Culture
Watching Max Dowman live: Arsenal’s ‘unbelievable’ 15-year-old who seems destined for first team
“No 7! No 7! Can we have your shirt please?”
Those high-pitched cries felt like the soundtrack to the evening at a stadium on the outskirts of London on Saturday as a group of young children constantly pleaded with Arsenal’s right winger to hand over his jersey.
The venue was Meadow Park, home of non-League Boreham Wood, and the player in question was Max Dowman.
Playing three years above his age, Dowman was making his FA Youth Cup debut against Queens Park Rangers – a goalscoring debut, too. In September, he made his UEFA Youth League debut against Atalanta and, at the age of 14 years, eight months and 19 days, became the youngest player ever to score in the competition. In between, Dowman made his first appearance for Arsenal’s under-21s – a boy against men.
Perhaps there would have been a Premier League debut as well this season but for the rules and regulations getting in the way. You need to be at least an under-16 (15 years of age by August 31, 2024 for the current season) to appear in the English top flight, which isn’t the case everywhere else. In theory, Dowman could play in La Liga now.
“At the moment, with all the legislation, there are restrictions for your age — something that in other countries you don’t even mention,” Arsenal’s manager Mikel Arteta said this week when asked about the possibility of Dowman getting some first-team minutes. “We’ll have to wait and see. But he’s taking very fast steps because every time you put him at a different level he overcomes that hurdle pretty quickly.”
Dowman takes instructions from Arteta in first-team training at Arsenal (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Get ready to feel old. Dowman was born in 2009 — just. He celebrated his 15th birthday on New Year’s Eve, which means — and this part of his story is easy to overlook when you focus on his football journey — that he is currently in Year 10 at school and won’t be sitting his GCSE exams until the summer after next. It will be another two years before Dowman can drive a car in England and three years before he can buy a beer.
In other words, he is a gifted young footballer who plays with a maturity beyond his years but, ultimately, is still a teenage kid — and that adds an extra layer of responsibility to how you write about him.
Those bursts of speed with the ball glued to his boot, his lovely knack of dropping his shoulder and gliding in off the right flank to shoot (or score, in the case of Saturday), the eye-of-the needle passes that he saw and you didn’t, and the way that he receives so naturally with the outside of his left foot before spinning away from opponents… it would be easy to make comparisons with players X, Y and Z. But it would also be silly to do that.
Dowman playing for England U17 against Belgium U17 in November (Neil Baynes – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
What we can say without getting carried away is that Dowman has huge potential and that seeing him running with the ball on Saturday, leaving a trail of QPR players in his wake at times, took your breath away — even if you were supporting Arsenal’s opponents.
“Oh, Jesus,” said the voice in the row in front as Dowman set off on another of his trademark surges in the second half.
Remarkably, Dowman trained alongside him as a 14-year-old at Arsenal — Gabriel Jesus, that is. Indeed, at an age when his peers are kicking a ball about in the playground before double maths, Dowman has been wowing Arsenal’s first-team squad with his ability.
“Some of the things that he does in training are unbelievable,” Arteta said on Tuesday, after Dowman took part in Arsenal’s session prior to their Champions League game against Dinamo Zagreb. “He’s a player with a huge talent.”
Reporting twice a week to London Colney (the home of Arsenal’s under-18s, under-21s and first team) as part of a bespoke development programme that includes one-to-one sessions, Dowman has been around Arteta’s squad for a while now.
Dowman turns away from Jorginho in Arsenal training (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
At some point in the near future — and it’s surely just a question of when — the accelerated pathway that Dowman is on will culminate in a senior debut at Arsenal and see him join up permanently with Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly, who are still young enough to play in the FA Youth Cup this season but have both flown the under-18 nest to become regular members of the first-team squad.
That isn’t hyperbole in relation to Dowman. It’s just a logical progression for someone who featured for Arsenal under-18s when he was 13 and became the club’s youngest-ever under-21 player at the age of 14. In fact, pretty much from the moment he walked through the door at Arsenal at the age of four, Dowman has been playing in advance of his years. Even at international level, Dowman plays two years above his age for England Under-17s.
Rice and Dowman in Arsenal training on January 21 (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Without seeing Dowman play, the natural assumption would be that he is a powerful early developer, as is often the case with teenagers who are fast-tracked through the academy age groups. Dowman is that to a point — he’s a superb athlete, for sure — but he doesn’t thrive just because of his physicality. His acceleration is a big asset but his exceptional technical ability, and the intelligence with which he plays and sees the game, really stand out.
“Please go online and check out this kid,” Rio Ferdinand said on his YouTube channel in November. “He was 14, I saw him coaching 18 and 19-year-olds on the pitch when he was playing with them. Bad player (which in this context actually means good player).”
Those internet showreels of Dowman are jaw-dropping at times, especially given the age disparity, and give you an insight into what all the fuss is about. He’s capable of playing in multiple positions (many in the game think Dowman will end up more centrally, as a No 8 or a No 10), has a lovely range of passing, dribbles beautifully and scores freely.
Dowman in action in the Youth Champions League against Sporting CP (David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
At the same time, there’s nothing quite like seeing a player perform live. You get to take in the bigger picture that the video highlights don’t show, including how a player interacts with his team-mates and his coach, the positions they take up on the pitch when they don’t have the ball at their feet, and how they deal with moments of adversity.
Early in the second half on Saturday, after Dowman skipped away from an opponent on the touchline, another QPR player came across to make a robust challenge from the side. It was a fair tackle — he took the ball — but it was full-blooded too and he cleaned Dowman out in the process.
One of the other QPR players revelled in the moment — something that’s going to happen. It’s football. Teenage testosterone and all that. Plus, Dowman’s reputation as a rising star precedes him at academy level in particular and that will stir all sorts of emotions in others.
Shirt and shorts covered in mud, Dowman got up, brushed himself down (literally) and didn’t have any issue with the challenge. He seemed less impressed with the reaction elsewhere but dealt with it coolly, calmly waving his finger from a distance a few moments later and saying nothing. Others — and that includes players twice his age — might have been rattled and lost their focus.
That wasn’t the case with Dowman, whose talking was done with his boots. He never stopped showing for the ball across 136 minutes of football (it was a long night with extra time) and, not surprisingly, his Arsenal team-mates kept giving it to him.
With a little over 20 minutes of normal time remaining and Arsenal trailing 2-1, Dowman pounced on a defensive mistake, dummied to shoot, shifted inside to open up the angle on his left foot and drilled home the equaliser. The outcome felt inevitable from the moment he picked up the ball.
An important equaliser from Dowman 🪄#AFCU18 | #FAYouthCup pic.twitter.com/TlEtsTnchu
— Arsenal Academy (@ArsenalAcademy) January 18, 2025
He also delivered an intelligent pass to release Dan Casey in the inside right channel to cross for Arsenal’s third goal on a night when 18-year-old Emmerson Sutton scored an impressive hat-trick for QPR.
Probably the overriding impression after watching Dowman is how totally at ease he is with a ball at his feet. He never looked remotely flustered in possession, even when taking the ball under pressure deep inside his own half, and those levels of confidence and self-belief manifested themselves in other ways too.
When the Arsenal players gathered in a huddle at the end of extra time and their coach Adam Birchall asked who wanted to take a penalty, Dowman’s hand went straight up in the air. Arsenal missed their first spot kick but Dowman scored their second and, following some heroics from their goalkeeper Jack Porter, they triumphed to set up a fifth-round tie against Fulham.
Dowman celebrates with goalkeeper Porter after Arsenal went through on penalties (Alex Burstow/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
After celebrating with his team-mates at the final whistle, Dowman climbed over the seats in the stand to embrace his family and friends. He was still wearing full kit, including the No 7 shirt that most people in the stadium — not just the children who wanted to take home a souvenir — had their eyes on all night.
(Alex Burstow/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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