of whom will have struggled to find new clubs. Suddenly the childhood dream is confronted with harsh reality. 

Thus, we have a situation where the two parties – player and club – engage in something of a dance. For all but the most talented – and therefore in demand – youngsters at this age, the power balance is firmly on the side of the club. For the small fraction for whom first team promotion is seen as the likely next step in their development, the balance is tilted in favour of the player.  These players can, to a certain extent, make demands of the club.  Chief of these has become that the club needs to set out a pathway to first team. For the top teams, this can be very difficult indeed, as invariably they will already have a top player – or multiple top players – in the position into which the budding young first teamer is likely to be suited. The incumbents will already have fought their way up the same near vertical slope themselves.  We have reached a fork in the road at this point and for the player to continue at the club there needs to be a coincidence of desires.

The Loan Approach

One pathway the club can offer to a young player considered too good for what used to be called reserve team level, but not yet ready for the first team  is the loan.  Lest we forget, at 15, Ødegaard moved to Madrid and played a total of 124 minutes in 2 seasons for the first team. This was followed by 3 seasons of loans at lower-level clubs in Holland before he made a breakthrough, while on a 4th season loan, at Sociedad, at the age of 20. Less haste, more speed perhaps.

At the same time, Arsenal don’t have a great recent history in sending players out on loan and then bringing them into the first team.  Lord only knows what Wenger was thinking, if he was at all, when he sent Gnabry to West Brom to play for the high priest of low brow football that was Pulis. No wonder the player left.  Most recently those players selected for a loan seem to be destined to leave the club. Brooke Norton-Cuffy looked a promising right back, but was sent out in loan to Lincoln at 18, followed by further loans to Coventry, Rotherham and Millwall before leaving for pastures new in Italy with Genoa in Serie A.  Perhaps his experience is indicative of just how difficult it is to break through at a Premier League club, and Arsenal in particular.  He would have seen Bellerin ahead of him, and then more recently White, Tomiyasu and Timber – All full internationals.  Another example is that of Balogun. He was tearing it up as a striker at under-21 level and didn’t get a loan until he was 21, spending a season at ‘Boro, before another at Reims where he really broke through. Impatient for first team football, he was sold to Monaco at 23, for a reported fee around €30m. One of Edu’s better sales. 

One loan which might be seen as instructive by the parents and advisers of bright young midfield rising stars is that of Charlie Patino. Seen for a number of years as being a star in the making, Patino was sent on loan at 19, after a couple of substitute first team appearances, to Blackpool in the Championship. Here he shone and was regarded so highly by the fans that he quickly had his own song. The following season he was also sent out on loan, also to the Championship but this time to Swansea City. This time his experience wasn’t so great and he found opportunities limited.  At the start of last season at the age of 21 he left for Deportivo La Coruna. He made 7 appearances in the Spanish second division.  

All of the players highlighted above were considered exceptional and all have gone on to play at a high level. None of them can be said to have seen a clear pathway to the first team. It is of course hugely pleasing to see them making a career in high level football and hopefully earning a good living. There is no hardship involved in living in Monaco or Genoa or La Coruna. The loan route is certainly a pathway which both club and player can use to develop further. It is also, however, an opportunity to put the player in the shop window, and it seems as though this has been the favoured approach at Arsenal for a while. 

Leaving at the End of the Apprenticeship, Before The Initial Breakthrough

The road to professional football success is strewn with examples of players who have seemed to have it all in front of them but who subsequently failed to meet their potential. Often this is through poor decision making. Many of these kids-becoming-young-men are from backgrounds which haven’t afforded them or their families exposure to a wider commercial world.  It can be as daunting for working class parents as it is for the boys themselves to be faced with a wall of information relating to financial and investment advice, legal advice, as well as agents and commercial offers. How are they to discern what is in their best interests when they have a limited frame of reference? Finance is an important building block of the whole package they seek. It is tempting for a kid and his family to be blinded by the numbers and look at the short term.  However, for the most talented and in-demand, understanding how the club in question sees the development of the player is the key element.  

There are a number of building blocks which the club can put in place to assist on the pathway.    Gently folding players into the first team set up is one such. One aspect is inviting the more talented players to join on pre- or mid-season training trips. At these, the young players get to mix with and hopefully learn from the first team in a less pressured environment. It shows that the club considers the player highly. The club also have an opportunity to assess the players social and mental maturity in an alien environment.  Each year it is instructive to see which of the youngest players are allocated the limited number of these slots. It is a signpost on the way, however, and not the destination. In the past we have seen many promising players taken along, who have then not made the final cut.  

Arsenal clearly also use intra-season first team training access as a significant tool for winning young players over by showing that they are regarded as being on a first team pathway. From the club’s perspective, both of these approaches are as much developmental as assessment opportunities. There is no such thing as a free lunch. MLS, Nwaneri and most recently Max Dowman have all been invited into first team training sessions at certain times while in their youth team phases.  Clearly this has be managed as they are still boys at this point and even if they have an advanced degree of physical development, it is unlikely that they will be able to sustain extended exposure to the power of full grown men.  There are exceptions of course. We think back to the adolescent Wayne Rooney.  These tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule, however.  Neither MLS, Nwaneri nor Dowman stood/stand out as being physically super-developed.  Most recently, we have seen Chido Obi leave for the perceived greener pastures of Manchester United (you, boy, at the back, why are you laughing?). He was clearly physically in advance of his years while at Arsenal and played for the U-21’s while only 15 and attended first team training around this time. His sheer physical size stood out at this point. Clearly he was being shown a pathway, one trodden by the likes of Fabregas, Wilshere and to a lesser extent thus far, Nwaneri.  However it didn’t seem to be enough and he eschewed signing the pro-contract he was offered in order to move to United last summer, for whom he made 7 appearances for the first team, totalling 165 minutes, as well as another 53 minutes in the FA Cup 5th round match against Brighton, also with no goals, all by the age of 17 and a half.  He also played 360 minutes at U-21 level, scoring twice and assisting once. It has to be said that even with our paucity of options up front, it is difficult to see how he would have gained the first team minutes with Arsenal.  Perhaps there were other reasons behind Obi’s move. Perhaps he looked at Højlund and Zirkzee and fancied himself against such clearly limited opposition. Perhaps the financial offer, in the light of the competitive journey through youth football as set out above, was just more compelling. We will never know.  He has made his choice and good luck to him. At the same time, Nwaneri (of whom, more later), born in the same year but 8 months older, played 895 Premier League minutes, scoring 4 times and assisting twice in a team challenging for the Premier League and 224 Champions League minutes as well, scoring twice for a team which reached a CL semi-final. If you’re good enough you’re old enough.  Clearly, Arsenal offer a pathway, but it is highly selective and needs to be appropriate to the player.  I am sure that Max Dowman and his family and advisers are watching closely. Dowman looks to me to be in the mould of a number 10 type player, as perhaps does Nwaneri, rather than the wing role each has been played in for the most part when playing above their age groups. 

Post First Pro-Contract, Pre- First Big Contract

This is a key turning point for many players.  They may have been invited on pre- and mid-season tours; been on the bench multiple times; made a few appearances for the first team; have individual development plans for the most talented.   As such they can almost, but not quite, touch the big time and the fame and riches the upper reaches of the game can offer. They may well be impatient for it. They may well have seen others get close and then not make the final push and will be determined that this doesn’t happen to them.  Crucially, they are likely to have offers from other clubs, against whom they will have been playing at U-21 level, as well as being watched at any or all of the junior international levels up to u-21. The club will need to convince them that there is a pathway to the first team if it is to have any chance if keeping them.  How do you do that when someone like Bukayo Saka is ahead of them in their favoured position?  This, I suspect, is exactly the position two shining stars of the youth set up have faced in the last few years. First Omari Hutchinson, who left for Chelsea just short of his 19^th birthday. At this age, when you leave out of contract, the signing club is required only to pay a fee to cover development costs for the player. They are, to all intents and purposes, free transfers.  Something of an enigma, this decision, given that he had already been released twice by Chelsea by the age of 10 and that their bulk-buying of talent at first team level makes it difficult to see how his pathway into their first team could possibly have been clearer than had he stayed at Arsenal. Perhaps there were other forces in play. Indeed, having signed for Chelsea in the summer of 2022, he went on to play a grand total of once in each of the Premier League and FA Cup. Both times as a sub, for a total of 51 minutes.  He was then loaned and then sold to Ipswich where he has subsequently become a regular.   The galling thing here is that he was sold for a reported club record fee for Ipswich.  A clear case of Arsenal leaving money on the table. Could the set-up not have figured a way to orchestrate such a loan?  Indeed, this approach may well have been replicated a mere two years later, when Amario Cozier-Duberry decided not to sign his second pro contract and leave for Brighton, also on a relative free. ACD too had Saka in front of him. In his case, Brighton didn’t even try to integrate him into the first team and simply put him out to loan at Blackburn last season and Bolton for the coming season.   Both clubs have a record of flipping players for outrageous profits. I suspect both players may well have been offered contracts more fulsome than we offered, given that an obvious pathway wasn’t available directly at their new clubs either. Food for thought. 

Next in line in this category is Ethan Nwaneri. The difference with him is clear in that he has made the transition firmly into the first team and is now fighting for a starting role.  He has both Saka, again, and Ødegaard ahead of him. Both generational talents themselves. Ødegaard will only be 27 in December and Saka is still, unbelievably, only 23 until September. How does the club sell a genuine first team pathway to a player who has himself been regarded as a generational talent at all levels thus far?  We cannot afford for him to run down his contract and leave for a relative pittance. He will know that. He will also know that he can walk into a first team slot at any club outside the top 4, on a particularly good financial deal. Or tread the well-worn path to European clubs with a record for player development, such as Dortmund.  He would almost certainly attract more first team playing time. He wouldn’t necessarily have the degree of physical pressure on him, and he could build into his contract a sell-on in 2 years giving him a route to global stardom.  This will come down to whether the club’s representatives, chiefly Berta and Arteta, can convince him that he is best served by taking an apprenticeship at a club genuinely pushing for trophies, European and domestic, and that he will be allowed space and time to develop physically and mentally. Arteta will be looking to call on examples he has seen at City. Foden springs to mind. At Nwaneri’s age, 18, Foden had played 18 times in the Premier League for City, for a total of 384 minutes, with 3 starts. Nwaneri has played 28 times in the league, with a total of 910 minutes and 11 starts. More than comparable. Martin Ødegaard is currently 26 and a half and approaching his peak. It is not difficult to see how Nwaneri can be groomed to replace him over a decent time period, if he has the patience to stick around.  Arteta and the team will explain about the problems of overplaying at an early age.  We can all remember the cases of Fabregas and Wilshere who were played, out of necessity perhaps, to destruction, far too early in their careers.  The player and his advisers will also need to see a contract which backs up this view financially.  Over to you, chaps.  Get it done.

As the club continues to develop and moves to being a genuine European top table mover, providing Academy players with a route to the first team will become increasingly difficult.  As I write, we have just signed Christian Norgaard, a full Norwegian international and captain of Brentford, effectively to understudy for Martin Zubimendi, club captain of his former club and Spain regular.  This makes it imperative for us to offer the best deal to genuine talent and convince young players that their best interests lie with us. We have recently managed to do this very successfully with Myles Lewis-Skelly.  The next players are clearly Nwaneri and then Max Dowman. Neither of these players look like loan candidates as they are both regarded as being in the very top drawer of national talent.  As a result, they need to be convinced of short, medium and long-term plans customised for each.  They also need to be remunerated appropriately.  At the same time, you can’t have a 15-year-old being paid the same as the first team captain.  Agents are not renowned for being subtle and there is, no matter who they are (with the possible exception of MLS’ mother who is also his agent, I believe) the possibility of an inherent conflict of interest.  This is what Berta and his team get paid the big bucks for. A job, frankly, to which they are welcome.

We need to maximise returns for those in the next category – not prodigies, but highly talented players who, with the right nurturing, can develop into first team players, either here or elsewhere.  In these cases, the loan route may well be more appropriate. We can’t just allow money to be left on the table.  Hopefully, our new Director of Football can oversee an improvement in what, in the past, has largely been a disappointment.

Finally, we as fans need to accept that even young players, once they have gone through the meat-grinder of the Academy system, don’t necessarily retain the same blind love of the club that we do.  Some will simply choose to leave. What we have to do, in a highly competitive market, is make that decision as difficult as possible.

There are no easy answers.