Arsenal have been the surprise package of the season so far – and the biggest surprise of all was Ethan Nwaneri's debut at 15 years old.
But don't fall for any loose talk about Mikel Arteta giving such a young kid a taste of first-team action at Brentford as an ego trip. If you turn a 15-year-old boy's career into a vanity project, just for the sake of the record books, you are potentially damaging his future and setting him back years.
I thought Nwaneri did fine, and put himself about well during his cameo in added time, with Arsenal fans chanting: “He's got school in the morning.” But social media 'experts' and pundits who speculate that Arteta's eye-catching substitution was an ego trip are playing with fire.
Managers don't just chuck schoolboys into the heat of a Premier League game on a whim or a hunch. You have to be sure the boy is physically ready to cope with the demands of any tackles or 50-50 challenges. And you also have to be convinced it will not damage the youngster's character off the pitch. As well as the rough and tumble, you have to safeguard his mental well-being. Football is littered with cautionary tales of the next boy wonder, the next superstar, and all too often they sink without trace.
It's so important to look after young lads whose physique and skill sets look equipped for first team football. If you throw them in, just to make a statement and say, “Look at our academy, aren't we doing well?”, you can ruin a youngster's prospects for years. If he makes a mistake leading to a goal, how do you repair his confidence? You have to be 100 per cent certain – not just 98 or 99 per cent – in his mental strength and his capacity to handle the surroundings.
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The pressures here are obviously different, but at Macclesfield last season we gave nine Under-16 players their debut at senior level. That still comes with a huge responsibility because you hear of stories elsewhere that kids given a chance in the first team think they have made it, and their parents think they have cracked the big time. When they go back to youth team football, it feels like an anti-climax and you have to be so careful not to disrupt the whole family unit, not just the teenage prospect.
Like I said, Arsenal have made a fantastic start, and if they are going to turn it into a sustained title challenge it means one of the big guns – and Liverpool have been desperately disappointing so far – is going to miss out on the top four.
The way the Gunners went to Brentford and absolutely dominated a fixture where they came horribly unstuck last season bodes well for Arteta. But straight after the international break, it's the white heat of the north London derby against Tottenham. And with all due respect, for his long-term development, I don't expect to see Ethan Nwaneri involved in a game of such fierce, partisan rivalry.
