What is your opinion of our youth team?

We have only really unearthed 2 top quality players in recent years and that is jack and gibbo.

The rest of the youth team players seem bang average imo. gnarby maybe has the potential to be better and eisfield is obviously a great prospect and our best youngster by far but, he is not from arsenal youth at all, all that he knows currently was taught to him by Dortmund.

In my honest opinion, i think Liam Brady is awful and needs to step down for someone younger, energetic and with new ideas. Our youth is not even comparable to the likes of dortmunds/barca's/bayern youth teams, who are bringing through great youngsters every year it seems.

We scout a lot of foreigners. Toral, olsson, eisfeld and gnabry are the latest imports, they are quite talented but if its the real Academy kids you are interested in, they are less famous, but i dont think arsenal have been doing a bad job, going back to jacks generation there was him, jay emmanuel thomas, kyle bartley, sanchez watt, and frimpong. That was decent for a youth team, they won all the youth prizes, 1 top player, two players that have gone on to play in the championship, and frimpong who has played in the premier league. The next generation: afobe, aneke, freeman, and yennaris, its a similar situation, they are decent players, they won the academy league, arsenal taught them well, but they just arent talented enough to play for arsenal, although yennaris could still turn into a class player imo. Next generation: bunjaku, i think he could play at the top level but he left us. This current generation of youth players: jack jebb, chuba akpom, austin lipman, and brandon ormonde-ottewill. This is a good generation, akpom is only 17 and already playing with the u21s, but the one to look out for imo is jebb, having seen him play, i think he is a better talent than all the imports and that includes gnabry, once he gets a chance with the first team people will start hyping him.

The academy isnt up to ajax or barca standard, but these teams benefit from signing 8 year olds from all over the world so they get all the best talents, english teams like arsenal cant sign a kid that lives more than 90 minutes away, until they turn 16 and the opportunity to teach them properly from a young age has gone. Given that restriction, the academy has done well with the limited talent they have access to

Obviously our academy isn't up the Ajax/Barcelona/Bayern Munich standards. What people don't realise is that those academies have been of a high grade for decades and have been producing top talent for just as long. They also devote a lot of funds to their academies.

Arsenal only really started focusing on their academy in the last ten years or so and don't put a lot of money into it. Moreover, no academy can catch up in such a short amount of time because you have to assemble the right coaches and develop a playing philosophy. Then you have to start teaching kids from a young age.

The EPPP should have an interesting effect on our academy, assuming we achieve a high grade. The scheme would allow us to sign kids who live more than 90 minutes away and grant us more coaching hours. Theoretically, with a bigger pool of players to choose from and more time to educate them, more talent should come out of the academy.