According to The Athletic, 15-year-old talent JJ Gabriel of Manchester United has expressed a desire to leave the club. This news coincided with Max Dawson, the rising 16-year-old star of Arsenal, scoring a brace in the League Cup. The contrast between these two events highlights the sense of loss felt by Manchester United fans at a time when the relationship between the club and its supporters has reached an all-time low.

The timing of this news is interesting for two reasons. First, just hours before the news broke, Dawson of Arsenal once again demonstrated his considerable potential with two goals. In a League Cup match against Ipswich, he not only scored but did so with composure and refined technique, showing how this 16-year-old, despite his youth, plays with the maturity of an adult. It is a simple coincidence, but it offered Manchester United fans a moment of "look at what you could have had."

The other reason is more directly relevant: the current relationship between Manchester United fans and the club is at a low point – perhaps not the absolute lowest, as 21 years of Glazer family ownership has witnessed many lows, but certainly bad enough to provoke intense and justified protests. During the Manchester Derby on Sunday, the usual flags and banners disappeared from the Stretford End at Old Trafford, replaced instead by a banner reading: "The way you treat us is a disgrace."

This move was partly prompted by a recent club investigation into "ticket touting," in which 1,149 fan accounts were suspended and many others faced the risk of having their season ticket revoked. In reality, this is just another addition to a litany of grievances, as fans have been extremely unhappy about their season tickets in prime locations being relocated to make way for hospitality seats and to comply with UEFA regulations.

As a football fan, this is quite a bleak period. We need not exaggerate and say it is worse than the 1970s or 1980s – when attending matches actually posed physical dangers – but the relationship between fans and the club has rarely been this distant. We are treated as customers, not as an organic part of a community organization, but as walking wallets, objects that a club can squeeze for money as much as possible, knowing that if we cause trouble, there is a long line of moneybags waiting behind us.

We feel there are fewer ways to genuinely connect with football clubs. But a child emerging from the academy system and breaking into the first team remains one of the purest and most enjoyable experiences a fan can have. If that child is also a supporter of the club itself, even better, but watching any academy graduate play for the first team is inherently deeply rewarding.

After Dawson shone alongside his academy graduate teammate Marley Salmon last night, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta called it "satisfying." Dawson scored the decisive goal in a 2-0 victory over Everton last season. That goal would be special even if it had been scored by a loanee who left weeks later. But for Arsenal fans, because it was Dawson, it becomes even more special. The romantic era when Celtic won the European Cup with 11 Glasgow players, or when Manchester United's treble-winning squad in 1999 was filled with academy graduates, has largely passed. But for most of us, just having one or two such players in or around the squad is enough.

This is true at most clubs. 20-year-old Lewis Koumas has broken into Liverpool's first team this season, bringing comfort to fans during a difficult transitional period. Tottenham fans have called for 17-year-old Luca Williams-Barnett to be given a chance. Everton fans reacted so strongly that the club had to cancel a transfer that would have sent rising 19-year-old Harrison Armstrong to Nottingham Forest in August. The optimism generated by Forest's strong start to the season has also been tempered by the increasing sidelining of long-time fan favorite Yates.

Some of these examples could be explained simply as fans seeking optimism when their team is performing poorly. But current Arsenal fans do not lack reasons to be cheerful – they do not need a comforting distraction – yet they remain very enthusiastic about Dawson. This is partly because they understand this feeling deeply: winning the league title last season and reaching the Champions League final became sweeter precisely because Saka and Lewis-Skelly played important roles.

These emotions can sometimes override reason. Recall how angry Chelsea fans were when Hudson-Odoi could not break into the starting lineup as a teenager: Hudson-Odoi subsequently had quite a good career, but the intensity of feeling at that time perhaps exceeded his actual talent. In 2020, West Ham fans reacted so strongly to Diangana being sold to West Brom that club captain Mark Noble publicly said he was "heartbroken, angry and sad."

As fans, we often overrate these academy youngsters because we want them to succeed. We want to feel excited, we want to feel connected to the club, even if that is irrational, because there are increasingly fewer ways for us to do so. Gabriel is still a child, of course. Ideally, none of us should know who he is; he should develop at an appropriate pace, without pressure from Manchester United fans or media expectations. You could even argue that he is not at the same level as Dawson or Liverpool's former academy product Alexander-Arnold, since he is from London rather than locally born, and started at other clubs' academies before joining Manchester United.

He may ultimately not be that good: the football world is full of countless examples of talented wonderkids, "can't-fail" prospects as teenagers, who for various reasons have failed to live up to their early promise. But that hope is intoxicating, and it would be deeply regrettable if Manchester United fans could not witness Gabriel's potential flourish, as Arsenal fans have seen with Dawson.

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