Arsenal Targets 16-Year-Old Winger Jeremy Monga

Arsenal’s search for the next great left-sided livewire has led them to a 16-year-old who plays like he’s still on the concrete.

Jeremy Monga, Leicester City’s fearless winger, is firmly on the Gunners’ radar, with a deal being pursued this summer after his breakout in the 2024/25 campaign. He arrived in the Premier League as a teenager, then became a regular in a Leicester side that slid out of the Championship. His club fell. His stock didn’t.

A gap on the left – and a kid who fits it

Arsenal’s academy production line is humming. Max Dowman, Marli Salmon, Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly have all pushed their way into senior conversations, some into senior games. The future in the middle of the pitch and on the right looks bright.

On the left, it’s murkier.

Gabriel Martinelli and Leandro Trossard face uncertain futures, and beneath them the pathway is not stacked with obvious heirs. That’s where Monga comes in: a specialist left winger who, even at 16, looks like he was born to hug the touchline and rip games open.

Leicester City correspondent Josh Holland, who has watched Monga closely for LeicestershireLive and the Leicester Mercury, paints the picture of a player Arsenal simply do not have in that age bracket.

“Monga plays football at a professional standard, like he is playing in the street,” Holland said. A line that fits the eye test. “A remarkable ball-carrier who is obsessed with beating his man and driving forward.”

This is not a safe, system player. This is chaos with a plan.

Street footballer in a structured world

Monga’s best work comes off the left, starting high and wide, demanding the ball on the paint of the touchline. From there, he drives inwards, slaloming into central zones with the kind of agility that turns full-backs and centre-backs into traffic cones.

He’s strong off both feet. That matters at Arsenal, where wingers are asked to shoot, combine and cross from multiple angles rather than just hit one trademark zone.

Leicester, though, never truly built around him. Holland is blunt about that.

“Leicester didn’t use him anywhere near as much as they should have last season in the Championship,” he said. The club were fighting for their lives, and a 16-year-old winger became a luxury they didn’t fully trust. The irony is painful: the more they retreated into caution, the more the one player who could break a game open watched from the bench.

Holland sees similarities between Monga and Arsenal’s own Max Dowman. Not in role, but in mentality and fearlessness. Arsenal know that profile. They’ve already started to lean into it.

Arteta’s pathway and the reality of minutes

For all the excitement, the cold reality is that Monga would not walk into Mikel Arteta’s first team. Holland doesn’t pretend otherwise.

“I don’t expect him to feature for Arsenal anytime soon,” he admitted. “Give him one more season, and I think he’d be ready to be a key member of Mikel Arteta’s side.”

That’s a bold statement for a 16-year-old, but it speaks to how electric he looked when he first hit senior football.

“When he came into the first team at the end of the 2024/25 Premier League season, he was turning defenders inside out, and it genuinely felt like City had a generational talent,” Holland recalled.

Then came the drop. His expected minutes shrank. Questions surfaced over his attitude. Was he sulking? Struggling with the pressure? Or just a teenager reacting like a teenager in a relegation battle?

Holland’s view is clear: this is a kid carrying the weight of expectation, not a problem case.

“There were some doubts over his attitude. But I’m in the camp that he’s just a 16-year-old taking the pressure in his stride, and he’s not an emotional figure,” he said.

Arsenal will back their environment to handle that. They have already shown with Dowman and others that if a youngster hits a certain level, Arteta will find minutes, even in a title-chasing squad.

Right now, though, the immediate wide-left priority is different. Morgan Rogers of Aston Villa is the main senior target to cover any outgoing star. Monga, by contrast, is the long-term bet, the one you tuck into the academy and slowly sharpen for the Emirates spotlight.

The price of relegation

The numbers involved underline just how far Leicester have fallen.

Suggestions are that Arsenal would need to pay between £10 million and £15 million to land Monga. For a 16-year-old with 37 senior appearances, it is a serious outlay. It is also the sort of figure a club newly dumped into League One can barely afford to refuse.

“A tribunal could still be required to determine a figure depending on how the move transpires,” is the line from those close to the situation. But the range is set. And for Leicester, it cuts both ways.

“I’m split on this. £10m-£15m is a decent fee for a 16-year-old,” Holland said. “Even more so when you consider he’s only played 37 times at senior level.

“But on the flip side. 12 months ago, the thought of him leaving for that seemed unrealistic. That’s the result of Leicester’s relegation to League One.

“As a third-tier outfit, City can’t turn their nose up at that sort of fee.”

That’s the brutal economics of modern football. Stay in the Premier League or the Championship, and Monga is the kid you build around. Drop into League One, and he becomes the asset you have to cash in.

For Arsenal, that desperation is opportunity. A player who looked untouchable a year ago is now firmly within reach.

The question is no longer whether Jeremy Monga is worth the gamble. It’s how quickly a 16-year-old street footballer can grow into the responsibility of being Arsenal’s next great weapon on the left.