what to do with Ethan Nwaneri
and why more people should understand the tightrope of talent development
The entire piece is available to all subscribers. Beyond the paywall lies the relevant chapter of my book Superstrengths and the ability to comment.
I achieved a childhood dream just after leaving school. I played a game for Bath Rugby first team.
Four of us academy players were brought along for a preseason friendly away at Exeter, then a first division team years away from their Premiership adventure, given a warm-up t-shirt and told we were there to bulk up the numbers in the pre-game preparation. At the hotel before the game we sat in some meetings before hammering the brunch buffet, demolishing omelettes and pancakes aplenty, gorging ourselves full in the knowledge we were not there to play. Bath is a rugby-mad city, playing at the elite level in England and Europe, and while us young pups all dreamed of playing for the first team, we thought it was a couple of years away and were happy to be along for the ride.
Then at half time of a relatively uneventful game, one of the first team coaches took me aside and said the words,
‘Ben, you’re on.’
With a stomach full of pancakes I was not best prepared for any kind of dream debut. The game didn’t flow and I didn’t get too much to do but I didn’t disgrace myself and despite my aching stomach, I enjoyed being on the field with a few of my childhood heroes.
This was quite low stakes as sporting debuts go but so were expectations. I didn’t expect to get on the field and no one was too bothered about the outcome of the game, played in front of a small crowd in preseason but this season, watching a young sporting prodigy taking his first steps for Arsenal FC in far more pressurised circumstances, I’m reminded of that slightly inelegant experience.
the Nwaneri era begins
Ethan Nwaneri is the latest sporting wonderboy for us all to get very excited over. He’s 17, has already played more senior football than Bukayo Saka or Phil Foden had at the same age and he scores glorious goals.
In my (in)expert, extremely biased Arsenal-centric opinion, we should be excited about him. He looks the real deal (and not full of pancakes). People want him to play, they want him to play right now and they are expecting him to make a difference to Arsenal’s attack.
But to my mind, a lot of people get a lot wrong about prodigy and how we should handle it.
The chatter and narrative around Nwaneri is often not much more sophisticated than my experience all those years ago, close to the beginning of professional rugby when the academy was a relatively new invention. Now, the thinking behind the scenes will be much more advanced, the systems much better-grooved at honing talent.
And Nwaneri looks robust enough to play. He looks more than a match for established professionals from lower division teams, has come on to great effect in the Premier League and Champions League and has recently begun to start these higher level games. His ability to compete and contribute right now isn’t really in question.
What is in question is whether he should be.
While every player needs to be thrown in the deep end at some point, to be pitched into a situation they don’t know, they don’t need that to happen right away. In fact, they need that to happen incrementally.
As academy players, we won most of our youth games. Winning and expecting to win are great habits to build and when the level of competition and the level of criticism at senior professional level is so high, there’s something to be said for building a sustained feeling of competence. When we played senior second team games against experienced professionals we would often lose but when friends asked how the games went, I’d usually say I was ok with my performances. If I’d managed to contribute positively, even if the team lost, I knew I could be pleased with my work. My academy managers would invite me to critique my game, looking for the negatives and the positives, letting me build a bank of evidence that I was good and could play with the big boys.
Those games were about developing not winning. Young players, perhaps any players, do their best work when they feel like they belong there. Internally you think, I’m good enough for this. Let me show you.
But until players accumulate those positive experiences, that feeling of competence doesn’t exist (and if it does it’s a delusion).
There’s something to be said for bringing Nwaneri off the bench in the games that are going smoothly, putting him into a well-grooved team in command of the game and getting him rolling downhill. He’s used to being the best player in his age group, maybe against slightly older players, and being decisive in every game.
If he doesn’t feel these same feelings in senior competition then quite quickly, he may convince himself that he can’t make the difference.
prodigy takes time
Most novels don’t start at the moment when writers first sit down to write them and most athletes don’t begin when we first see them play.
My first book Fringes took about a year from inception to publication. I could have done it faster if I’d prevaricated less. But while it was fast, it was the culmination of all my thoughts and feelings on something I’d spent about 15 years of my life pursuing seriously. The book began when I was a teenager, even if I didn’t put pen to paper until I was in my 30s.
Even one of the great prodigious literary talents, Donna Tartt, took her time to make a mark. She was given a $450,000 book deal aged 22 for her first novel The Secret History. Presumably the book already existed in draft form to garner such a large advance but it wasn’t deemed ready for publication until Tartt was 28. The literary wunderkind took the best part of ten years to complete her first novel.
Like a sporting prodigy, rushing might have spoiled Tartt’s talent. Letting her breathe across her career has led to a portfolio of only 3 books but the overwhelming consensus is that her body of work is great.
It sounds like obvious advice but for us fans, Ethan Nwaneri is someone we’re discovering as a senior player right now. For Arsenal, the academy and for Mikel Arteta, his project has been a long term one. They’ve spent years watching, finessing and protecting his talent. Nwaneri himself has spent an entire lifetime working on his football, first for fun and now for something else.
Arsenal might need Nwaneri to help them out right now and while his first scribblings on a football pitch are pretty good, what they should really want is for him to write a masterpiece in 5 years’ time.
Anything that compromises that possibility should be regarded with caution.
the price of youth
Two of the greatest players of all time, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, were less inevitable than we remember.
They took time to become themselves and while they were regarded as prodigal teenage talents, two of their contemporaries were better and more important to their teams before they were.
Wayne Rooney and Cesc Fabregas were counted upon as senior players before Messi or Ronaldo were. Being around their age, I remember when 19 year old Messi and 20 year old Ronaldo were often used as substitutes for their club teams while Rooney and Fabregas ran the show as 18 year olds. Messi didn’t get off the bench for Argentina in the 2006 World Cup quarter final but Wayne Rooney was England’s best player two years before at Euro 2004. Fabregas was so clearly brilliant aged 18 that Arsenal let club legend Patrick Vieira leave and he later became the Arsenal captain aged 21.
Later, the early starters Rooney and Fabregas both left Champions League level teams in their early thirties and are now both managers. Messi and Ronaldo, held in reserve that extra bit longer, are both still playing, only a few years removed from the game’s biggest honours and they have long surpassed any of their contemporaries.
Ethan Nwaneri looks physically robust and mature, with a goatee far more convincing than his captain Martin Odegaard, and the physical preparation of young players is improving all the time but he’s already experienced a muscular injury in senior competition. Even as sports science has advanced (I was nowhere near physically ready for top level rugby at 18/19 in the way young players are now) so have the demands of competition. Careers can last a long time but they will require careful management, particularly as the number of competitive games continues to increase.
Young minutes perhaps count for more on the back end. Youthful bodies continue to grow and change, requiring patience and understanding and if you start early, you may finish early. Nwaneri’s future physical wellbeing needs to be as carefully considered as the development of his talent.
how to walk a tightrope
Throw them in at the deep end.
Often it’s stated that young talent needs a sink or swim moment. There is some truth to it but the idea that their career should depend on one big splash into the shark-infested water of high level football is incorrect.
While writing Superstrengths with sports performance professional Trystan Bevan, I learned some more detailed theory on exactly how we improve our skills.
It turns out that to develop a talent, you have to walk a tightrope.
Walking an actual tightrope isn’t complicated. You walk from one side to the other. But what does a tightrope represent for talent development?
A tightrope needs both tension and support. The rope needs to be tense in order to hang across the gap and it needs to be supported at the sides in order for you to be able to walk it.
People are the same.
In order to succeed, you need a gap to bridge, just enough tension (preparation) to be able to walk with support behind and reward in front of you to speed you on your way. Putting more tension on the rope by doing more preparation and training is helpful but if you never try and make the crossing, it’s all for nothing. At some point, you have to go for it.
Then of course, where is this rope?
With the tightrope, context is everything.
When someone is new to tightrope walking, you don’t string a line between two skyscrapers like Man On Wire Philippe Petit, the pictured Frenchman who famously crossed the gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre (incredible documentary here). You hang it a foot or two off the floor. Then as they improve, you raise the tightrope, higher and higher, all the while helping them maintain their balance with a mixture of praise and appealing goals while exposing them to different stressors. We build confidence inch by inch, crossing by crossing.
But we do need to keep raising the rope.
Former Performance Director of UK Athletics, sport psychologist Professor Dave Collins published a research paper entitled Putting the Bumps in the Rocky Road: Optimizing the Pathway to Excellence. The paper explained that if we make our journeys too well-grooved, we risk not learning the lessons that tough times have to teach us. Collins says,
A periodised and progressive set of challenge, preceded with specific skill development, would seem to offer the best pathway to success.
In the same way as support must be deliberate, encouraging and helpful, the challenge also needs to be demanding, building to the point where we doubt whether we can be successful. The size of the task needs to be at the upper ends of our talents for us to keep developing. Otherwise we remain in our comfort zone where we can perform a task too easily and we cease to move forward.
Nwaneri needs to be challenged. He needs to keep improving technically off the pitch, testing his skills at training, be tested physically by playing longer stints more frequently and psychologically, being trusted with greater responsibility in the more difficult games. Arteta and his staff need to keep raising the tightrope, perhaps shaking it as they do, but crucially, they need him to succeed.
Each successful crossing will convince Nwaneri he does belong, that he can make the difference, that he can play game after game, year after year. But raising the tightrope too high too early and letting him fall could undo years of careful work. As Arsene Wenger said,
You go up by stairs and come down by the lift. That’s what confidence is.
Even the Lionel Messi’s of this world were not thrown in the deep end. Like me, Messi made his debut in a preseason friendly. Unlike me, he tore the pitch to pieces, leading opposition manager Fabio Capello to remark, ‘Who is that little devil?’
But then that wasn’t ‘it’ for Messi. He didn’t become a reliable starter for a few years.
In fact, in Superstrengths we used the example of Messi in the 2022 World Cup Final as his apex performance, the moment when the tightrope was as high as it could possibly be but as I mentioned, a 19 year old Messi was infamously not used by coach Jose Pekerman when Argentina crashed out of the World Cup in 2006. A quarter final was regarded as too high a traverse for him at that stage in his career.
So why rush with Nwaneri? If your expectations for him are greater than those on the likes of Lionel Messi, something’s not right.
the master(s) and the apprentice
There’s an Arsenal analogue with Bukayo Saka. Saka has consistently been great for Arsenal, impressing as a very young player and now as the star and sometime captain of the team but the 19 year old Saka was left on the bench for the 2020 FA Cup final. His talent is obvious now but he wasn’t regarded as worthy of minutes in that game.
Now Saka is Arsenal’s best player and him and Odegaard together will be the best possible mentors for Nwaneri. They play the roles he’s learning, they understand the burden of expectation and have become consistent performers at the level he aspires to reach. Aligning the talent with the right teacher will help them cross the tightrope.
And what will they be working on with Nwaneri?
I asked Trystan Bevan, who since overseeing the development of some of the best rugby players of the past 20 years has allied a writing portfolio with the General Manager position at women’s football outfit Gwalia United. Aside from getting Nwaneri up to a physical par with the seniors and safeguarding his longterm fitness, he shared that,
They are almost certainly thinking about the Triple A:
Ability - yes he has it at the lower level but can he express it at the highest?
Application - does the sport psych aspect of competitive anxiety and performance under pressure affect his ability? Can he impact games where players are equally as good as him?
Attitude - he will fail a lot more at the top level where the air is thin than on the way up. How will this affect him?
In football terms they will be looking at the specific tactical and skill demands of his role. What are the better statistical options to take in different situations? How can he get into similar positions on the pitch as Odegaard and Saka to assist or score? How can he continue to augment his superstrengths, like dribbling and cutting inside to shoot while mitigating his weaknesses? Tailored training exercises and gym routines will help him develop the power, automaticity and skill to transmit his ability from youth to senior level.
It’s not normal to be 17 and affect top flight matches in the way Nwaneri has but for every next big thing, there’s a list of those who never live up to their billing. So yes, let’s be thrilled about Ethan Nwaneri. Yes, let’s throw him into challenging games. He’s clearly ready to contribute to a team as good as Arsenal, competing at the top of the Premier League and in Europe and he could be the next Saka-like success story.
But let’s also remember the tightrope. How can the club keep a sense of progression across all aspects of developing Nwaneri, enabling him to keep pushing at the edges of his talent by raising the rope higher and higher while making sure he never falls?
It’s a delicate balance but if Arsenal get it right then one day, when the tightrope is strung across a gap so high most of us would refuse to take a single step, Ethan Nwaneri will walk to the other side.
Thanks to Ranjit Saimbi and Trystan Bevan for their help with this piece.
(I’ve posted the full tightrope chapter from Superstrengths below the paywall)