Regardless of whether Arsenal can be viewed as "developing" those players, I think it's a pretty sound strategy and Wenger takes too much criticism for it. Buy a ton of young starlets, if one in four turns out to be a star and you break even on two others you're coming out way ahead. It's not so good for the players' careers, but as a club business strategy it's smart.
But is it not just a rather poor version of what we do - and if so, why does it need to pick out Arsenal as the shining example?
We poach young players as well: Schneiderlin, Clyne, Cork, Gazzaniga, for example, all arrived from other clubs at least partially developed (similarly to Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain's transfers to Arsenal), and we have the likes of Rowe, Mells, Stephens, Gallagher and so on in the youth teams who were all recently signed from other academies.
Sure, but do we not generally do more - both in number of players developed (either through the youth set-up or poached) and in the quality of development? My point was would we not be a better 'home grown' case study than Arsenal?
I guess if you think about it, the PL does (or recently has, in some cases) contain a reasonable number of players who pulled on an Arsenal shirt, roughly, before the age of 20. Obviously very few have exactly become massive players on the world stage. Maybe only Cole, Anelka and Fabregas? But just of the top of my head, you've also got Pennant, Larsson, Upson, Bentley, Aliadiere, Senderos, Bartley, Clichy, Muamba (Lansbury also comes to mind, but I can't recall him playing in the PL since leaving Arsenal). I'd say that's a decent amount. If you drew up a full list for each club, I'd expect Man Utd to be be able to beat Arsenal (purely based on volume; the likes of Gibson, Neville, Higginbottam etc), but possibly not too many other clubs. But then again, you could argue that a manager of a lower level PL club is maybe more willing to sign a player with, for example, an Arsenal background than, say, an Aston Villa background - and therefore it's maybe not solely based on ability that so many of these Arsenal outcasts have gone on to play for other PL clubs.
Perhaps. The article is not so much a case study as a piece about Wenger's comments on his commitment to the youth setup though, which are significant given what the board members have been saying about spending more money (and the signing of Ãzil of course). I don't really see it as reflecting poorly on us (or indeed at all).
There's a difference between produced and developed. AOC we produced and arsenal are in the stage of developing him same with Walcott and bale.
