In Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri, Arsenal have two of the most promising young players in European football. Just how far can they go?
Arsenal will have rather different memories of the last time anyone so young scored a goal against the reigning champions.
In Sunday afternoon’s 5-1 win over Manchester City at the Emirates, Ethan Nwaneri (17 years, 318 days) and Myles Lewis-Skelly (18y 129d) became the youngest players to score in the Premier League against the champions since Wayne Rooney scored for Everton against Arsenal in March 2003 (17y 150d).
Rooney’s goal – just the fourth he scored in the competition – came early on in what eventually became one of the greatest careers the Premier League has ever seen. So, given the role Lewis-Skelly played in Arsenal’s latest victory and Nwaneri’s continuing rise, you could forgive anyone for getting excited about what the future holds for these two prodigies.
“They play with a lot of personality,” Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta said after the game. “They are really brave. They have the courage. They are really intense, and they understand what we want.
“The [other] players believe in them. When you have a 17-, 18-year-old next to you and you feel okay with that, and you feel that we are a better team, that is a big sign. And they’ve earned that.”
Lewis-Skelly’s emergence as Arsenal’s first-choice left-back has looked surprising from the outside, but he has never doubted where he would end up. He didn’t even make the matchday squad for Arsenal’s opening game of the season against Wolves, but reports have now emerged that he rejected the club’s suggestion that he should be sent out on loan. He saw his future in the first team, and imminently.
His self-confidence is plain to see on the pitch, too, not least from the celebration that poked fun at Erling Haaland. On the ball, he is calm in pressured situations, happy to dribble his way out of trouble when facing his own goal as he did in one key moment this weekend, and a composed figure when Arsenal look to play out from the back.
On Sunday, he completed an impressive 92.0% of his passes, but that is actually down on his rate for the whole season so far, which stands at 95.4% – the highest of all players in the Premier League to play at least 45 minutes. He isn’t just safe with his passes either; on Sunday, only David Raya (six) and Gabriel Martinelli (four) completed more passes to centre-forward Kai Havertz than Lewis-Skelly (three).
Defensively, he stands out for his physicality despite only having turned 18 in September. Against City, he won eight of his nine duels, giving him the highest duel success rate (88.9%) of anyone in the game for either team. No opponent has managed to dribble past him even once in his 553 minutes of Premier League action.
That physicality has shone throughout all of Lewis-Skelly’s first-team performances so far, with the young left-back winning a higher percentage of his duels (74.2%) than any other Premier League player to have contested more than 25.
His goal – his first at senior level – capped a fine day on which Lewis-Skelly further cemented his position as Arteta’s pick in the left-back spot. That is despite Arsenal strengthening with the signing of Riccardo Calafiori in that position in the summer, and having other senior players in Oleksandr Zinchenko, Jakub Kiwior and Kieran Tierney available, too. Jurriën Timber is another option there who won’t be needed to fill in.
What’s more, as Arteta admitted after the win over Tottenham last month, Lewis-Skelly had “never played as a full-back before” his promotion to the first team. Incredibly, it’s now difficult to imagine anyone other than Lewis-Skelly playing there.
The same can’t quite be said of Nwaneri, who is one of the most exciting prospects in world football but will know that he too may require a change of position to establish himself in the first team. His favourite position on the right side of attack will very much not be up for grabs when Bukayo Saka returns from injury.
But in Saka’s absence, Nwaneri is showing he is ready for first-team football, which should at least give Arteta the chance to rotate a little more than he has done with Saka in recent times.
Nwaneri’s goal on Sunday was his seventh in all competitions for Arsenal. Only Rooney and Michael Owen (nine each) have scored more times for a Premier League side while aged 17 or younger than him, and he has another six weeks or so to add to that tally before his 18th birthday.
It wasn’t his best goal – like Lewis-Skelly’s, City goalkeeper Stefan Ortega should arguably have done better – but we have already reached the stage with Nwaneri that we aren’t surprised to see him cutting in and bending a shot inside the far post. If this effort wasn’t quite unstoppable, one only has to watch his strike at Girona from last week to see proof that he can fire in shots that no goalkeeper would keep out.
He always wants to affect games and make things happen. He was only on the pitch on Sunday for a matter of minutes, but of all 28 players involved, only Leandro Trossard attempted (four) or completed (three) more dribbles than the 17-year-old (two successful from two attempts).
Meanwhile, his goal finished off a 36-pass team move – the longest move leading to a Premier League goal since September 2023 (Rúben Dias for City vs Nottingham Forest). His teammates all wanted to keep hold of the ball, but Nwaneri wanted to pile further misery on the fallen champions. His goal confirmed Arsenal’s biggest-ever Premier League win over the reigning champions.
It also meant two players aged 18 or younger had scored for the same team in a Premier League game for only the fourth time in the history of the competition.
All these numbers tell an incredible story about just how remarkable it is that Arsenal have two teenagers excelling in their first team.
So, the answer to our own question as to how excited the club should be about Lewis-Skelly and Nwaneri is a short one: very.
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