Arsenal prides itself on grooming youngsters, which has made their academy one of the best in the world.
Several stars, including Cesc Fabregas and Bukayo Saka, came through the ranks at the Emirates and earned first-team chances as teenagers.
Mikel Arteta continued that culture when he gave Ethan Nwaneri his debut at age 15, and the Spaniard is generally considered a youth-friendly manager.
However, he was unable to convince Chido Obi Martin to sign a new deal, and a new report revealed why the striker had likely left, which was game time.
Opta via the Daily Mail has computed the number of minutes teenagers earned at every Premier League club last season, and only Tottenham offered fewer minutes to teenage stars than Arsenal.
In the Premier League, the Lilywhites gave players under 20 just seven minutes in total, while Arsenal gave teenage stars just 13 minutes in total.
Obi Martin is joining Manchester United, and it is easy to see why. The Red Devils offered teenagers the most minutes in the Premier League last season, with 4,919 minutes.
Just Arsenal Opinion
We need to start trusting teenage stars more. Otherwise, we will continue to lose our best talents.
They watch how we promote youngsters, and that determines whether they will sign professional forms with us or not.
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There was also only one club that finished above Arsenal in the table last season. Oh geez, I’ve done it now.
A bit of a skewed article really as obviously apart from City all the other teams giving more minutes to teenagers finished below us, which kind of tells a story!
This is not good, 13 minutes only. Surely we can do better
Man U gave most minutes and finished 8th 🤔.
“ the Spaniard is generally considered a youth-friendly manager.”
Good one 😂
A team that wants to win the EPL needs to have players that are a sure thing. So if the teenager is like Messi or Rooney or Pele when they were teenagers then absolutely, stick ’em in. Otherwise selecting teenagers for the first team isn’t really an essential criteria at this stage of Arsenal’s project. If they’re good enough, then they’re old enough. But only if they’re definitely good enough.
I second someone who said, teams that gave the teenagers much time were below us. ( Arsenal….)
So why do we!!!???
I never really sure about these rather obscure stats. Presumably, the Arsenal coaching staff just didn’t think that it was advisable to bring on teenagers in particular games for a variety of reasons.
There is this idea around, a false one in my opinion, that suggests it’s almost mandatory to “bring on a youngster”. It’s great if there are any “ready” – and obviously Utd’s staff think they have several who are – but clearly Arsenal’s don’t.
Stats are often of questionable usefulness in and of themselves. The thing is with stats is that they don’t tell the whole story even if they are a relatively complete set.
For example, in the case of Utd if memory serves they had a boatload of significant injuries and were sucking wind for much of the season with their results and needed to take chances that otherwise might not would have been taken with youth.
That is a very different scenario than Arsenal was dealing with. Thus, another part of the story which has a bearing on the black and white stats. Stats, even if not cherry picked can often be used to further a narrative that doesn’t tell the full story. Unfortunately, the media is very well aware of this.
ChatGPT
Rewrite:
You read the comments and realize why the progress is so hard to achieve. Even we fans have become sycophants of individuals, Arteta in this case, over the team. How can we be content that all teams who gave teenagers more minutes than us finished below us and still believe in the “phased progress project”? If the project did not require naturing players then why did it have to take 5years? We could have just bought the good old players needed and win the league in the first phase. It’s hypocritical to say we are building a long term project and be happy that in a whole season, our teenagers got to play only 13 minutes. While I celebrate the progress we have made as a club, I wish we gave more chances to our teenagers and developed more from within. We don’t have to put the league at risk for this. There’s the FA and Carabao for that. A good coach should be able to use a mix of Arsenal’s youth and experienced players to advance in both competitions without risking the league.
ChatGPT
You read the comments and realize why progress has been so hard to achieve. We, as fans, have become sycophants of individuals—Arteta in this case—over the team. How can we be content that all teams who gave teenagers more minutes than us finished below us, yet still believe in the “phased progress project”? If the project did not require nurturing players, then why did it need to take five years? We could have simply bought experienced players and won the league in the first phase. It’s hypocritical to claim we are building a long-term project and then be satisfied that our teenagers played only 13 minutes in an entire season. While I celebrate the progress we have made as a club, I wish we gave more opportunities to our teenagers and developed more talent from within. We don’t have to risk the league for this; there’s the FA Cup and Carabao Cup for that. A good coach should be able to use a mix of Arsenal’s youth and experienced players to advance in both competitions without jeopardizing the league.
@admin, please help fix this 😂
Apologies, English is not my first language so I use chat GPT to fix errors😁
We could have at least given the youngsters more playing time in the lesser cup matches. Just saying..,🤔
Maybe we did. The stats are gathered from the league, without taking into account the others cups.
Nonetheless I still agree that we should be giving more chances to the youth. I think it’s in the club’s DNA and we can’t neglect that. Too many subs were used for players like Elneny and Cedric for example, which could have gone to Lewis-Skelly and Walter’s to name a few
Fair comment – if only we hadn’t got Liverpool in the 3rd round of the FACup
SueP, or away to West Ham in the League Cup, after beating Brentford in the previous round, where Sagoe Jr played 68 minutes.
People seem to forget that kids have played in the Cup games, but we’ve been knocked out in the early rounds.
This does not look good and i can’t see that improving any time soon, having been scold not to use my favorite term.
I imagine that Arteta and his team of coaches had several situations to weigh up
Do they purely use the domestic cup games to use the majority of the second 11 with a sprinkling of youngsters which gives the first team a rest and then P off the season ticket holders etc who may feel shortchanged by not having a team with greater strength for their hard earned coin? Or play the first 11 and change it about IF the score is favourable?
I believe that you should be going out to win. The skill lies in not overloading the team with too much of a change of personnel but with it a strong enough group to reach the next round.
All of us crave a league trophy and more and whilst I have absolute sympathy for the plight of some of the second string and youngsters who are not getting a decent crack of the whip, I am conflicted by the need to win.
Couldn’t agree more 👍
We are one of the youngest sides in the league with plenty of players in the their early twenties. Sometimes when that happens it does block lads who are a few years younger but I would not read too much into the stats from one season.
You can’t eat your cake and have it. Give the minutes at your risk. We could have done better though.
Chido Obi however left because MU offered double the pension Arsenal was offering to keep him. Arsenal maximum for pensioners is 15K. MU offered 30K. And his advisers wanted 1.7 million pounds which MU accepted to pay. They also promised to make him their 3rd striker in the 1st team.
MU is desperate for a rebuild to make an impact. So they had an opportunity to hurt Arsenal and did it.
I want us to play our strongest side in the cups because if we come up short in the league again then we have to get a bit of a winning mentality from somewhere it’s so important we get a taste of winning