On 22 November, 2008, Gavin Hoyte started in central defence for Arsenal away at Manchester City. William Gallas had been disciplined for comments in the media, stripped of the captaincy and dropped for the trip to Manchester. 18-year-old Hoyte started in his stead. His brother Justin made his first Premier League start for Arsenal in similar circumstances.
Pascal Cygan was injured in the warm-up at Carrow Road in August 2004 and Hoyte was parachuted into the starting line-up. The junior of the brothers, Gavin, endured a torrid time at Eastlands. It was one of the select games where Robinho could be bothered to turn up and he turned Hoyte inside out as City won 3-0.
Gavin, now 34, has since played for Dagenham & Redbridge (twice), Gillingham, Barnet, Eastleigh and Maidstone United. He transferred to Folkestone Invicta this summer. The point of this column is not to lampoon Gavin Hoyte, but to point out that he is in the top 1-2% of Arsenal academy graduates because he started a Premier League game for Arsenal. He was a success and nobody will ever be able to take that away from him, not even Robinho.
The vast majority of Arsenal academy graduates barely make it in the Football League, let alone the Premier League, let alone Arsenal. So what of a player, a striker no less, who plays 168 games for the club, scoring 38 goals? That makes Eddie Nketiah one of the most successful Arsenal academy graduates of all time. The quantative data is impressive but, as is always the case with numbers, it only provides a snapshot.
Nketiah’s Arsenal career has not been laid before him. His career has not been comfortable or without trials and tribulations. He has had to be patient, work hard and circumnavigate odds that were often stacked against him. Lest we forget that he came to Arsenal as a 14-year-old because he was released by Chelsea (a fate also suffered by his contemporary and friend Declan Rice).
Nketiah burst onto the scene in late 2017 as an 18-year-old with a pair of goals from the bench in a League Cup tie against Norwich City. Arsenal fans had seen this before in the League Cup, of course. Jay Simpson, Sanchez Watt and Carlos Vela all had their brief flirtations with future stardom via the competition that remained unrealised. But Nketiah’s cameo was not an instant springboard.
Arsenal had just spent a lot of money on Alexandre Lacazette and were about to sanction a similar sum on Pierre Emerick Aubameyang. Having a pair of £50m strikers is a strong illustration of Arsenal’s dysfunction in the market at the time. In one respect that was a significant blocker for Nketiah but as Arsenal muddled their way into a ‘solution’ involving playing Auba and Lacazette together, Nketiah was able to take up the back-up striker spot on the bench.
Arsenal’s decline led to seasonal involvement in the Europa League and Nketiah would also find opportunities in the group stages. In reality, he was waiting for the mismatched Auba Laca partnership to drift into its dotage. In the summer of 2019, he went on loan to Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United in the Championship. He managed 0.53 goals per 90 minutes at Leeds, the problem was that was spread across just two starts and 15 substitute appearances as Bielsa and Patrick Bamford formed football’s most unlikely bromance at Elland Road. Arteta made the decision to cut the loan short shortly after his appointment in January 2020.
With the indignity of an adumbrated loan spell in the Championship and Aubameyang and Lacazette still senior players in the squad, not many Arsenal fans would have laid money down on Nketiah remaining at the club for another 4.5 years before being sold to a Premier League club for close to £30m. it’s a huge testament to Eddie’s attitude and commitment that these experiences did not deter him.
He successfully waited out Aubameyang and Lacazette, even though the former signed a new contract in the summer of 2020. His path suddenly became unblocked and the role as the clear number two striker was sealed in the summer of 2022 when he signed a new contract and took the number 14 shirt. He wrestled his way into the starting line-up in the spring of 2022 with a run of five goals in the final eight games of the season.
Nobody should pretend that the new contract that Nketiah signed in the summer of 2022 wasn’t a marriage of convenience. Gabriel Jesus was signed during the same summer and had Arsenal qualified for the Champions League that year, they may have had greater funds to secure a back-up striker more to Arteta’s liking. Eddie was potentially going to leave on a Bosman and I won’t pretend that I didn’t have some anxieties about awarding a big contract to a player that I never really felt had much of a future beyond another season or two.
Those fears have proved to be misguided. Retaining Nketiah saved Arsenal from eating up budget on another back up striker and they were able to allocate funds to more urgent positions in the team and it hasn’t prevented them from selling him on at a good price. Eddie probably wasn’t the absolute long-term future of that role; but he was far from a problem.
The release of the Amazon All Or Nothing documentary in the summer of 2022 gave us another insight into his character too. The scene where he lambasts Albert Sambi Lokonga for looking miserable about not playing revealed a part of Nketiah’s character that I feel is still under heralded. His laconic ‘you think you’re the only one unhappy about not playing?’ comment in Lokonga’s direction showed that a) he wasn’t satisfied with his position as a back-up and b) he was willing to demand more from teammates in the same position. That’s leadership.
Nketiah never complained, kept his head down and worked on his game. His goal against West Ham in December 2022, where he rolls the West Ham centre-back before blasting the ball into the bottom corner illustrated the extent to which he was willing to work on flaws in his game (the 2020 version of Nketiah would not have scored that goal). He scored plenty of goals as a result of sweat and toil too, he collected close range efforts against Chelsea and Leeds in the spring of 2022 simply because he was prepared to chase lost causes. He scored a last-minute winner against Manchester United.
Nketiah’s Arsenal race is now run. Arsenal are no longer in a position where they require short-term solutions and he probably isn’t at the level of a team that is aiming for in excess of 90 Premier League points. But there is little shame in that, in my view. A lesser man and player would have fallen several hurdles before this one given the challenges placed in front of Nketiah. He is one of Arsenal’s most successful ever Arsenal academy graduates, he always showed an outstanding attitude in the face of adversity and he should be celebrated and leave with his head held high.
