Mikel Arteta's first team staff have held conversations with Arsenal academy staff about the progression of the Gunners youngsters ahead of their mid-season trip to Dubai.
The Gunners travel out to the Middle East on Sunday where they will take part in friendlies against Lyon and AC Milan as part of the Dubai Super Cup. With several first team players progressing into the latter stages of the World Cup in Qatar, Arteta is set to take several of Arsenal's academy youngsters on tour with him to make up the numbers.
The Gunners under-21s side have been impressive this season and currently sit top of Premier League 2. The likes of Matt Smith, Myles Lewis-Skelly and Hubert Graczyk have already been training with the first team this week, and football.london understands that Arteta has been casting his eye over several of the Arsenal youngsters as he seeks to pick his group to travel out to Dubai.
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"Our main job is to make sure we’re supporting the first team," under-21s coach Mehmet Ali told football.london after Arsenal's 1-0 defeat to Sparta Prague in the Premier League International Cup on Wednesday night.
"The World Cup is going on so they’ve got less players back and I’ve had fantastic conversations with our first team staff about who’s been doing well, who could be doing better and those conversations have resulted in (some) players being with the first team. Ultimately that’s what we want."
"I’m in constant communication with first team staff," he went on to add. "The first team staff have said to me, ‘What’s their programme? What have they been working on? How can we support them when they’re out there?’ So we’re lucky to have that link at Arsenal from the first team to the academy."
Arteta was heavily involved in the appointment of Ali alongside Per Mertesacker and Edu - who has newly been appointed as Arsenal's sporting director, giving him more of a role in the academy set up. One of the key components they've been keen to instil is to have the under-21s playing in a similar manner to how the first team play.
This has been clear for much of the season in the way that Arsenal have operated more or less exclusively in a 4-3-3 set up, with full backs such as Reuell Walters and Lino Sousa coming infield to invert in a manner similar to Ben White and Oleksandr Zinchenko at first team level. Despite this though Arteta has generally been reluctant to hand too many first team opportunities to academy players so far this season.
While Ethan Nwaneri was of course given his record-breaking debut against Brentford earlier in the campaign, the Spaniard has generally preferred to go for more experienced benches in Europa League fixtures where he has looked to blood young players in the past. Lino Sousa, Matt Smith, Catalin Cirijan and Amario Cozier-Duberry were all part of the group who travelled to play FC Zurich in the Europa League group stage back in September, but aside from that the Arsenal boss has generally elected to pick more experienced squads. With so many away at the World Cup though that is now likely to change for the trip to Dubai.
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