From its early days of Charlie George, Liam Brady and Tony Adams to the current format which has produced mega talents such as Ashley Cole, Cesc Fabregas and Jack Wilshere; Arsenal’s youth academy is by far the best in England and only second in Europe to Barcalona.

Not since the early nineties when Man Utd produced the likes of Scholes, Beckham and Neville has there been an academy as productive as Arsenal’s.

Take the current side for example. Sczesny who now looks to be number one. A product of the youth set up. Left back was clichy, now gibbs. Wilshere, Ramsey, Theo (although bought in) are all examples.

Compare that with United, who you clearly support, and you’s have who? Wellbeck, O’shea (now departed), Brown(now departed), and maybe Tom Cleverly!

Your argument has no substance whatsoever. Not to mention that another wave of young talent is emerging from Arsenal’s ranks in Frimpong, Lansbury, Bartley, and a few others.

Also, the United players you mention that now ply their trade at another club do so due to their lack of ability to cut it at the top, with the exception of O’Shea and Rossi. Surely that is a fault of the set-up, in that, they cannot produce the finished product?

United have long broke from the trend of bringing players up through the ranks. They now favour spending colossal sums on foreign players unlike Arsenal who are unable to compete in that field.

So to say that our system has failed is ignorant, ill informed and to be quite frank jealousy driven.

If Arsenal could spend the money United do, they would be streets ahead of the rest and competing with Barcalona for European silverware every season.

United should, and probably do, look at Arsenal’s club model with our profit operating system a healthy business, if not trophy acquiring, system.

Having said all that, I feel this post is nothing more than an attempt to evoke some reader reaction, albeit in a biased pro-united drip of trivia.

Yours in Arsenal,

Kieran

While I may not agree with all of the author’s points, his point of view is his no matter how moronic it may seem. (I am not one who thinks its a worthless article)
Even those who have posted comments to this article offer a different point of view.

This type of debate is good for us and good for the site. It keeps us talking and expressing our points of view as opposed to simply deeming it as “crap”.

Cheers,

I have always been a strong supporter of the Wenger ethos which led to me giving up on big money ball a long time ago. I stopped following a team on the other side of the Irish sea and put all my hopes and dreams(foolishly?) into a club on my doorstep. As a fan of the Beautiful game though, of course its impossible to ignore the exploits of Messi et al in la Liga. The only other thing that gets me excited about TV football is watching Wengers academy proteges on a tuesday night in the early rounds of the Carling cup.

I’m sure the day will come for Wenger when his morals are either finally corrupt or he walks away from what is obviously the wrong job( the premier league) for a man with his belief system. Alas it will be a sad day either way, but should be the benefit of the FFF.

This barron spell has coincided with the emphasis being switched to youth development due to our move to the Emirates but since that there have been clear results from our youth policy- Szczesny, Clichy, Gibbs, Djourou, Song, Cesc, Wilshere, Ramsey, Walcott, Diaby, Vela, Bendtner have all been at the club since they were 16 and are all full internationals now. These are players that were nothing before, they may have had ability otherwise we wouldn’t have spotted them but from 16 no player is fully formed and thats where the development for those finishing years is most important and thats why we’re lauded as a team of producing exceptional talent. The players mentioned above are most certainly just the start, as Wenger has stated before to put the coaching in place to get the local players technically ready you have to start with the 5 year olds- Wenger has been at the club since 96 so it’s only now where we can look at top quality English players coming through ready for the Arsenal team.

Now you’ve suggested because United have produced players such as Bardsley, Richardson, Campbell, Greening, Savage, Ebanks-Blake, Shawcross that the calibre of these players is obviously better than Arsenal’s- You also tried to suggest that Pique and Rossi were as good as they are because of their time at United, they were good but they had to leave to become great… But both were recruited from Barca and Parma and are now worth between 40-50m and they’re only worth that because they did leave. Just comparing the names you’ve mentioned with Arsenal players- Ash Cole, Fab Muamba, Jerome Thomas, Jay Bothroyd, Steve Sidwell, Jermaine Pennant, Anthony Stokes, Moritz Volz, Phillippe Senderos, David Bentley, Keith Fahey, Sebastien Larsson and the majority of those are stilling playing in the premiership and I would also argue to much better effect to the aforementioned United players.

This part I take great offence to:
‘Arsenal merely take players, young players, who have had their footballing education and give them a platform to showcase their talents- Robin Van Persie comes to mind.’
If it truly was that simple why were these players not recognised before they came to Arsenal, why wouldn’t every team in the world be doing the same thing as it’s a hell of a lot cheaper then huge transfer fees, do you know the amount of failure there is with youth players being developed the premier league is lucky as it’s catchment area is the whole world due to the popularity but that then means you need to have the people capable of finding quality which will be suited to you’re team but then also have the foresight to know that these players are capable of raising their game and you’re not just going to waste millions of pounds developing the player into a world class talent. But it goes a load deeper than that, our system is so finely tuned now that we will continue to produce youth talent at a faster rate than any other team- last season alone we had 17 players on loan, 17!!!

Sadly, you’ve also neglected to look at the current and future players coming through, yes you’ve mentioned Gibbs and Wilshere… next up is Bartley, Frimpong, Miguel, Lansbury, Coquelin who will be next in line. Then for the future it’s going to be beautiful and I’m talking three of the best talents to come from England Benik Afobe, Chuks Aneke and Alban Bunjaku and theres plenty more of these players coming through who will now be techincally better than most thanks to the coaching they’ve had from a young age and the facilities that they work within at Arsenal.

It would be feasible that in the future we won’t need to spend huge amounts of money on transfers we’ll just pluck one of the youngsters from our youth setup to fill the gap… The point that you should have made is that our youth setup cannot afford to fail given how much effort and money is put in, similar to Barca it’s thought around £5m a year is spent to run either academy. We’ve easily recouped last years sum with Szczesny and Wilshere breaking through to the first team. Gibbs will cover this years with maybe Frimpong and Bartley on top. Next year Miguel should be getting close with also Aneke and Afobe.