Luton Town has signed Reuell Walters after he turned down Arsenal’s contract offer to leave as a free agent.
The 19-year-old was a highly-rated prospect in the Arsenal system, and the Gunners made it clear that he was part of their plans.
However, they were unable to convince him to stay, as he had not been assured a place in their first team.
After considering their offer, the right-back decided to change clubs and has now been snapped up by Luton Town.
The Hatters, who have just been relegated from the Premier League, are eager to return to the English top flight as soon as possible.
Despite Mikel Arteta’s reputation for providing one of the best pathways to first-team football for youngsters, Arsenal could not persuade Walters to stay. According to Arsenal Youth, he will now compete with others for starting spots at Luton next term.
Just Arsenal Opinion
It is tough to keep players happy without offering them a pathway to immediate first-team action, and we can understand why Walters is leaving the club.
We need to find a way to keep our best youngsters who are still in our system because they could be useful in helping us save money.
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Who exactly from our academy did Arteta promote to the first team. Just asking…🤔
Spot on. Buying young players is very different than promoting academy players. The first one MA is doing really well, the other one is yet to happen…
Who should he have promoted?
I have no idea.
MA is not promoting academy players or The Academy is not developing players good enough to be promoted.
Either way, Houston, we have a problem…
And who did Pep promoted? Is Arteta’s Arsenal competing against Wenger’s Arsenal or Pep Man City?
Pep promoted Oscar bobb, Rico Lewis in last couple seasons
NYG
You can only promote players that are good enough in the first place
If Ruelle Walters is heading off to Luton it suggests to me that he is likely to have a decent Championship career with the potential to return with Luton to the PL if they bounce back.
Just because he and the other academy players started out at Arsenal it doesn’t mean they can all make the grade.
Just sayin..😊
If so, we still have a problem: our academy is not developing players to make our senior squad.
Our academy should either develop players to make our senior squad or develop players to be sold, like Willock ans Balogun. We need to see this more often…
We spent money on Taveres, Lokonga etc rather 🙂
Not saying that they were genius signings- perhaps Arteta thought they had potential- but it doesn’t look that way, unfortunately. Neither have many academy players which is what the topic is about but I do take your point
Might be wrong but in the past, we may have promoted a few players who were a little below the very top level and just ran with it – players like Gibbs, bendtner and bellerin come to mind, though I know others will vehemently disagree (particularly re bellerin, who I know had serious injury troubles).
It could be that arteta is completely unwilling to promote players until he’s convinced they are capable of doing far more than making up the numbers at this point. It’s why I think nwaneri will play quite a bit next season whereas others have left/will leave unexpectedly. Might be that some of those who leave are seen as potentially very good players, but either won’t develop quickly enough, or won’t ever reach the very top level we need.
Nelson and nketiah might be solid counterarguments, but I think it’s a question of timing – we could afford players who were arguably just below the level before, but we’ve progressed beyond that now? Just a thought – not sure if I believe it myself, frankly.
In any case, I do think we could be making more from the academy players from a monetary perspective than we seem to. We always seem to get it wrong with contracts and timing.