Arsenal Need English Talent Sooner Rather Than Later

England’s first XI for their first EURO 2016 fixture included ZERO Arsenal players. Arsenal must work to improve the quality of English players at the club.

Tottenham Hotspur may have fallen behind Arsenal on the final match day of the 2015-16 Premier League, but the Gunners will look enviously at their rivals’ young English talent that is making an impact on the international stage.

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Eric Dier was the goalscorer in England’s 1-1 draw with Russia, but Dele Alli was gliding about in midfield and Harry Kane, while very quiet, is still the top English forward at the moment and is somebody the Three Lions will turn to when they need a moment of magic in these next two games.

Not only do Spurs have the young trio of Kane, Dier and Alli; Danny Rose and Kyle Walker started their first competitive fixture together for England, while Arsenal’s home-grown defenders – Kieran Gibbs, Calum Chambers and Carl Jenkinson – didn’t make the match squad.

It’s not only defenders that are missing from the England squad. Arsenal’s only man to make the eighteen was Jack Wilshere. Perhaps Danny Welbeck’s injury is the reason Wilshere was the only player selected from Arsenal, but it says a lot that the only man who didn’t play for the Gunners in 2015/16 was training at a high enough level to get selected by England manager Roy Hodgson.

England’s squad at this tournament features a high amount of young players relative to how many have been traveling in years past. So it’s not like Arsenal have been misrepresented by their lack of young players in the team.

Calum Chambers is the only player who is English in the Arsenal first team that gets selected with any sort of frequency, and he has barely featured for Arsenal after joining from Southampton for fifteen million pounds.

There are young players in the Arsenal squad, like Alex Iwobi and Krystian Bielik (Hector Bellerin is young, but he’s already a starter), but when it comes to English players that Arsenal will be building around in the future there is a distinct lack of quality.

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In today’s transfer market it’s extremely difficult to compensate for this lack of quality with money. It’s difficult enough to buy English players with potential without spending massive amounts of money, and once other big clubs see that someone is trying to gain some sort of monopoly on home-grown talent the competition for those players will become ferocious.

Now that England’s time of a ‘golden generation’ has come and gone, English clubs should all be scrambling to produce their own new wave of domestic talent. Thanks to the Premier League’s TV money, however, the concept of building a squad without transfers has – for the most part – left the English game.

Liverpool and Manchester United may be the fallen giants of today’s league, but they certainly have more promising young players that feature in the first team. Arsenal are in a time period where their youth products from six or seven seasons ago are not progressing any further, and they’re also not good enough to compete at the level Arsenal want to be at.

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This Arsenal team has been put together to win now. That’s great. But it’s going to become a problem if Arsenal can’t win now and then don’t have a plan for when their star players are 34 and 35 years old.