Say it
I can't be a pessimist because I am alive
When I was sixteen, I was sitting on my bed with my back against the wall. On my lap was a screen, and on that screen was Alex Song, clipping his right foot into a pass that broke the Leeds United line; and receiving that pass was a bearded icon, a bronze statue in musical motion, a little echo that had moved through time to be right there and open his body and sweep a shot along a well-remembered line. What were you doing at sixteen?
When Thierry Henry scored that comeback goal, I shouted and screamed and cried alone in my bedroom. I didn’t have much of an outlet then; my family were not Arsenal fans, and if I wasn’t in the stadium I didn’t know what to do with myself when the club made me feel the things only the club could. But at sixteen emotion explodes in a supernova and everything feels new and the urge to put it somewhere, anywhere, is overwhelming and immediate. So I took a permanent sharpie and found the spot on the wall I’d been sitting against and I wrote the words: Arsenal 1-0 Leeds United. Thierry Henry 78’.
Those words are gone now. I moved out of that room for university and my parents repainted. They were quite upset I’d defaced the wall. What a strange thing to do. Property damage over a football game? For what? Because some old French man scored? They didn’t get it, but you do. I’m sure you understand what it’s like to be sixteen and to see something so magical on a football pitch you’ll do anything, anything to remember it, any small and silly gesture to defer its fading. You remember where you were, Arshaviiiiiin…you remember where you were, Reiss Nelson 90+7. Many of you will remember Michael Thomas, it’s up for grabs now, Tony Adams, can you believe it!? I wasn’t so lucky. We were all lucky, we were all here, on Saturday night. We all heard the voice break as it tumbled out the name, all saw the little right-right shimmy, all felt every stride meet the floor: Max Dowman, 90+7. Someone find a sharpie.
If you like Redstory, please consider subscribing. Every penny helps me pay for bills and groceries and stuff as I try to eke out a living as a writer. I am immensely grateful to those who have sponsored me already. If you’d rather give money to charity, I’m also fundraising for my first half marathon here.
I’m exhausted. My spirit animal, currently, is Martin Zubimendi, that little ball of energy blasting around the pitch on empty, pulling all the power he possibly can from fumes. He’s still going, because he really wants this, and he feels responsible to the people around him who also really want this, but the battery is running lower by the week. And there comes a point when resting in the face of adversity is better than facing it with gusto, when rising to the occasion is the most dangerous thing you can do - I think I’m getting there, and I think Arsenal are creeping across that red line, too.
At every glance something more seeps out. Did you see that video of an explosion in Tehran? What about the one in Tel Aviv? They were both generated by feelingless computers, but that doesn’t matter much. Players are grappling in the box and corners are fucking boring, the game is ruined, a hypersonic missile booms above a freight tanker. Towels by the sidelines are the twelfth man and a drone just hit another primary school. Our supreme leader has exited his technical area and entered his resort in Palm Beach. Polymarket stocks for ‘will Arsenal win a trophy this season’ are at 96¢ but betting on ‘will there be a nuclear detonation in 2026’ has been delisted. The world is a casino with a gas leak and set pieces are to blame. Murillo, off the line.
When I last wrote about Arsenal I was convinced it was over. I saw the slip against Wolves as proof this team did not have the stones, that the ghost of failures past was enduring, that the team’s quality was still second to its fear of success. Wins against Spurs, Chelsea, Brighton did not entirely disabuse me of that belief. Perhaps I’m too conditioned to disaster, perhaps the backdrop of noise is just too loud, perhaps I’m just tired. Before Everton, I saw an avalanche of headlines - from Arsenal fans - to the effect of ‘this was the night we won the title’, big fuck-off blaring posts that made my migraine worse and the puddle of sweat I sat in more damp. How did you get there? How did you find the joy in all this? All Arsenal had proven to me was that this run-in is going to be a hellish slog until it’s not. I was extremely jealous; by all means relax, if you can. God knows the rest of us need an example.
I was objectively wrong on one point: I said quality didn’t matter. I thought that Arsenal’s fear of winning made the technical and tactical elements immaterial, that you can’t manoeuvre terror with clever triangles. Thankfully, I was incorrect. We tore Spurs apart because they were abysmal, and the spaces between their centre-backs large enough for Viktor Gyokeres and Eberechi Eze to do whatever the hell they liked. Chelsea had lost four (now five) games in 2026 and three of them have been to Arsenal. Against Brighton, meanwhile, Arsenal were abject until they brought on the ball-magnetic players that have defined their style for so long. There was a marked difference between the performance before and after Riccardo Calafiori and Kai Havertz entered the fray. This period convinced me the technical fundamentals of this side have not yet been overcome by fear, that they still have an enormous part to play in our destiny.
And then Saturday. Finally, after so long, the ball players were back from the start. Kai Havertz dropped from the final line into little pockets that changed the picture for his partner, and Eberechi Eze looked fantastic in the comfort of his big shadow. Riccardo Calafiori was allowed the freedom to affect the game as only he can. Noni Madueke looked odd as he always does on his off-side, but he still found moments to drive inside with a sticky purpose. In recent months the players Arsenal have had available have formed a kind of clumsy battering ram, physical and fast but awkward but here, finally, the scalpel returned. Unfortunately, Everton are genuinely brilliant, David Moyes is an unfashionable but deeply sexy genius, and even these shades of the old Arsenal were not enough. Until. Until.
My day job, as some of you may know, is editing a magazine called SCOUTED. For twelve years I’ve helped some of the smartest and most incisive scouts and analysts in the editorial space transform their nerdy ideas into story. My football knowledge is weirdly esoteric as a result: I can’t tell you Real Madrid’s best XI but I can describe, in detail, the passing and carrying profile of a young dutch midfielder called Kees Smit. For two years now, much of this weird field of knowledge has been occupied by a young, floppy-haired boy with braces. Finally, on Saturday night, Max Dowman became a household name.
Football analysis types (at least the good ones) are generally quite serious about their work. They reject hyperbole and dramatisation, which I often find is to their detriment: many find it difficult to hold both the science of their work in the same hand as an acceptance they are working in an entertainment medium. Football (and therefor analysis of it) means nothing without the soft arts, without the narrative it generates, and analysis struggles to contend with the fact football is not really a competitive sport at all but a stage for great stories, a kind of modern gladiatorial combat. Billy Carpenter recently used a Raymond Chandler quote to illustrate this perfectly (seems it’s on everyone’s mind) so I’ll defer to the great man, too: “The coolheaded constructionist does not also come across with lively characters, sharp dialogue, a sense of pace, and an acute use of observed detail. The grim logician has as much atmosphere as a drawing board.” I raise this for two reasons: first, the tension between these two states has kept my work at SCOUTED fundamentally interesting for more than a decade, and is a huge part of the reason I persist. And second, because it’s meant I - and all who have watched him - have been guarded in the language we use to describe Max Dowman.
Some of that caution is warranted. Young men change dramatically in the period Dowman is living through and for athletes, such change can be disastrous. He could enter his twenties in a fundamentally different shape or size to his teenage years. The fame or pressure could go to his head. A chronic injury or illness could strike. There’s so much that could go wrong; no path is set. But my colleagues and I have been doing this for a long, long time. We’ve seen thousands of players enter the professional sport. And every so often the instinct to dampen hyperbole in favour of cold, sensible analysis simply breaks, and a flood of colourful words pour forth. During my career I’ve seen it happen a few times, and I know the patterns by now. Kylian M’bappé. Erling Haaland. Lamine Yamal. Max Dowman.
Do you feel it? Of course you do. I’m not sure exactly how to describe it, but it’s there. Terror? Anything could go wrong. Perhaps it’s the fear of being ridiculed? Twitter might make fun of you for being so brazen. You’ve just staked your reputation as a Very Serious Analyst on something that has a million ways of being proven wrong, and you’ve done it on the Internet, the Only Real Place left. It’s here forever, now! Or perhaps you just can’t allow yourself to believe something like this has emerged from Hale End and is Arsenal through-and-through. We’re favourites in four competitions and now this? It’s too good. We don’t deserve this. It must be a trick.
No scout or analyst can predict the future. What they can do is reflect what they see, right now, and use the patterns of the past to lay a likely path. And I can tell you, with certainty, I have very, very rarely seen as much excitement among the Very Serious types as I have for Max Dowman. And so I give you (and myself) permission to use whatever language you like to describe this moment, and let the scoffers me damned. This is the most exciting young player to emerge anywhere, globally, since Yamal. This is a generational talent. Don’t worry about saying it, as if it might jinx or poison him - he knows. He’s been told a thousands times, over and over, for years. If the stars align we are looking at the next great English superstar, a player with the potential to leave as much an imprint on the professional game as Wayne Rooney or Steven Gerrard or anyone you want to name, or perhaps eclipse them all. Fuck it! It is possible. Talent is the only thing we can comment on; what shape it takes is up to him and the fates. But on talent alone there is no language too hyperbolic as there are simply no examples of players more talented. If his one peer is anything to go by, Max Dowman could be on the Ballon d’Or podium in less than two years. So say whatever you like, it’s all defensible.
And you should. Now is the time for such nonsense. No more hedging bets or self-censorship. The world is a casino with a gas leak. The sensible have failed, miserably. Everyone is dancing on the tables with a pint in each hand. Reality is coded, it’s all ones and zeros, and it’s our obligation to find joy in the spaces between. We pull at the fabric when we do, we tear it just a little. So fucking Say It. Say we’re winning it all, the Premier League and the Champions League and the Mickey Mouse Thing and all the others, say that we’ve found the next Messi and he listens to Future, say this is a new Golden Era and corners helped us get there. Nothing really matters except the way we feel. Whenever I feel a little broken about it all, I come back to James Baldwin: “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive.”
Of course if we lose again I’ll welcome nihilism immediately. That’s the wonderful thing about football. It doesn’t make sense and talking about it doesn’t have to, either, because we are just people, silly people following a silly sport and yapping our silly words, and Max Dowman is the best fucking football player in the world.
I’m running my first half marathon in less than a month (!). Donations are immensely appreciated.
Fantastic read once again. It's crazy how I don't let myself get carried away for fear of jinxing things, whilst at the same time having zero belief in the idea of jinxing things.
After the Everton game I was trying to think of when I have celebrated a goal like Downman's before and, as a man of similar age to you, Henry's return is what came to mind. Not trophy winning goals but pure catharsis. Great article as always.