“It’s where he belongs,” Grant Cornock says, smiling. “I messaged him after the game and said exactly that: ‘That’s your level, this is what you’re capable of’.”
Cornock is talking about Myles Lewis-Skelly leaving Arsenal’s pitch to a standing ovation in a Champions League semi-final three weeks ago. Or, to put it another way, the holder of the Year 7 shot put record at Aldenham School, in Hertfordshire, turning it on against Atletico Madrid in central midfield before winning the Premier League title.
“Myles threw the shot 11 metres 75cm (aged 11),” adds Cornock, who is the director of sport at Aldenham and a former professional with Watford. “At sports day last year, the kids were pleased with themselves throwing 8-9 metres. So there was some serious strength there.”
There are plenty of stories that Cornock can tell about Lewis-Skelly’s athletic prowess, including the time when he walked into the gymnasium on a sport scholarship assessment day and his jaw dropped at the sight of a primary school pupil 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 says, laughing.
Cornock is not just a voice from Lewis-Skelly’s past. Part of a select group of people invited to the Emirates Stadium last summer to celebrate Lewis-Skelly signing a five-year contract with the club he grew up supporting, Cornock takes much more than a passing interest in the teenager’s football career.
“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.”
Grant Cornock with Lewis-Skelly last summer at his contract signing (Credit: Grant Cornock)
The point that Cornock is making is that it’s easy to forget that Lewis-Skelly is still only 19 years old.
A whirlwind breakthrough season, including a goalscoring debut for England in March last year and a performance of remarkable maturity against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in the Champions League quarter-final the following month, propelled him into the spotlight.
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 had been playing out of position at left-back.
The season that followed has been far more challenging — as it often is for young players. Despite featuring regularly in cup competitions, Lewis-Skelly started only one Premier League game up until April and lost his place in the England squad as a result. The fallout on social media and beyond was predictable.
“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,” Cornock adds.
“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?
“And that’s why I was really pleased to hear what Declan Rice said. For him to say that the manager has been tough on Myles — not many people say something like that. 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.”
Fulham at home earlier this month feels like a watershed moment for him. It wasn’t so much that Lewis-Skelly was named in the team; it was more that he was starting a match for the first time in centre midfield — the position where he excelled as a youth player for club and country. Arsenal beat Fulham 3-0 and Lewis-Skelly was superb.
If that was a bold call on Mikel Arteta’s part, an even bigger decision followed three days later. Against Atletico Madrid at home, and with a place in the Champions League final at stake, Arteta picked Lewis-Skelly in midfield ahead of Martin Zubimendi for a second time. It was a huge show of faith from the manager.
Arteta with Lewis-Skelly after the controversial win at West Ham (John Walton/PA Images via Getty Images)
Steve Morrow, who played for Arsenal from 1992 to 1997, got to know Lewis-Skelly and his family well during his time as head of academy recruitment at the club.
“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 says. “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 games against Fulham and Atletico Madrid have turned around Lewis-Skelly’s season, and maybe even his Arsenal career. 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.
More than anything, though, he looks like the player that people on the inside at Arsenal always thought he would be.
“Lewis-Skelly is a cheat code.”
It was September 2022 when Arsenal’s Academy posted that line on social media under a 36-second clip from an under-18 game against Norwich City. The footage shows a 15-year-old boy receiving a pass deep inside his own half, leaving a trail of opponents in his wake as he drives with the ball…
“… right through the middle of the pitch,” Morrow interjects.
Lewis-Skelly is a cheat code 😅#AFCU18 pic.twitter.com/2r5G6BebRr
— Arsenal Academy (@ArsenalAcademy) September 21, 2022
Although Morrow had already left Arsenal to take a job with the English Football Association when that Norwich game took place almost four years ago, the passage of play that we are talking about is one that he has seen a hundred times before with Lewis-Skelly.
“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, and that was just such a noticeable part of his game at a young age,” he says.
Morrow smiles when reminded of a conversation that he had years ago at an international youth tournament in Portugal with a senior figure who was working for a rival Premier League club and who has never forgotten the conviction in the Northern Irishman’s voice when he said that 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 adds.
He also knew, drawing on his past experience with young players, that there would be a bump in the road somewhere along the way.
“It’s not really a surprise,” Morrow says, reflecting on what’s 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.
“I think what’s normal is to be in and out of the team as a young player, and that has happened this year. You also have to remember that there has been tremendous competition in the left-back spot at Arsenal this season — (Piero) Hincapie has moved there after playing more as a left-sided centre back, and there’s (Riccardo) Calafiori too.”
Last summer was challenging for Lewis-Skelly. 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 ended up complicating things at left-back.
There were still moments of promise — the superb assist for Gabriel Martinelli in a 4-0 win over Atletico Madrid in the Champions League in October — but also times when Lewis-Skelly looked exposed at left-back.
Lewis-Skelly set up Martinelli against Atletico in October (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Arteta’s own assessment was interesting when he spoke 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,” the Arsenal manager 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.”
How much Lewis-Skelly did that as opposed to looking at himself — a difficult balancing act for any player when they lose their place and search for the reasons why — would be fascinating to know. It’s quite possible that the answer is written down in black and white somewhere, given that journaling is one of the psychological skills that Lewis-Skelly’s mum has instilled in him from a young age.
Interestingly, Arteta said that it took three or four conversations with Lewis-Skelly before the penny dropped and he took on board the manager’s 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 probably fits the popular perception of Lewis-Skelly as someone who is not short of self-belief — an opinion formed in part by the way in which he celebrated scoring 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.
Lewis-Skelly after scoring against City in February 2025 (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Yet that’s not how Lewis-Skelly comes across when you speak to people who have been on the journey with him. It’s fascinating, for example, to hear Ryan Garry, who worked with Lewis-Skelly at Arsenal’s academy and was also his coach with England at youth level, talk about how he “found Myles to be very serious about his game” and 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 says.
“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.”
The comparison that Lee Dixon makes is striking.
“It’s alright being strong, but there’s a million strong kids out there,” says the former Arsenal and England full-back. “It’s not about that.”
“I’ve watched Myles a lot — he’s very Gazza-like in the way that he uses his weight and his strength. He almost allows players to catch up with him. He’ll go past them and then he slows down a little bit. Gazza used to do that so that when they come in and make contact again, he bounces them off him.
“Myles will win free kicks by doing that and he will also get himself in positions higher up the pitch, so it’s a brilliant skill to have.”
Paul Gascoigne, or Gazza, was one of the most gifted footballers of his generation and played a starring role for England at the 1990 World Cup. As well as being a brilliant technical player, Gascoigne was exceptionally difficult to knock off the ball.
With Lewis-Skelly, that strength and power have been there from day one. Or, at least since, he picked up the shot put at Aldenham School and they went in search of a longer tape measure.
Lewis-Skelly playing for Arsenal U12s in 2018 (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Occasionally, he will get caught on the ball because of the way in which he uses his body to almost encourage contact when receiving. But more often than not, that kind of move leads to Lewis-Skelly rolling away from his marker, escaping pressure and driving forward.
Morrow nods. “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.”
Cornock feels similarly about Lewis-Skelly’s passing, in particular the way in which he can take opponents out of the game by rapping the ball into team-mates with a mixture of speed and disguise.
“I don’t think people will even recognise it yet — his passing ability is genuinely world-class because he breaks lines,” Cornock says. “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!’
“But that ability to break a line when the other team’s sat in a mid-block or a low block is a massive difference-maker. And the more he plays there, the more confidence he’ll get, and the more risks he will take in the right areas.”
It makes you wonder what might have happened had Arteta given Lewis-Skelly an opportunity to play in midfield before — something that was planned in an FA Cup tie against Wigan Athletic in February, only for Calafiori to pick up an injury in the warm-up.
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.
“I can’t say I was surprised because I think I knew he could do it,” Dixon adds. “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.”
It was too late for Lewis-Skelly to force his way back into the England squad for the World Cup — Dixon thinks another five games in midfield would have strengthened his case — but there’s every chance that he’s timed his run perfectly for the Champions League final.
“It’s a big call,” Dixon says. “But I’d probably play Myles. I think he’s already shown enough not to be fazed by that.”
