Arsenal and Ethan Nwaneri: How quickly should clubs introduce academy talent to elite football?

Age is just a number.

Promoting academy players into a club’s first team is easily oversimplified to a judgement of talent — “if you’re good enough, you’re old enough”. Those exact words are on a wall at Carrington, Manchester United’s training ground.

But this way of thinking cements the problematic view that academies are conveyor belts and the players in them are ‘products’. Human development is inherently non-linear. There is a balance to be struck in the frequency of academy players who get first-team debuts, and the timing of them.

That balance is currently playing out at Arsenal. They’ve improved their final points tally for four Premier League seasons in a row and bettered their goals-scored figure in each of the last three top-flight campaigns, all under manager Mikel Arteta, to become title challengers again, having not won it since 2004.

Making so much progress so quickly has started to close the academy-to-first-team pathway which underpinned their evolution. Arsenal’s ClubElo rating, a measure of team strength that allocates points for every result, weighted by the quality of the opposition faced, has risen significantly in the past three years.

That is something Arteta referenced before the recent Carabao Cup win away to Preston North End of the second-tier Championship, where he started teenagers Ethan Nwaneri (17) and Tommy Setford (18), saying young players “have to earn the right to play. When you have that right, you have to perform in a way to help impact the team to win the game”.

Nwaneri certainly did that night, completing 55 of his 56 passes, winning four of six ground duels and firing in a top-corner finish from outside the box for the second goal in a 3-0 victory. He hit the crossbar too and had the ball in Preston’s net a second time, only for it to be disallowed because team-mate Kai Havertz was offside.

All that after scoring twice against third-tier Bolton Wanderers in the previous round of the same competition in September.

⏪ Previously in the Carabao Cup…

Nwaneri lit up N5 with a brace against Bolton ✨ pic.twitter.com/GMudGKtv68

— Arsenal (@Arsenal) October 30, 2024

But Nwaneri is an exception.

Arsenal ranked 18th for Premier League minutes given to under-21s last season (only Fulham and West Ham United gave fewer). And across the first 11 matches of this one, Nwaneri and 18-year-old Myles Lewis-Skelly are the only under-21s to feature for Arsenal in the top flight, for a combined 67 minutes across seven substitute appearances — that is also the third-lowest figure (once more behind Fulham and West Ham).

It bucks a league-wide trend — and one which Arsenal followed in Arteta’s early days.

He gave at least 5,000 league minutes to under-21s in his first four seasons, with Arsenal the youngest team in the Premier League in both 2020-21 and 2021-22. Academy graduates Bukayo Saka (14) and Emile Smith Rowe (12) were the club’s top and second-top non-penalty scorers across those two years, when under-21s scored or assisted 70.4 and 54.5 per cent of Arsenal’s league goals respectively.

Arteta built a young squad which has grown together. Arsenal signed six players aged 23 or under in the 2021 summer window alone: Martin Odegaard, Ben White and Takehiro Tomiyasu are still part of the first-team group, Aaron Ramsdale was sold to Southampton this summer, and Nuno Tavares and Albert Sambi Lokonga are out on loan.

Academy football is, by nature, generational.

There was the 2008-09 FA Youth Cup-winning team (Arsenal haven’t won that competition since) which featured Jack Wilshire, Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, Henri Lansbury, Francis Coquelin and Luke Ayling.

Saka and Smith Rowe were part of the Arsenal Under-23s team who, in three successive Premier League 2 seasons between 2016-17 and 2018-19, finished fourth, first and second.

That was a stacked generation at Arsenal, including Chuba Akpom (now at Ajax), Eddie Nketiah (Crystal Palace), Reiss Nelson (Fulham), Donyell Malen (Borussia Dortmund), Ismael Bennacer (AC Milan), Ainsley Maitland-Niles (Lyon), Josh Dasilva (Brentford), Stephy Mavididi (Leicester City), Joe Willock (Newcastle United) and Folarin Balogun (Monaco).

Nketiah and Smith Rowe left the club permanently this summer, with Nelson departing on loan (his third). In a recent interview with The Athletic, academy director Per Mertesacker described Arsenal’s youth programme as “vital investment for the future. It’s shown in the transfer market, how important talent from our academy is (summer sales). It allows us to invest in the first-team”.

The shifting perspective of academies — thanks to current financial regulations where the sales of homegrown players count as pure profit in clubs’ accounts — towards becoming cash machines is a broader Premier League trend, and means the remit is as much developing talent for others as yourself.

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November 29 marks six years since Saka’s first-team debut. Arsenal are ripe for their next academy generation, but timing matters.

There is a sweet spot, a point that Arsenal happened to be at when Arteta took over midway through the 2019-20 season and where Chelsea and Manchester United are now — albeit the former more by buying up young talent rather than promoting their own.

It is to be contending for European places (and then playing Europa League or Conference League football, not the more demanding Champions League) rather than truly being in the title race, as it allows greater scope for defeats and mistakes, so is a more conducive environment for academy players.

Arsenal have the joint-seventh-youngest average age in the Premier League this season (26.4) and have given 14.6 per cent of minutes to club-trained players (those who spent three seasons at a club between the ages of 15 and 21). Only Manchester United, Liverpool and Brighton & Hove Albion have given a higher proportion.

Outside the early rounds of the Carabao Cup, Arsenal have limited opportunities to parachute academy players into first-team games which aren’t high stakes or difficult technical, tactical and psychological tests. Arteta has brought Nwaneri, Lewis-Skelly or both on in this season’s league matches against Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City and Liverpool, and the former changed the game in the 4-2 win against Leicester City.

Arsenal’s high-pressing style and possession-dominant attacking approach bring specific physical and technical demands too, which multiply the already huge step up from academy football.

“We cannot replicate an experience like this,” Mertesacker also said of young players moving up to the first team during that aforementioned interview. “All of a sudden, you’re on the pitch at the Emirates and then you’re back playing with the under-18s and you might have a bad game and make a couple of mistakes. We need to understand that’s part of the programme, part of the process.”

Moving up the age groups is essential to give players exposure, but they need regular game time rather than just being a human mannequin in first-team training or filling a spot on the substitutes’ bench.

Psychologically, it is difficult to switch between the intensity of a Champions League matchday and the relative calmness of a Friday-night Premier League 2 game. Then there are the tactical challenges of playing with different team-mates. “I mean, we can have the under-21s in front of 500 (spectators), or the FA Youth Cup in front of 35,000, but we can’t replicate the 60,000. It will be something completely new,” said Mertesacker.

There is an often-forgotten duty of care for Arsenal, which Mertesacker is referencing.

Nwaneri has consistently shown glimpses of brilliance in his first-team appearances, but is not yet 18. Playing ‘up’ an age group last season with the under-21s, he was running the show.

Other than him, Lewis-Skelly started the first two Premier League 2 matches of the season after featuring for the first team in pre-season. Ayden Heaven, 18, has played in seven of the eight Premier League 2 games following heavy involvement with the seniors in the summer, and was given his first-team debut in that cup tie against Preston. Goalkeeper Jack Porter became Arsenal’s youngest-ever first-team starter at 16 years and 72 days in the previous round against Bolton, and has mostly been with the under-18s since.

Awww this is fab. Myles Lewis Skelly's mum pulls the best shocked/elated/proud face when he comes on in the Champions League.

A mother's love ❤️ https://t.co/kxHIbHPygv

— Amy Lawrence (@amylawrence71) October 2, 2024

For Arteta, it is about “identifying moments, understanding where he (Nwaneri) is, where the team is and what is the optimal moment to throw a player in (to) allow him to grow”.

In academy football, age is actually a series of numbers: chronological age — the age from a player’s date of birth; biological age — their rate of physical maturation; footballing age — how long they have been playing for. All of these factors need consideration. Spain’s Barcelona are a useful example of a team who recently leant heavily on their academy because of financial restrictions, and overplayed its best talents, leading to lengthy injury absences for Gavi and Pedri.

Being overly cautious is better than being overly cavalier.

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Winning can be a misnomer for success at academy level. Certain clubs move better players through age groups and into the first team faster, others prioritise keeping a strong group together.

Arsenal came fifth in Premier League 2 last season and are in that position again now. They finished bottom of their group in the 2023-24 UEFA Youth League (the under-19 equivalent of the Champions League) and have lost three of four games so far in it this time.

They were beaten 5-1, at the Emirates, by West Ham in the 2022-23 FA Youth Cup final — that competition produces notoriously high-scoring finals, and West Ham are known for keeping strong age groups together. Nwaneri and Lewis-Skelly started that match. Michal Rosiak (now 19), Josh Robinson (19) and Jimi Gower (20) are the only other members of the XI still at Arsenal, all of them now playing for the under-21s.

Lino Sousa (Aston Villa, now on loan at Bristol Rovers in League One), Omari Benjamin (Everton Under-21s), Bradley Ibrahim (Hertha Berlin, now on loan at Crawley Town, also of the third division), Reuell Walters (Luton Town of the Championship), Noah Cooper (Stoke City in the same division) and Amario Cozier-Duberry (Brighton, on loan at the second tier’s Blackburn Rovers) have moved on.

Jack Brazil, a former academy coach at PSV Eindhoven of the Netherlands, who beat Arsenal 2-1 away in last season’s UEFA Youth League — from 1-0 down, after Nwaneri scored the opener — spoke to The Athletic about why those two clubs didn’t get past the group stage.

“PSV and Arsenal had the best individuals, and probably the best way of playing in terms of attractiveness,” Brazil said. “But in terms of winning a football match, Lens (who lost to eventual winners Olympiacos on penalties in the round of 16) and Sevilla (eliminated on spot kicks by a Nantes side later beaten in a semi-final shootout by Olympiacos) were so far ahead.”

Arsenal’s academy sides, at the older end (under-18s through to under-21s), simply haven’t had the kind of success that other ‘Big Six’ clubs’ youth programmes have in recent seasons — whether you’re measuring on silverware, the number of debuts or sales income. That might be compounded by Arteta’s background; having only previously been an assistant at Manchester City in two title-winning campaigns, his roots aren’t in academy coaching.

Then there is the question of where the academy talent is, both in positions and skill sets, and what is needed by the senior side. For example, Arsenal Under-21s’ current captain, Zane Monlouis (21), is a physically dominant, ball-playing centre-back. Apart from right wing, where Saka reigns supreme, central defence is probably the hardest position for a youngster at the club to break through to first-team level at the moment.

The reality is that most of the groundwork in terms of an academy player establishing themselves with the seniors is done when nobody is watching, not in-season. Arsenal took 12 youngsters on their tour to the United States this summer to support a first-team group that was missing players after Euro 2024 and Copa America, and they also play important roles during international breaks when the squad thins due to call-ups.

Ultimately, young player development and progression have to be organic, and it will, generally, be non-linear.

Saka, and his generation, must not become the benchmark — that was an exceptional group. However, Arteta must keep the pathway open, and Arsenal need to avoid becoming win-at-all-costs, as doing so will hurt both the first team and the academy in the long run.

(Top photo: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)