Myles Lewis-Skelly’s return reshapes Arsenal’s midfield

Myles Lewis-Skelly’s – Three weeks after leaving Arsenal’s pitch to a standing ovation in a Champions League semi-final, Myles Lewis-Skelly is back at the center of the plan. His rise began with extraordinary youth athleticism and a whirlwind England season, but the hardest part cam

When Myles Lewis-Skelly walked off the pitch in a Champions League semi-final three weeks ago, it wasn’t just a polite farewell. Arsenal’s crowd gave him a standing ovation.

The noise lingered for Grant Cornock long enough to prompt a message. “It’s where he belongs,” Cornock said, smiling. “I messaged him after the game and said exactly that: ‘That’s your level, this is what you’re capable of’.”

Cornock—director of sport at Aldenham School in Hertfordshire and a former professional with Watford—talks about Lewis-Skelly like someone who has been watching the same talent grow for years. He points to the numbers first, the kind that don’t flatter anyone. Lewis-Skelly was the holder of the Year 7 shot put record at Aldenham School, throwing 11 metres 75cm at age 11.

“At sports day last year, the kids were pleased with themselves throwing 8-9 metres. So there was some serious strength there,” Cornock added.

There are other memories, too—moments that sound almost impossible until you hear the details. Cornock recalls walking into a gymnasium on a sport scholarship assessment day. where Lewis-Skelly—then a primary school pupil—was hanging onto a basketball hoop. “Then you suddenly realise. wait a minute. this kid isn’t just a very good footballer. he is a specimen at 10 years old!” Cornock said. laughing.

Cornock isn’t only a name from Lewis-Skelly’s past. Last summer. a select group of people were invited to the Emirates Stadium to celebrate Lewis-Skelly signing a five-year contract with the club he grew up supporting. Cornock took much more than passing interest in what came next. because he knows how quickly attention can disappear—and how hard it can hit when it does.

“I’ve said to Myles this season. if it wasn’t for what happened last year. if he hadn’t played for England. if he hadn’t made 30-odd appearances. and he’d then had this season. he’d probably be very happy sitting on the bench. But when you get put up there and everyone talks about you. and the crowd sing your name. it’s hard to have that comedown. ” he said.

Lewis-Skelly’s breakthrough season had delivered that comedown—only it came with substance, not hype. The run included a goalscoring debut for England in March last year. and then. a month later. a performance marked by “remarkable maturity” against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in the Champions League quarter-final.

By the end of that campaign, Lewis-Skelly had played 39 times for Arsenal, won four England caps, and was nominated for the PFA Young Player of the Year award. All the while, he was playing out of position at left-back.

The season that followed has been far tougher—especially the way it arrived for a young player with expectations already attached. He featured regularly in cup competitions, but he started only one Premier League game up until April. By then, he had lost his place in the England squad.

The fallout online was immediate and predictable. Cornock listed the kind of comments that spread faster than nuance: “Some of the comments: ‘He’s not good enough. that’s why he’s not being played centre midfield.’ ‘We bought a better left-back now.’ Whether he reads it or not. I don’t know. You hope they don’t.”.

The question Cornock keeps coming back to is how a player copes with being watched from the side when everything in him wants to be on the pitch. “But if you’re not playing and you’re sitting on the side every week with 60. 000 Arsenal fans behind you. and all you want to do is play. it’s hard not to take it personally. isn’t it?. ‘I wanna be on that pitch, I’m not getting on.’ How do you cope with that?”.

Declan Rice’s comments offered Cornock something else to hold onto. Cornock said he was pleased to hear Rice talk about the manager being tough on Lewis-Skelly—something he believes not many people would say out loud. “So for Myles to be able to cope with that. and to not sink at those times when he wasn’t playing. and then also to come back in and play as well as he did. it speaks volumes of his unbelievable ability. obviously. but his mentality as well.”.

For Lewis-Skelly, the turning point started to look real earlier this month in a match against Fulham at home. It wasn’t only that he was named in the team. It was that he started a match for the first time in centre midfield—the position where he had excelled as a youth player for club and country.

Arsenal beat Fulham 3-0, and Lewis-Skelly was described as superb.

If Fulham was a watershed moment, the next step raised the pressure. Three days later. against Atletico Madrid at home. with a place in the Champions League final at stake. Mikel Arteta picked Lewis-Skelly in midfield ahead of Martin Zubimendi for a second time. The decision was a show of faith. and it came in the exact kind of game where young careers can either harden or crack.

Steve Morrow played for Arsenal from 1992 to 1997 and later got to know Lewis-Skelly and his family well during his time as head of academy recruitment at the club. His view is straightforward: the choice belonged to Arteta’s leadership style.

“I think it’s one of the qualities of Mikel as a leader and as a coach that people often overlook. or don’t give him enough credit for — he is brave in his decision-making and he goes with his gut. ” Morrow said. “And the decision was justified too. because there were two or three great performances from Myles in what I consider to be his more natural position.”.

Those Fulham and Atletico performances have shifted more than just the results column. They have changed the conversation around Lewis-Skelly’s season—and possibly his longer-term Arsenal future.

From being third-choice left-back and potentially available for transfer this summer, Lewis-Skelly is now firmly in the conversation to start in midfield against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final on Saturday.

But the story doesn’t end at the stadium noise. It reaches further back, to how Arsenal’s own academy once tried to capture what it saw long before the spotlight.

In September 2022. Arsenal’s Academy posted the line: “Lewis-Skelly is a cheat code. ” under a 36-second clip from an under-18 game against Norwich City on September 21. 2022. The footage showed a 15-year-old receiving a pass deep inside his own half. leaving opponents behind as he drove forward through the middle of the pitch.

Morrow. who had left Arsenal to take a job with the English Football Association by the time that Norwich game took place almost four years ago. still recalls the passage of play. “You always look for one or two outstanding qualities with young players. and one of those with Myles was — and you see it today — being able to receive the ball on the half-turn. being able to look forward and drive forward in those first five or 10 metres. ” he said.

He points to what he considers the special part of Lewis-Skelly’s game even then. and to a conversation years later that left an impact. At an international youth tournament in Portugal, Morrow spoke to a senior figure working for a rival Premier League club. That person, Morrow said, never forgot how sure he was when he told them Lewis-Skelly would “be the one.”.

“I could just see special talent in him between the age of 12 and 14, and I knew that he was going to go the distance,” Morrow added.

Even that conviction came with a warning he expected to come true: the road would have bumps. “It’s not really a surprise,” Morrow said, reflecting on what has happened this season. “I think what was a surprise was how well he did consistently over a long period of time coming in at left-back. performing at such a high level and being the outstanding player in big games. That’s unusual in itself.”.

Normal, Morrow said, is the in-and-out reality of youth development. This year had also brought tremendous competition in the left-back spot at Arsenal. Piero Hincapie had moved there after playing more as a left-sided centre back, and Riccardo Calafiori was also in the mix.

Last summer, Lewis-Skelly’s challenges were sharpened further. He didn’t have a particularly good pre-season. it took time for him to build a relationship with Gabriel Heinze. who joined as Arsenal’s first-team coach in July. and Hincapie’s arrival from Bayer Leverkusen complicated things at left-back.

Moments of promise still appeared. Lewis-Skelly provided a superb assist for Gabriel Martinelli in a 4-0 win over Atletico Madrid in the Champions League in October, but there were also spells when he looked exposed at left-back.

Arteta described the emotional difficulty of those shifts earlier this month. “He goes to the national team. comes back from pre-season and starts to realise that maybe he’s not going to be a starter. ” Arteta said. “So you need to go through those emotions, not only you but the people next to you as well. You have to navigate through that, and that’s not easy. I understand that. It’s easy when it’s going so well for you. but when it goes the other way. the temptation is going to be to start pointing at people.”.

Arteta’s view was also that it took time for the penny to drop. He said it took three or four conversations with Lewis-Skelly before he took on board the reasons for him not playing so much this season. “I think he realised: If it’s not this way, I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Arteta said.

That helps explain why people interpret him differently depending on what version of him they’ve seen. There is a popular perception that Lewis-Skelly has plenty of self-belief—formed in part by the way he celebrated Arsenal’s third goal against Manchester City in a 5-1 win at the Emirates last season. when he mimicked Erling Haaland’s meditation pose.

But those who know him say the bigger story is not confidence versus doubt. It’s how he manages the pressure of both.

Ryan Garry. who worked with Lewis-Skelly at Arsenal’s academy and was also his coach with England at youth level. described a player who can be very serious about his game. “He found Myles to be very serious about his game” was how Garry framed it. and he said he was also “too hard on himself at times.”.

At one stage. Garry decided to speak to Lewis-Skelly about shifting his mindset on failure and learning to occasionally embrace it. “That trait of really holding himself to a higher account was there. and sometimes it could tip over the edge. ” Garry said. “It didn’t come from a bad place. He’s wanting to be the best. but it was about allowing him the space to develop and understand that there’s going to be moments in a game of football where you’re going to make a mistake. So you might as well think: ‘What do you do on the next action?’. instead of really going to town on the why and the how of the previous mistake. There’s going to be a time for that afterwards. And when he started to work on that, you could see his emotional control was better.”.

Lee Dixon’s comparison added another layer. “It’s alright being strong, but there’s a million strong kids out there,” Dixon said. “It’s not about that.”

He described Lewis-Skelly as “very Gazza-like in the way that he uses his weight and his strength.” Dixon said Lewis-Skelly allows players to catch up with him. then slows down slightly so that when contact comes again. he bounces off them. Dixon said Lewis-Skelly wins free kicks by doing that. and that it gets him higher up the pitch—a “brilliant skill to have.”.

Paul Gascoigne—Gascoigne—was “one of the most gifted footballers of his generation” and a starring figure for England at the 1990 World Cup. The point, in Dixon’s telling, is not just the strength but the way it becomes a tool.

With Lewis-Skelly, that strength and power have been there from day one, or at least since that shot put moment at Aldenham School, when the pursuit of a longer tape measure began.

Lewis-Skelly playing for Arsenal U12s in 2018 is among the images tied to that timeline.

There is also a trade-off. Dixon and others point out that he can occasionally get caught on the ball because of the way his body can encourage contact when receiving. But more often, the contact invitation becomes a way to roll away from a marker, escape pressure, and drive forward.

Morrow nodded when asked about that quality. “He’s got such a special quality of being able to protect the ball and making it so difficult for opponents to get it off him. As he gets more experienced, he’ll do that (use his body) even more and he’ll hang on to the ball even more,” Morrow said.

Cornock sees it in the passing. too—especially in how he can “break lines” by slipping the ball into teammates with speed and disguise. Cornock said: “I don’t think people will even recognise it yet — his passing ability is genuinely world-class because he breaks lines. The pace of his pass is at that level. He’s also playing with good players now. When he was at school. I had to actually say to him sometimes: ‘Myles. you can’t pass it that hard because these kids can’t control it!’”.

Cornock added that the difference-maker is what happens when teams sit in a mid-block or low block. “And the more he plays there, the more confidence he’ll get, and the more risks he will take in the right areas,” he said.

There is one more unresolved question hovering beneath all the recent decisions: what might have happened if Arteta had given Lewis-Skelly an earlier chance to play in midfield. An opportunity had been planned in an FA Cup tie against Wigan Athletic in February. only for Calafiori to pick up an injury in the warm-up.

Instead, the route into midfield opened through a mix of necessity. Dixon said that in the end, it was “a combination of Zubimendi’s fatigue and loss of form” that opened the door for Lewis-Skelly, who had been playing in midfield in training for several months to show what he could do.

Dixon’s verdict was blunt. “I can’t say I was surprised because I think I knew he could do it,” he said. “I think it was an opportunity born out of Mikel needing something, and he got it in bucketloads. I thought Myles was brilliant. His control, his awareness of players around him — he was my man of the match, and possibly in both games.”.

For England, though, it may have been too late for this World Cup. Dixon said it was too late for Lewis-Skelly to force his way back into the England squad for the World Cup, and that another five games in midfield would have strengthened his case.

But the timing appears to be right for the Champions League final. Dixon believes Lewis-Skelly has possibly timed his run perfectly. “It’s a big call,” Dixon said. “But I’d probably play Myles. I think he’s already shown enough not to be fazed by that.”

Myles Lewis-Skelly Arsenal Champions League final Paris Saint-Germain Atletico Madrid Fulham Declan Rice Mikel Arteta Martin Zubimendi Riccardo Calafiori Piero Hincapie