Arsenal have reportedly decided to cash in on academy product Emile Smith Rowe, but had it not been for injuries, things might have been very different for the midfielder.
Arsenal fans will understandably be experiencing conflicting feelings at the news of Emile Smith Rowe’s impending departure.
While feeling sad that the club is finally giving up on an academy product who once promised so much, those supporters will simultaneously – and likely unanimously – be sure that selling him to Fulham for a reported £35 million is for the best.
Smith Rowe broke into the Arsenal first team at a time when there wasn’t much – at least by today’s standards – to cheer about. When he established himself in Mikel Arteta’s team in 2020-21, Arsenal were on their way to a second successive eighth-placed finish, and a fifth season in a row finishing outside the top four (they would go on to make that six seasons). The sole FA Cup they have won under Arteta wasn’t enough to satisfy their trophy-hungry fans.
The emergence of Smith Rowe alongside fellow academy product Bukayo Saka, however, helped Arteta change the mood at the Emirates Stadium. Fans had become fed up with the final years of the Arsène Wenger era and Unai Emery’s failed reign, so having not one but two homegrown talents in the first team gave them something to cling on to.
The rise of those two players and their output over the next couple of years showed that while the team underachieved, the future was at least bright.
But their paths have since diverged dramatically. Given their contrasting positions in football now – with Saka a reasonable shout for the best right-sided forward on the planet and Smith Rowe heading for an inevitable mid-table battle with Fulham – it’s hard to believe there was a time when Smith Rowe was almost as exciting a prospect.
Across his first two seasons playing regularly in the Arsenal team (2020-21 and 2021-22), Smith Rowe scored 15 goals and recorded nine assists in all competitions. With 24 non-penalty goal involvements, he ranked fifth in the Arsenal squad, only seven behind the leader (Saka, with 31).
Only Saka (101) and Martin Ødegaard (97) created more chances in open play for Arsenal in that time than him (69), while only Saka (89), Alexandre Lacazette (79) and Grant Xhaka (75) played more games than him (70).
His 10 Premier League goals in 2020-21 put him in the league’s top 20 goalscorers for the season, only one behind Saka, and level with players including Bruno Fernandes, and ahead of eventual title-winner Phil Foden (nine) and future Arsenal teammates Kai Havertz, Gabriel Jesus and Leandro Trossard (eight each).
At that stage, it would have been unthinkable that Havertz or Trossard would be part of the reason that Arteta would eventually give up on Smith Rowe.
Early on in the following season, he scored and got an assist in a 3-1 north London derby victory over Tottenham. It wasn’t as if he needed to give the fans any more reason to love him, but there was nobody left to convince after that display.
Smith Rowe’s form that year led to a first call-up to the England senior team in November 2021, and he made three appearances for Gareth Southgate’s side in a short space of time, scoring his first international goal, too.
There was to be a disappointing end to the campaign for the team, though, as Arsenal fell away in the race for fourth place and were beaten to the Champions League places by Spurs. Their fortunes would soon change, but unfortunately for Smith Rowe, the years since barely featured him.
By the end of 2021-22, aged 21 years and 192 days old, he had 18 goal involvements to his name in 55 Premier League appearances. Those aren’t exactly earth-shattering numbers, but it puts him level at that age with the likes of Paul Scholes (18 in 44 appearances) and Gareth Bale (18 in 76) and ahead of past Arsenal stars like Aaron Ramsey (14 in 75) and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (13 in 78), which goes to show the kind of foundations Smith Rowe had established.
Since then, however, he has made just 25 appearances in the last two seasons, and only three of those were starts. He has three assists but hasn’t scored a single goal.
It’s not an entirely fair comparison because, clearly, Saka was always going to be the better player (and Smith Rowe might never have come close to emulating Scholes, Bale, Ramsey or Oxlade-Chamberlain), but his rise only serves to brutally highlight what might have been.
A comparison of his and Saka’s numbers before and after the end of the 2021-22 season shows just how starkly their careers have diverged.
Smith Rowe has had several injury problems, suffering four separate lengthy spells on the sidelines between 2018 and 2020, but it was a groin injury he suffered that required surgery at the start of 2022-23 – having just had his best season – that derailed his progress most significantly.
That recovery meant he missed 121 days and 21 games in the first half of that season, but – crucially – when he returned in early January, Arsenal had a five-point lead at the top of the table. They were flying, and there was next to no opportunity for Smith Rowe to find a way back into the team. Every game was must-win, so Arteta couldn’t risk giving Smith Rowe game time in the name of his development.
Then, after a positive pre-season before 2023-24, he came off the bench with his team 2-0 down at Stamford Bridge last October to help inspire a rousing comeback and a 2-2 draw. The following week, he started in the league for the first time in 17 months in a 5-0 win over Sheffield United, in which he set up Eddie Nketiah’s hat-trick goal.
But he picked up a knee injury that ruled him out for nine games, and he played only 241 minutes in the Premier League between that Sheffield United win and the end of the season. He wasn’t directly involved in any goals in that time.
So, after two seasons of playing so little and contributing next to nothing to successive failed Arsenal title bids, it’s the right time for everyone to move on. Smith Rowe needs games and Arsenal need money to invest in high-quality, reliable alternatives to the players they already have.
Fulham, meanwhile, are getting a player with bags of ability and – still just 23 – plenty of time to improve, too. His passing and dribbling ability in tight spaces close to the opposition’s goal could prove invaluable to a team who have lost Bobby De Cordova-Reid from one of the attacking midfield positions this summer and also relied heavily for creativity last season on the now 35-year-old Willian. A fit and firing Smith Rowe significantly improves that team.
Ultimately, though, whether or not he comes close to fulfilling the potential he showed all those years ago will come down to whether he can stay fit and put a run of games together.
If he can do that, Arsenal fans could be in for some more mixed feelings as they watch the Emile Smith Rowe they love tearing it up in the colours of another team.
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