Arsenal walking in a Martinelli, Saka, Smith Rowe & Odegaard wonderland

Football fans need to feel that emotional connection to their team. You will always support those who don the Arsenal red and white, but sometimes it might have felt forced. This is not that.

There is nothing forced about loving this group of players. It is impossible not to be swept up in their ebullience.

While you will always love your club, you may not always love your team. To have the feeling of unbridled adoration for the players running their socks off in your club colours is something money can’t buy. How you feel about your team is more important than we can care to imagine and for many supporters they will never have felt as attached to those who left Elland Road with three points.

Gabriel Martinelli (20), Bukayo Saka (20), Emile Smith Rowe (21) and Martin Odegaard (23) are not only affable young men, they’re outstanding footballing talents.

Arsenal are walking in Gabriel Martinelli, Bukayo Saka, Emile Smith Rowe & Martin Odegaard wonderland after storming Leeds win

This quartet are heading straight for the top. The fact that in the case of all four that is set to be with Arsenal is something it might be worth pinching yourself over.

Their development has been managed superbly and the strides they’re taking individually and collectively being played out every week for supporters to wax lyrical over is a source of immeasurable joy.

Martinelli is echoing a certain Chilean of late. Adding ruthless finishing and tactical maturity to an arsenal already containing blistering pace and captivating technical quality, his ceiling is out of sight.

Odegaard is cementing his role as the No. 10 to lead Arsenal for years to come as he finds comfort operating as the puppet master playmaker where goals are being added to his repertoire.

Saka is generational. He is one of the finest young players around and every week he seems to reach a new level of dominance on that right side that someone his age shouldn’t be capable of.

Smith Rowe was tasked with scoring 15 goals this season at the age of 21, having only come into the team less than 12 months ago. He has eight across all competitions and he’s not even starting every week.

If you took the levels these four are operating on and maintained them throughout the whole season then top four is a more than achievable target. But that’s the greatest part: as they develop their games and learn each other’s, there is firm reason to believe they can get even better across the second half of the campaign.

And that’s just this term. It’s frightening and intoxicating in equal measures to contemplate that this isn’t even their highest level. Three of them are 21 years old or younger. That final part is so easy to overlook as they dominate their more experienced counterparts on the Premier League stage.

You run out of superlatives.

Thus, whatever further ups and downs will come this season with a team whose youthful inexperience can also be to its detriment, sitting back and basking in their effervescent glory knowing it’s a pleasure others across the world grieve in envy of is something not to be taken for granted.

Magnificent in the moment, you dare not think what they can be in the future.