I don't care much about who he handed their first start to, but we definitely should have played a lot of young players a bit more last season. Some played and performed well in the spare games such as the first few cup rounds but never got much of a chance outside of it. Some didn't really play at all, or weren't even registered. Many of the key decisions in retrospect came down to prioritising experience over youth, and we didn't end up with anything to show for it which automatically makes them bad decisions.
We did give plenty of time to Saka and Smith-Rowe and there's credit due for that, but the sum of our youth commitment isn't two players. The whole point is to develop a squad and then spend the money in focused areas to elevate it. Instead we've kept spending big in wages, transfer fees and - perhaps most costly - playing time on rather old players without peaks, who have little upside since they won't dramatically improve and won't learn from their mistakes either.
I accept it's completely possible we would have been at the same stage right now if we had put more faith into youth, but at least we would have paid with point on the field for something. Now we have a bunch of young players that are behind the curve instead of on it, or at least within the context of turning them into performing Arsenal players. We create these issues for ourselves by being conservative, in attitude and effort, when it comes to encouraging talent.
I think it's the wrong way to go about it personally, and I have to say it puzzles me to on one hand see people who advocate for giving Arteta more time because we should take a longterm approach towards teambuilding, only to on the other hand see them support his short-termist moves and attitudes that seem to come at the expense of what's going to be rather important homegrown players moving forward.
