There are few things that supporters love more than watching their academy players flourish in the first team. In that respect, Arsenal fans have been spoiled this season with the twin emergences of Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri. The latter, we all knew plenty about having made his debut off the bench at the age of 15 against Brentford in September 2022.
Lewis-Skelly was a name most of us had heard but few would have reckoned with him having any sort of first team impact this season, let alone fending off competition from Riccardo Calafiori for the left-back spot and scoring goals against Manchester City. Over at the Arsenal Vision Podcast, just before each season we record a predictions pod.
One of the predictions we make is player appearances. We made predictions for Ethan Nwaneri but didn’t mention Lewis-Skelly who was just not on our radar. Arsenal have a lot of depth in midfield and even when it became apparent that MLS would be trialled as an inverting left-back, well, that’s not exactly a position where Arsenal are short either.
Needless to say, even knowing Nwaneri and being aware of his talent, few of us would have expected to see this level of impact this soon. But therein lies the paradox of seeing your academy players flourish, it is pretty much always borne from strife. Both have become so important and are developing so quickly due to injuries in the squad.
For instance, there were few breakout young talents during the Invincibles season. This despite David Bentley scoring a delicious lob against Middlesbrough in the FA Cup and a team of teenagers getting to the semi-final of the League Cup (even as Arsenal chased down a second leg deficit against Middlesbrough, 16-year-old Ryan Smith played).
This is simply because Arsenal had so few injuries that season. It wasn’t until Vieira’s future was up in the air off the back of Euro 2004 and Gilberto Silva bust a vertebrae that Cesc Fabregas truly got a look in. Tournament summers are often the gateway to academy player breakthroughs. International players come back to pre-season late, sometimes nursing bumps and bruises and that gives young talent the opportunity to shine with the first team in pre-season.
It’s no coincidence that 2010-11 proved to be Jack Wilshere’s breakout year at Arsenal, with Fabregas winning the World Cup that summer and missing the whole of pre-season, Jack took the reigns in midfield and only had to let them go due to his own injury woes.
Last summer, Nwaneri and Lewis-Skelly got the opportunity to travel to the US with the first team and played minutes with a lot of their direct competitors recovering from the Euros. The combination of the Euros and the expanded schedule have almost certainly had a bearing on Arsenal’s physical woes this season which has, in turn, allowed The Hale End pair to establish themselves further.
In a challenging season, The Hale End production line has probably been the bright spot of the campaign (so far). It’s slightly reminiscent of the way that Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe burst into the team together four or five years ago to the backdrop of a Status Quo laced terrace chant.
Their prominence, even if only one of them ultimately survived in the long-term, came to symbolise the dawn of a new era, of Arteta’s Arsenal. Gone were the late prime attackers that Arsenal had banked so much of their wage bill on in exchange for a scant return (Aubameyang gets a pass for winning us an FA Cup pretty much single handedly).
A newer, younger, more vibrant Arsenal was emerging backed by a young manager, a young sporting director and a young academy head, all of whom were former Arsenal players. It put me in mind of George Graham’s major reorganisation of Arsenal in the late 1980s. A former player who put cannons back on blazers, brought some short back and sides back into the team and underpinned it with a core of younger, hungrier players who either came from the academy or else were found at places like Wimbledon, Stoke and Colchester.
Graham’s project youth drew a line under the flabby excesses of the post Brady era, with high salary, high reputation players who just did not deliver. Graham used his young charges, spearheaded by academy talent like Rocastle, Thomas, Adams and Merson, as a broom to sweep away the mediocrity that had engulfed the club. Because this is the way of youth production in elite football, it usually emerges at a low ebb.
Arsene Wenger’s project youth experiment was borne from the financial restrictions of an expensive new stadium. The romance of forging a globally assembled youth production line underscored by cold, hard fiscal reality. Individual players will usually break through due to an injury or recruitment crisis of some sort in their position, even if the team is not in an especially tough spot.
Hector Bellerin was rather thrown in at right-back after the departure of Bacary Sagna and a bad injury to Mathieu Debuchy. Bellerin took to right-back like a duck to water and Debuchy’s short Arsenal career was essentially over. Ashley Cole became a fixture at left-back largely due to, ahem, administrative issues for Sylvinho and his documentation.
Arsenal bought Gio van Bronckhorst, who could play left-back, the same summer that Sylvinho was packed off to Celta Vigo just in case Cole was not up to the standard. But Cole resolutely was and van Bronckhorst ended up going to Barcelona on the cheap as a sop for Arsenal exploiting a loophole to nab Fabregas for the price of some training cones and a packet of Salt and Vinegar crisps.
Which brings us on to Nwaneri and Lewis-Skelly. In the case of the latter, I think Arsenal tried quite hard to shop Zinchenko last summer and they probably anticipated that Tomiyasu, who finished 2023-24 at left-back, might not always be available. Still few would have envisaged MLS becoming so important to the team so quickly.
Nwaneri has clearly always been regarded as a big talent, capable of becoming a star. Arsenal allowed Fabio Vieira and Emile Smith Rowe to leave last summer without replacement which cleared a path for Ethan. In the short-term, Arsenal absorbed some pain for that. They probably didn’t bank on Odegaard getting such a big injury so early in the season.
I imagine they planned to ease Nwaneri in slowly with minutes in the early rounds of the League Cup before making him more a part of the Premier League and Champions League squad. Odegaard’s injury happened just before he was ready to take on such an important role.
Arsenal could certainly have done with Smith Rowe and Vieira during that period. However, now Arsenal really are down to the bare bones and really do need Nwaneri, the period of exposure earlier in the season means he really is ready to roll now. Short term pain for long term gain. Or as the situationists put it, under the paving stones, the beach.
Ben White added to his canvas of tattoos recently. He had the phrase ‘no rain, no flowers’ inked onto his neck. And that is the way with academy talents too, Nwaneri and Lewis-Skelly have been rainbows in an overcast season for Arsenal. If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.
