Arsenal: I’ll believe Freddie Ljungberg impact when I see it

Arsenal under 23s coach Freddie Ljungberg has been promoted into Unai Emery’s first-team coaching set-up. I hope this means more young players will be used, but I will believe that impact when I see it.

Arsenal have always been a club that prioritises the development and production of young players. It was a key proponent of the Arsene Wenger years and was highlighted as an extremely important element of the next era by Ivan Gazidis when he was listing skills he wanted in the next manager.

Find the latest episode of the Pain in the Arsenal Podcast here — Death, Decay, Despair

Unai Emery, the man who succeeded Wenger, has shown some commitment to this philosophy in his first season at the club. Although not all of the young talent has been given first-team opportunities, players like Emile Smith Rowe, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Rob Holding and Joe Willock have all seen their roles in the squad grow.

More from Pain in the Arsenal

• 3 standout players from 1-0 victory over Everton
• 3 positives & negatives from Goodison Park victory
• Arsenal vs PSV preview: Prediction, team news & lineups
• 3 talking points from Arsenal’s victory at Goodison Park
• Mikel Arteta provides Gabriel Martinelli injury update after Everton win

And now it seems as though Emery is set to double down on this youthful approach. This week, it was revealed that Freddie Ljungberg, the under-23 coach who impressed in his year at the club, has been brought into the first-team coaching set-up alongside Steve Bould and Juan Carlos Carcedo and Pablo Villanueva, who came with Emery from Paris Saint-Germain. Ljungberg is viewed as a significant part of the coaching team and will have a major say in the team’s activities.

Obviously, it is very easy to put two and two together and assume that Emery is now going all in on the crop of talented young players at the club, moving the person who knows them best into a role where he will directly impact the senior team. And that is a very fair line of thinking. Certainly, Ljungberg’s presence on the senior coaching staff is not going to harm the development of the young players at the club.

However, this is something that I will be a little more hesitant to back. I will believe it when I see it. And that is not to say that I do not agree with the thinking that Ljungberg shows intentions to bring young talent through. It does. But good intentions do not always lead to good actions.

There are plenty of managers that have professed to want to use the academy, to intend to invest in the training facilities, to bleed young stars into the senior team, only to feel the pressure to get instant results and steer clear of their initial plans, turning to more experienced and trusted veterans to get the job done.

This may or may not happen at Arsenal. We will have to wait and see. But saying that you will do something and then doing the thing you said you would do are very different, and just because Emery intends to bring young players, which is an assumption in and of itself, does not mean that he actually will.

I hope I am wrong, and to an extent, I believe that I am wrong. But I will believe the Ljungberg impact when I see it. For now, let’s all just take a step back and calm down a tad.