On and off the field a team will help ensure the teen is provided with everything he needs to fulfil his potential in terms of playing and earning, but also as a person. Arsène Wenger and Arsenal’s impressive range of coaches, specialists, financial people and those who help players in a pastoral sense will form the frontline. In midfield will be Walcott’s management company and sponsors, and underpinning it all at the back his father, Don, and the rest of his loving family.
Wenger’s first question to Walcott after he agreed to become the most expensive 16-year-old in the world was: “Are you tired?” and when the answer was affirmative, Wenger issued his first diktat: “Take your dad on holiday and don’t come back here for 10 days.” As Theo and Don head off with their golf bags and the sunscreen, they must be reflecting on how they had found the right football club. Chelsea asked: “What would it take?” for them to change their mind but Walcott, advised by his father and the rest of the family, made a decision about his playing future that was not based on money. He believes Arsenal, and Wenger in particular, create the ideal combination for a young player: opportunities to light up the scene at first-team level and yet protection against being burnt out.
When Wenger made his pitch to Walcott via Key Sports, the player’s agent, he came armed with a persuasive set of data. It showed how he handled Cesc Fabregas, the young Catalan, who made his Arsenal debut aged 16 years and five months but is still being sheltered from overexposure more than 70 games later. Walcott wants to play and his camp were encouraged to note that Fabregas was given 46 first-team run-outs last season, in which he turned 18 only during its final month. But they were also pleased to hear Wenger talk of the “golden rule” he applied: Fabregas, for most of the campaign, was allowed only one full game in every seven-day period. At Southampton this season Walcott had already played Saturday/midweek/Saturday three times and, over Christmas, three times in a six-day stretch.
“Four weeks ago the boy was dead on his feet,” said a family friend. Wenger, with a range of scientific methods that include blood monitoring, continues to keep an eye on Fabregas’s condition. Even though the midfielder is now a pivotal part of the Arsenal first XI and appears to a casual observer to be an ever-present, through his manager’s sleight of hand he has somehow played only 997 minutes of league football this season — fewer than Walcott, who also had to put in his hard yards for Southampton in the sometimes brutal Championship.
“Theo will get in the first team at Arsenal straight away, because of his quality, the pace he’s got and the positions he gets into. At the money we’re talking they’re not going to put him in the reserves for a couple of years,” said Steve Wigley, Walcott’s former youth coach and mentor at St Mary’s and now assistant to Stuart Pearce at Manchester City. “But he’s gone to a good club and they won’t be playing him every week.
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Last May, in the week of his 18th birthday, I spoke to Fabregas about how Arsenal were developing him. He said he never feared burnout. “The manager is looking after me. When he takes me out I know it is for my benefit. I believe in him because without him I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t play too many games, but I always want to play.”
It is the examples of Fabregas, Robin van Persie and Philippe Senderos that Walcott held in mind when he chose Arsenal — and not a teenage record transfer of a previous generation, Jermaine Pennant, who signed for Arsenal aged 15 and ended up in prison by the time he was 22. Wenger admits that since Pennant he has learnt a lot about nurturing youth in England and it is notable that his failures with young signings (the others being Francis Jeffers, Richard Wright and Matthew Upson) were footballers captured five seasons ago or more. That all are English is surely coincidence; nationality never held back Ashley Cole.
The very fact Wenger first saw Walcott at the age of 14, when he was watching Arsenal’s kids play Southampton, demonstrates his commitment to youth, and for a boy who models himself on Thierry Henry it is thrilling that Wenger makes all Arsenal’s teams play with the same style and system. From the moment Walcott starts turning out for his new club, whether in a reserve match, FA Youth Cup game (he is eligible to play in the competition until 2008) or at a higher level, it will be in the “Henry role”.
Having prospered in Southampton’s academy, which even without producing Walcott is generating enough talent to be considered among the best in the country, he did not experience the same level of coaching when he came into Southampton’s first-team set-up under Harry Redknapp. Redknapp would not claim to be a training-ground guru and with Southampton struggling to reach the playoffs there were more pressing concerns for him and his successor, George Burley, than giving close individual attention to one young player. Walcott was finding training to sometimes consist of just running and a quick five-a-side. It will be more sophisticated at Arsenal.
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He already has eye-popping pace, a cool head and a sure touch. Wenger will seek to develop his heading, game awareness and consistency when it comes to finishing. Look at how much Fabregas has developed physically: there will be a careful weights programme designed for Walcott who, though he will never be Henry’s size (he is 5ft 9in, his father is 5ft 8in and his older brother 5ft 10in), is, says Wigley, already deceptively powerful, particularly in the legs.
His home life will be stable. From August, Walcott had been living in accommodation with seven other Southampton scholars but now he will move back in with mum and dad. Lynn, his mother, has a midwifery business that precludes the family moving too far from their base of Compton, a village outside Newbury, but Arsenal’s training ground at London Colney is only 70 miles away and a midpoint may be found.
If not, Arsenal will provide a house, initially for Walcott to live in with his father, Don, before moving him either into digs with another player (until October, Fabregas lived with Senderos under a landlady’s roof) or even, according to the club vice-chairman, David Dein, ask one of the senior pros to take him in.
He will continue to be looked after by Key Sports, which limits its client list so that it can give each player individual attention, and is owned and run by ex-professional footballers. Walcott is to sign a new contract with Nike, which will exceed what Wayne Rooney earned from boot deals at a similar age, but apart from that, commercial activity will be limited initially. “Boots are the tools of Theo’s trade, but everything else will have to wait,” said Warwick Horton of Key Sports. “If he is developing into the footballer everyone thinks he can be, the rest will take care of itself.”