From turning down a scholar contract at Tottenham Hotspur to a registration mishap collapsing a move to Manchester United, Reuell Walters has had to endure a few false starts.
Add in unexpected success on the video game Fortnite and then landing at Arsenal after 18 months out of academy football and the teenager’s journey to the first-team bench and FA Youth Cup final is quite something.
This is his story…
At the family home in Streatham, south west London, Walters’ dad Raphael read a book about Brazilian soccer schools.
The Walters found one in Croydon which soon shut down, and were recommended Peckham Town when Reuell was seven.
He was taught by his parents — Raphael and Aisha, a former British gymnastics champion who works in coaching education for British Gymnastics, the national governing body — at home rather than going to school.
A coach called Jamie Waller, who had recently left Crystal Palace to set up an independent training academy called Unique FA, suggested day-time sessions, as well as more technical classes three times a week alongside children at academies.
After two seasons, Waller quizzed Walters tactically in front of his parents and felt there was room for the youngster to kick on.
“He was absorbing everything like a sponge, he was so studious for someone so young,” says Waller says, who was also working as a technical match observer for the Premier League, and recommended Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur.
Both clubs watched Walters, who played in midfield at the time.
“Reu scored a hat-trick in the game because I promised him a new pair of boots,” says his father, Raphael.
“They were the new (Nike) Tiempos,” mother Aisha adds. “They were expensive boots so I couldn’t believe when he did it.”
“That night, Tottenham called and asked ‘Can you come in tomorrow?’,” Raphael continues. “When we were in the lobby, Chelsea called.
“We never wanted to play games. If we say something, we mean it. At that point, we had already committed to being at Tottenham.”
Walters was signed at Spurs within three weeks in March 2015. The family moved to Potters Bar, north London, and by November he was flying with the under-11s. He began playing in older age groups and was praised by coaching staff. But something felt off.
One night, around 11 o’clock, he asked his dad to go for a walk.
“It was pitch black and I knew this was him wanting to talk,” says Raphael. “He says ‘Dad, I just feel really lost. At football, I don’t know where I am.’”
“It felt like he was retreating very much into a shell,” Aisha adds. “The expressiveness, the explosiveness, the attacking side of his game — all the things where you would watch him and go ‘He’s come alive’ — were very slowly dimming and dulling which was really worrying.”
The Walters gave it time but it became apparent to Raphael that Tottenham was just not the right fit, so he presented a document to Spurs. Aisha puts this down to his more analytical German perspective (Raphael’s mother is German which makes Reuell eligible to play for Germany as well as England, with a dual passport).
“We had a great meeting,” Raphael says. “We went through all of the points. They were like ‘Look, we see Reu going all the way here. Getting the next two years, getting a scholar, getting his pro, we actually see him as a first-team player’.
“Most parents will be like ‘YES!’. Us? Couldn’t care less. And here’s why: We never wanted anything to do with football. We never dreamt of being footballers.”
On Saturday, March 2 2019, Raphael informed Spurs it would be his son’s final season at the club, whether or not he was offered a scholar contract.
Walters played what would be his last game for the club’s under-14s on Sunday and then had a meeting with the club on Monday.
It was made clear Walters was not allowed to leave without Spurs receiving training compensation and that they wouldn’t authorise his departure before his existing contract expired (June 30 2019), while still offering new schoolboy terms.
For Walters, training compensation (which a club would have to pay to Spurs) started at £4,000 a year at under-11s. From under-12s it jumped to £40,000 a year which meant he had a fee of around £125,000 to be paid at 14 years old.
The inability to talk to other clubs while under contract, which would be deemed as tapping up, added another layer of uncertainty.
“We said ‘Look Reu, here’s the reality,” Raphael adds. “If we go through with this decision, you are looking at the possibility of not being able to play football again.
“I said to him ‘If you plant a mango seed in Potters Bar, it doesn’t do too well. Plant it in Hawaii and it flourishes’. To be fair, there was nothing wrong with Spurs as a club, nothing wrong with Reu, you’ve just got to get the right player at the right time in their journey.”
“What did I always say when we moved up to Potters Bar?” Aisha interjects.
“She was convinced that Reu was going to be at Arsenal by the time he was 16,” Raphael answers.
“We had no connection to the club — other than Reuell supporting them as a child — and there was nothing to suggest it. I just kept saying, ‘I’ve got a funny feeling that he’ll be at Arsenal by the time he’s 16’,” she says.
On July 1 2019, the phone started ringing. Fulham, Manchester United, Manchester City and West Ham United were calling.
Manchester United wanted to sign Walters outright but still offered a six-to-eight-week trial contract. Manchester City wanted to sign him as a defensive midfielder but got in contact after United.
Walters arrived in Manchester and was immediately put into a match. Two days later, he was travelling with the under-15s to Northern Ireland to play in the Milk Cup — a Manchester United tradition spanning three decades. It was the start of a transformative spell up north.
“In one of the matches, Raphael was quite teary, took a picture, sent it to his mum and said ‘Reu’s smiling on the pitch’,” Aisha recalls. “For us, that was just like ‘He’s back.“
“It was like a time-lapse photo when you see a rosebud start to blossom,” adds Raphael.
“The moment that sealed the deal was his first game (watching) at Old Trafford. It was Frank Lampard’s first game in charge of Chelsea, we’re sitting in the Stretford End and halfway through the game, Reu leans over to me and says ‘Dad, I think I can do this’, pointing at the pitch.
“That night we said ‘We’re done. Man United. That’s it’. I called City and said ‘We’re really sorry, but we’re not going to be coming’.”
Manchester United were willing to sign Walters as part of their MANNUS programme for players the club believed would have a stronger chance of making the first team. Their training schedule was slightly different, while they attended Dean Trust schools (a group of 12 schools and academies across Manchester, Trafford, Wigan and Knowsley). Marcus Rashford, Jesse Lingard and Scott McTominay are just a few of the alumni.
Walters was still being homeschooled as his GCSEs (academic qualifications taken at age 16 in England) approached.
“Nicky Butt (Former Manchester United player who held various coaching roles at the club’s academy until 2021) sat down with us,” Aisha says. “We spoke about his twin sister Amirah and what schools would suit her if we relocated and it was a real pastoral sense.”
Walters’ trial contract expired during the relocation process. He could not trial again or train at United without insurance or train elsewhere because the club were signing him. By November 2019, he had been in an academy setup for only three weeks since March of that year.
Manchester United still offered him a schoolboy contract, but the Premier League declined Walters’ registration.
Only 20 boys were allowed to be registered in each age group and United had already met their quota as departing players were still registered while being supported in finding new clubs. Walters was going to be playing in the age group above but the Premier League would not budge. When a space became free, Manchester United ultimately decided a different position was seen as a more important priority long-term.
Walters’ young career was in limbo once again.
Interested clubs from the summer had moved on and he had nowhere to play or train. United ensured they would find a southern club he could join to act as a holding place and a placement at Charlton Athletic took six weeks to arrange.
COVID-19 then broke out and lockdown was announced in England. Academy football was halted nationwide.
November 2019. Walters, then 15, received an email from EpicGames, the makers of the game Fortnite, saying he had made $20 after building a map called RJW’s BoxPVP.
Maps in Fortnite are different locations which can be created for players to use in-game.
“He said ‘I just made $20 for my map,’ says Raphael. “People are in my map and when they buy stuff with their V-Bucks, I get a commission, so I made $20’.”
Walters’ map gaining traction was followed by a request for bank details which was swiftly declined as Raphael and Aisha assumed their son was about to be scammed. But a week later it was $50 and then $200.
The family set up a PayPal account and by December, 250 million people globally played it in one week. In one night, the most he made was $11,000.
But football was still first on the agenda, and soon enough, it was time to say goodbye to Fortnite.
Walters did one-to-one sessions with Saul Isaksson-Hurst as the country eased out of lockdown.
“You can have all the technical and physical qualities in the world but if you don’t have the mentality or personality, that’s going to hold you back,” says Isaksson-Hurst, who had worked at Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur’s academies, helped organise Walters’ trials at Manchester United, and is now a consultant to clubs including Arsenal. “He’s got the full package in that respect.”
The Walters were already familiar with Arsenal’s then-lead recruitment analyst Youssuf Sajjad, but Isaksson-Hurst knew the club’s head of talent ID, Lee Herron.
Right-back wasn’t a top priority at the time for Arsenal, but Isaksson-Hurst convinced Herron to come to one of Walters’ sessions.
The player was invited to Arsenal on trial in August 2020, but he was not allowed to train with the club while the Premier League undertook a five-step process to investigate whether he had been tapped up.
In November 2020, 18 months after playing his last match as a contracted academy player at Spurs, Walters signed for Arsenal as an under-16. The contract offer came over Zoom and a pro deal was not on the cards.
“We said, ‘We don’t want to make a commitment to a club that doesn’t believe in him,” Aisha recalls. “If you believe in pro, you’ll offer it to him when we cross that threshold. We don’t want it because we negotiated it; we want it because you believed in him.’ That was quite a refreshing conversation on both sides of the table.”
That willingness to earn opportunities has been ever present in the two and a half years since.
Walters was first called to the under-21s by Kevin Betsy (who scouted him for England as a midfielder when at Spurs) at 16 early last season. He maintained a place in Betsy’s squad for most of 2021-22 as an inverting and overlapping full/wing-back.
“If we don’t put him in situations where he’s challenged and under consistent pressure, then he would just become a very functional full-back. That’s not the type of full-back this club is used to.” Betsy said last April.
The 18-year-old was rewarded with a pro contract last year and opportunities this pre-season. He started as a right-sided centre-back away to Nuremberg and was the only academy player taken to the U.S. tour where he had a positive cameo at left-back against Everton.
A slight hairline fracture picked up in a behind-closed-doors match against Brentford set him back at the start of 2022-23, but Walters has spent most of the season at right-back for the under-21s. Since the turn of the year, however, he has been entrusted with playing left-sided centre-back in Jack Wilshere’s under-18s FA Youth Cup run.
He grew eight centimetres (3.14 inches) during lockdown and another two centimetres (0.78 inches) since Christmas 2021 and now stands at just over 6ft.
While most of his football education has come at right-back, it is unlikely he will be restricted to just that position. Benjamin White, Takehiro Tomiyasu and Oleksandr Zinchenko are all examples of how the first team benefit from versatility and that is the main goal: preparation for the moment he has to appear for the first team.
That is why he was on the bench away to Sporting CP as well as against Crystal Palace, Leeds United and Liverpool. Thomas Partey moving to right-back at home to Crystal Palace may be a glimpse into Mikel Arteta’s Plan B if White becomes unavailable, but Walters is being prepped nonetheless.
He has overcome steeper hurdles, after all.
(Top photos: Getty Images, Raphael & Aisha Walters; design: Sam Richardson)
