Moulding

When nurturing talent from the academy, coaches are caught in a sort of paradox where opportunities have to be earned and not given. At the same time, you have to show a player a pathway into your first team otherwise they will happily continue their development elsewhere. Coaches have to balance the risk of players learning (sometimes the hard way) on their watch but if you want to avail of the player’s potential, you have to tolerate the risk.

As Arsene Wenger put it, ‘You pay for the education of young players with points. If I play a 20-year-old centre back, I know he’ll cost me points during the season and I have to stand up for that. A less talented 28-year-old would cost me fewer points. However, by 23/24 you have a player.’ When you’re trying to hit the 90-point mark required to win the league title, those points become more difficult still to write off.

However, Arteta has shown faith in youth during his time in charge at Arsenal. Even if you think Bukayo Saka’s talent is so obvious that even the most reluctant manager would harness it, the faith he has shown in the likes of Saliba and Martinelli show that when Arteta thinks a player is ready; he will stand by them.

Last summer, Fabio Vieira and Emile Smith Rowe were packed off, which has created a space for Ethan Nwaneri to assume a greater role. Arsenal almost certainly lost points throughout Odegaard’s absence earlier in the season due to a creative deficit that Nwaneri wasn’t deemed quite ready to fill. However, without giving the player a clearer path to first team minutes, he probably doesn’t sign his first professional contract in March of 2024.

The market for youth players is so competitive now and clubs from abroad have shown a willingness to dip into the market for young English talent too. When Nwaneri signed his first pro deal in March, I am certain Arteta will have told the player that Smith Rowe and Vieira’s uncertain futures could present an opportunity for him. Arteta had to swallow the Odegaard deficit to safeguard Nwaneri’s long-term future.

I found Arteta’s comments around potentially turning Nwaneri into a striker really interesting recently. ‘There is another position I think he can develop into – No 9. He has got the goal in front of him and he looks at the goal and he has a tremendous ability to put the ball in the back of the net.’ I thought it was such an interesting observation.

Because while you can lose points in the short-term when you show a young player a pathway, developing from your academy has a number of obvious advantages- principally economic and they also help with homegrown quotas. But perhaps the biggest advantage is the malleability of a teenage prospect. When you look at Arsenal’s most successful academy products, they have often been moulded into slightly different roles in accordance with the most obvious first team pathway.

Bukayo Saka earned his breakthrough in 2019 playing at left-back because Kieran Tierney was injured. However, he found his calling on the right wing partly because that is where the space in the team was. Nicolas Pepe and Willian had proved to be pretty disastrous signings and that meant the right-wing was the most obvious spot available in the team.

Ashley Cole spent the majority of his academy career as a left-winger but Arsenal had Pires and Ljungberg in the first team squad. They didn’t need a left-winger, they needed a left-back, so Cole became a left-back. Similarly, Jack Wilshere often played as a 10 or an inverted right-winger in the academy. He played much closer to goal than in his senior career.

But when he was coming to the boil, Arsenal already had Nasri, Fabregas, Arshavin and Walcott in the team. Further back, that quality wasn’t reflected by prospects like Denilson and Diaby who were inconsistent at best. So Wilshere dropped a little further back when he broke into the first team because that is where the first team needed an injection of quality.

I am sure this figures in Arteta’s thinking when he talks about Nwaneri as a potential nine. The observation that Nwaneri looks good in front of goal is accurate, of course. But (hopefully) the right eight and right wing positions currently held by Odegaard and Saka will belong to those players for as long as they are happy to keep signing contract extensions.

Saka’s injury presents him with another opportunity for greater involvement. The more realistic long-term gaps for Nwaneri to probe are in the left eight role (though Arteta seems to prize more physical players in this role) or the centre-forward position. The latter would represent an excellent market efficiency. Havertz, Merino and Rice can all play the left eight role well enough but if you asked any Arsenal fan where they really would most like a starting eleven quality player they would almost unanimously point to the forward line.

The extortionate cost of even an average striker on the market is the main reason that Arsenal have struggled to buy the absolute bona fide number 9 in my view. If they could develop the most talented player in their academy into that position it would represent a very neat long-term solution. Clearly, Nwaneri is some way from being able to do that yet. It might only be a flicker of an idea at this stage.

But the striker market is not going to get any easier. Arguably Arsenal’s number 9 issues are over a decade old dating back to the departure of Robin van Persie. Even a solution that takes a year or two to come to the boil would be incredibly welcome, pretty much no matter what else Arsenal are able to do in the market.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the decision to develop academy midfielder Myles Lewis Skelly into an inverted left-back. This also seems to be a decision borne of pragmatism. With Zinchenko, Tierney and Tomiyasu not longed for this squad, quite simply there is a better pathway as an inverted left-back than there is in midfield for the time being.

The hybrid role is also a pretty difficult one to play, so forming a more malleable lump of clay from the academy into the demands of the position makes a lot of sense too. If you wanted to buy this sort of player in the market, who would you look at? It’s a short list. In one sense, Arsenal have shown a willingness to create pathways for Nwaneri and Lewis Skelly but what they also appear to be doing is developing into the gaps in the Arsenal squad.

Nwaneri is simply not going to develop and grow as Odegaard or Saka’s understudy in the long-term and good strikers are very difficult to find. It would be unfair to pressure Nwaneri into being the world class striker Arsenal fans have thirsted for for over a decade but developing him into areas of greater need for the squad would have mutual benefits.

In the shorter term, Arsenal have been able to use Lewis Skelly and Nwaneri to plug gaps due to injuries. Lewis Skelly started away at Crystal Palace and Arsenal won 5-1. Nwaneri started away at Brentford and Arsenal won 3-1. Longer term, I am sure everyone regards both players as significantly more than fill-in players but for them to have that role at the ages of 17 and 18 respectively is incredibly useful too.

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