Arsenal let star go for £0, now he’s playing “best football of his career”

One of the most impressive aspects of Arsenal‘s season so far has been the emergence of several academy players in the first-team under Mikel Arteta.

17-year-old Ethan Nwaneri is one of the young starlets to come through to the senior set-up this term and he registered his first assist in the Premier League with a beautiful cross for Mikel Merino on Saturday.

The England U19 international, who has scored seven goals in all competitions this season, is not the only Hale End star to emerge for Arteta, though.

Left-back Myles Lewis-Skelly had not made a single first-team appearance before the 2024/25 campaign, and has already racked up 21 this term.

Myles Lewis-Skelly’s form this season

The 18-year-old defender has beaten off competition from Oleksandr Zinchenko, Kieran Tierney, and Riccardo Calafiori to be the first-choice option at left-back for the Gunners in recent weeks.

He has started eight of his 11

appearances in the Premier League this season, all as a left-back, and recently scored his first senior goal for the club in a huge 5-1 win over Manchester City at The Emirates.

Lewis-Skelly has made a terrific start to life at first-team level and Arteta will, surely, be hoping that the academy graduate can be his first-choice in that position for many more years to come.

The Spanish head coach, however, did once have another academy full-back with potential who he ended up allowing to leave for nothing, in the form of Ainsley Maitland-Niles.

He came up from the academy and made 132 appearances in all competitions, the majority of which came as a full-back, before Arteta ruthlessly released him for £0 in the summer of 2023.

Where Ainsley Maitland-Niles is now

The five-cap England international was snapped up by Ligue 1 side Lyon ahead of the 2023/24 campaign and he has made 57 appearances in all competitions for the French side to date.

Maitland-Niles has played 28 times in the current season, mostly as a right-back, and France-based broadcaster Matt Spiro recently claimed that the defender is “playing the best football of his career with Lyon” and should be in with a shot at making the England squad again.

Spiro added that Pierre Sage, the Lyon manager, hailed the full-back’s tactical intelligence and claimed that he does a lot of good work that goes unnoticed on the pitch.

As you can see in the table above, Maitland-Niles has offered a creative threat whilst also winning defensive duels for his team on a regular basis in Ligue 1 this season.

The 27-year-old star has found his place with Lyon and it appears as though Arteta’s decision to ruthlessly bin the defender in 2023 has worked out for everyone, as the Gunners now have Jurrien Timber and Ben White at right-back Maitland-Niles has hit his stride in France.

Hopefully, the English dynamo can continue to impress with the Ligue 1 outfit and force his way into Thomas Tuchel’s plans for England this season, and beyond.