Jordan Lawrence-Gabriel has come out to say that he didn’t want to be at the Arsenal academy because of the atmosphere.
Recall that Lawrence-Gabriel started his career in Arsenal‘s academy set-up as a 14-year-old in 2013, and played alongside the likes of Joe Willock, Tolaji Bola, Marcus McGuane, Charlie Gilmour, Josh Dasilva and Nathan Tella before being released the following year.
According to him, he didn’t feel like he was around staff members at the club that were willing to guide and push him through throughout his stay at the academy.
Lawrence added that he didn’t even want to go to training at some point because he’d constantly get picked on.
His words, “We were all Arsenal fans in my family. My dream had always been to play for Arsenal and to play at the Emirates, which I eventually did in the U14s.”
“The ability our team had was frightening. When you went away for tournaments you went with your year group. I remember in 2006-2007 we went to Dirinon and won the tournament in France.”
“But talent only gets you so far. If you have staff who want to push players through, that helps. Not everyone had that. Coaches can have their favourites they are going to push, whether they have a bad attitude or not.”
“So it is not always a nice atmosphere to be in. A lot of the time I didn’t want to be there at Arsenal because of the atmosphere. Sometimes I didn’t really want to go to training because you’d get picked on.”
“The staff wouldn’t really do anything about it. There was more chance of people being rewarded than punished. Coming through at a young age, you get a lot of knocks. Some people don’t get up from that and they don’t want to go through that.”
“They put it aside and drop out of football because they lose belief.”
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