Former Arsenal youngster Jordan Halls has lifted the lid on the ruthless mindset inside the club’s academy, revealing how being surrounded by superstars at “the best Arsenal, at the best time” left him feeling both privileged and frustrated.
Speaking to GOAL via Casivo, the Swedish casino experts, Halls reflected on what it was really like to grow up in an environment where self-belief wasn’t just encouraged – it was demanded.
‘You walk like the best because you are the best’
From the age of 10, Halls says Arsenal drilled a certain mentality into their prospects. Not softly. Not subtly. Relentlessly.
“You are the best, you train and you eat the best, you walk like the best and that is because you are the best,” he recalled. That message, repeated over and over, became the foundation of everything.
At a club of Arsenal’s stature, doubt simply didn’t fit. If you were in the system, you were expected to carry yourself like an elite player. Anything less, and you wouldn’t last.
That attitude followed Halls all the way up to the fringes of the first team. When he finally found himself in and around the senior squad, he didn’t stare in awe. He measured himself against them.
“All you do is look around and think, ‘no, I'm better than you, I'm better than you, I should be playing in front of you’,” he said. That wasn’t arrogance in his eyes. It was survival. “That’s that mindset that they instil into you, otherwise you ain't going to last there.”
Pride on the outside, anger on the inside
Halls grew up an Arsenal fan. For his friends and family, the idea of him sharing a training pitch with their heroes was almost surreal.
When he left the training ground and stepped back into normal life, he felt the buzz from those around him. “Your mates would be like, ‘oh my God, that's a mate from Arsenal’,” he said. Family members reacted the same way. To them, he was living the dream.
Inside, it felt very different.
In his own head, he wasn’t a lucky kid along for the ride. He was a player who believed he should be starting. That belief, sharpened by the club’s culture, often turned into frustration.
“In terms of yourself, you're like, ‘no, I deserve to be here and I should be playing in front of him, I should be playing in front of him’,” Halls admitted. “And you're kind of angry most of the time because you might not be playing.”
That anger, that edge, was part of the package. Arsenal wanted players who thought that way. It was the only way to cope in a dressing room stacked with elite talent.
Best team, worst timing
Only when his playing days were behind him did Halls fully grasp the scale of what he had been part of.
“When I come away from football later on, I'm like, ‘wow, I was at the Arsenal’,” he said. Time and distance turned daily routine into something far bigger: a front-row seat at one of the club’s greatest eras.
He calls it both a blessing and a curse.
“Lucky to be there with the best team, at the best time, but also unlucky to be there with the best, at the best time,” he reflected.
The standard was so high, the squad so strong, that breaking through became almost impossible. Halls is convinced that many of his contemporaries would have made it in other Arsenal sides.
“I think most of our players would have walked into many of Arsenal's teams except for that one,” he said.
It’s the paradox of growing up at a superclub in its pomp: you’re raised to believe you belong at the very top, then you run headfirst into one of the greatest teams the club has ever assembled.
For Halls, that reality only truly landed once the boots were hung up and the noise had faded, leaving a single, lingering thought: just how far might that generation have gone in any other Arsenal era?
