Former Arsenal youth player Folarin Balogun recalled coming up against a Liverpool youngster during their Premier League academy days and rates him highly.
Former Arsenal striker Folarin Balogun name-checked Curtis Jones as he discussed the best players he played with and against during his days as a youth-team player.
Balogun and Jones were both born in 2001, which meant they came up against each other regularly while playing for the Arsenal and Liverpool youth teams respectively.
While Jones remains a key part of Liverpool’s first-team squad at Anfield, Balogun left Arsenal permanently in 2023 to join AS Monaco, having impressed during a loan spell in France with Reims.
In an interview with with JD Sports, Balogun was asked to name the best players he played with and against while coming through the ranks with the Gunners.
“There’s a lot, especially at Arsenal,” Balogun said. “There’s almost like a myth with Hale End (Arsenal’s academy) that so many young players come there and go on to do good things, but I think at the time when I was younger, for sure, Reiss Nelson, he was the truth. He was skilling up guys. Even though he was only a year older than us, a lot of us looked up to him.
“He was the main one but of course you had Emile [Smith-Rowe], Joe [Willock] and Bukayo [Saka], so there was a few guys. [In terms of players I] played against, yeah, there’s loads. I played against Curtis Jones from Liverpool – yeah, he’s cold. There was a lot of people, we were all friends and even though we would see each other at tournaments, we would speak to each other, and we would all follow each other’s journeys so it’s nice to seeing them do well as well.”
Jones has emerged as an important player for Liverpool in recent years, but he suffered an injury earlier this season that curtailed his progress under Arne Slot. The 23-year-old is yet to start in the Premier League this season but has emerged in each of their last three top-flight games, and also impressed on his only start as the Reds thumped West Ham 5-1 in the EFL Cup.
Speaking over the summer, Jones revealed how impressed he had been with new manager Slot, saying: “He’s amazing. I’ve said it a lot, it’s probably the happiest I’ve been in terms of a style of play that suits me and the lads that we have in our team. It’s a clear plan. In the training stuff he’s fully involved, he coaches us a lot. He’s big on the finer details of things. We’ve got a certain way of playing — he knows it’s going to take a little bit of time because it’s obviously a big change.”
