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)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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