Arsenal take on Manchester United in the FA Youth Cup on Friday with the hope of reaching another semi-final. In 2003, Jack Wilshere took his then Under-18s side with the likes of Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri all the way to the final, and his replacement Adam Birchall is hoping to do the same.
football.london sat down with Birchall ahead of the important match being played at the Emirates Stadium to get his thoughts on the game and more broadly the club’s recent success with promoting youth stars and the excitement of what is still to come. Taking over from Wilshere last year, Birchall has taken his side now through the pathway of his predecessor who reached the final playing matches at the Emirates Stadium.
During that run, both Nwaneri and Lewis-Skelly announced themselves, with the latter even scoring a last-minute winner in the semi-final at the Emirates Stadium. That is the reward for reaching the quarter-finals of the competition, playing in the iconic north London ground.
The experience brings with it more than just the ability to play on the Emirates pitch. With the playing time comes everything else attached with a senior player’s matchday timetable, as Birchall explains.
“Yeah, it’s so exciting,” Birchall said. “And the staff are the same.
“So, we’re all very inspired to be playing on the pitch, but also we know we want to put on a good show as well. So, this week really is a different type of week for the young boys and, you know, we’ve really framed it as enjoy the week, be present, try and take it all in.
“They’ll get stuff that they don’t usually get. Get a first-team experience on the day. So, yeah, really excited.”
The youth coaching experience is something which grasps Birchall’s attention and intrigues him massively. This concept that as a coach, your reward for developing players is to lose them seems backward compared to his counterparts of the first team.
The best performers stay, sign new contracts, help take you toward your goals. At the younger ages, the script gets flipped, and the Under-18s boss explains this in a very revealing way, even picking up on the term ‘manager’ when questioned on his role with the squad.
“For me, I find this fascinating because you use the word manager there,” he says. “I’m a coach.
“I’m a coach and I’m here to serve the players, to help them, to serve the club. My reward with coaching is that you don’t get a lot of pats on the back.
“It’s not the way it is, but when you can look into the eyes of a player and know you did your best and the family know you did your best and when you talk to them you have that relationship, you gain real pride from seeing what they achieve. It might be here, and it might be elsewhere, and it might be not even in football and you’ve helped use football to develop them as people so they can go out and do something else with their life, but the intention is always to win.”
He adds: “It really fascinates me because development is so much more complex than: you’re top of the 18s league. But then in two or three years if none of those players go on and have a career, probably the outside world thinks I’m a brilliant manager because I’ve won the 18s league, but none of the lads have developed and none of them are going on. That’s surely my job.
“My job is to develop young people and help them with what they want to do. When you’re dealing with children it has to be a selfless thing. These young people are growing up in the world, and they want stuff, and they want help.
“I think where the line gets blurry is when adults start putting themselves before lads. They’re so young, you need to put them first.”
Arsenal have lost some key young players in the past year as well as finding the pathway for others. In frustrating circumstances, both Chido Obi-Martin and Ayden Heaven decided that the route to senior football was better for them with Manchester United.
Birchall worked with both players during their time at the club. He, however, can take the positives of developing those who do indeed decide to move on elsewhere instead of staying with the north London side.
“Being at Arsenal for, I think, 25 years now, what you would love is that they all go through and they play for our first team, because you end up caring so much about the boy, you love the club. So, that’s perfect,” Birchall said.
“But, the reality of football is that it’s not that. I still speak to lads – there is one at Northampton, one at Colchester, one at NEC, one at AC Milan.
“They are everywhere and, absolutely, once you know them and care about them, if they can go on and try to live their dream, I am so proud and happy for them. That’s the main thing – happy for them. Whether it’s here or elsewhere, a professional career is why they are here. That’s why this academy runs, to produce players.”
But the academy and youth teams are not just about nurturing players from single-digit ages. There has been a real push in the last couple of years for the club to seek out the best young talent in the teenage years and sign them.
The club have looked to sign players like Brayden Clarke and Ceadach O’Neill and then integrate them into the Under-18s and Under-21s. Birchall discussed the challenges and methods for helping these players who have not grown up in the Arsenal culture and are instead joining it at a later stage.
He said: “It is going to sound cliche coming from a coach, but that connect for correct, that type of thing. That idea. The connection idea.
“The starting point for me is always like caring for them, get a relationship with them on their terms. As they get a little bit older, it needs to be a little of a coach or a manager [relationship], if you want to look at it that way, because they need to learn that is important how to navigate that.
“Then you have to develop them and believe in them, but the starting point is to understand culture, background, them as a person, who do they want to be? What do they want to achieve?
“Then, the skill of the coach is having the personal skills to really connect with them. A word I love is mutuality, because once you get that and you get a shared sense of ‘we are going to achieve this, we are going to get better at this together’; they are not alone, and you get in that learning pit with them.
“The challenge is the fact that they are coming into a new environment. That’s where if you set a culture and environment, which is set by this amazing football club, the history of the football club, Per and Mikel and everything that is going on, they should be able to come into that, and the lads also help with that.
“Ceadach, for example, comes in and he goes to digs. He is staying with Louie Copley and Bless [Akolbire]. These become very important figures for them, but it also challenges his family as well because all of a sudden they are not seeing their son.
“So, we have a player liaison here who will work closely with families and players to make sure they are alright in that process. But it is bedding them in first before we can really shout at them and get them better! But yeah, it is that connection piece.”
The collection of all these facets, from those brought through and moulded from a very young age, to those who have joined more recently and had to learn quickly to adjust to their new, alien environment, is a side now looking to take on a very good Manchester United team on Friday. They go in as underdogs, with the average age of the side certainly not nearer 18 than the lower figures and that in itself tells you everything you need to know.
While a trophy could be at the end of this particular road for Birchall and his young side. The real success comes in developing a group of players where the frequency of senior graduation to join up with Mikel Arteta’s side is on a scale very few clubs are able to match, particularly at such a high level.
