Bukayo Saka: The making of a London icon and Arsenal's humble superstar
Eight minutes, three touches and a corner of net. That is all Bukayo Saka needed on his return to Arsenal’s line-up on Sunday to breach the Premier League’s best defence and simultaneously restore a sense of energy and calm to the Emirates Stadium.
He had missed just two club matches with an injury picked up on international duty, but that had felt an age for a player whose durability is renowned, and whose workload and work rate in his young career have at times bordered on the obscene.
Arsenal were dreadful in both games, beaten away at Bournemouth and then squeezing past a limited Shakhtar Donetsk thanks to an own-goal in the Champions League.
A 2-2 draw with Liverpool was neither a disaster nor a game-changer for Arsenal’s title ambitions, but his performance on comeback was a reminder that Saka’s absence or availability will be.
Starboy remains the moniker, but Saka has long since developed into Arsenal’s attacking talisman. He has begun to wear the captain’s armband with increasing frequency, including from the start against Liverpool, and the boyish face is (slowly) beginning to look a little less so.
“What I like about B is that when he needs to show his teeth and have that edge, he has got it,” manager Mikel Arteta said recently. “He does that in a really special way.”
Beyond Arsenal, Saka is established as a capital icon, an inspiration to this city’s children and cast upon billboards in others around the world.
This week, he has been named one of the Standard’s 100 people shaping London, and deservedly stands shoulder to shoulder with the other 99.
He is no longer just the jewel in the Arsenal crown but a figurehead in himself, with driving influence on this team even greater than Martin Odegaard, William Saliba or Declan Rice.
Increasingly, comparisons are not to his contemporaries but to the greats of eras past. Saka’s goal on Sunday was his 50th in the Premier League, at 23 years and 52 days the youngest Arsenal player to ever hit that landmark, surpassing the record of Thierry Henry.
Harry Kane was barely a week younger, one of just six players quicker to the milestone from any club. Five of those were centre-forwards; the other was Cristiano Ronaldo. Not bad for a kid who started out at left-back.
What I like about B is that when he needs to show his teeth and have that edge, he has got it
Mikel Arteta
Intelligence, pace, power
The A40 Western Avenue, in London’s Central line suburbs, casts a neat seam through twin pillars of Saka’s early development.
To the south lies Greenford High School, which he left with seven A*s and As at GCSE, and where teachers proudly point to his name on the sports honours board, a Year 8 long-jump record of 5.28 metres still intact.
To the north, just beyond the Bridge Hotel, Saka would head to the playing fields, once infamous locally for having an awkward grass ridge running through their core, where his Greenford Celtic youth team played their games.
At home, Saka would play in the garden with his older brother, Abayomi. Their father, Yomi, would go in goal.
“It would be me versus my brother and if I got past him, I would have to then score past my dad,” recalls Saka. “It was quite competitive and I never let anyone stop until I won.”
Within six months of him joining Greenford Celtic, scouts from Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham and Watford were coming to see a six-year-old who was turning heads.
He was such an intelligent boy and physically capable, which is what the modern player has to be
Dan Micciche
Saka began training with Watford, but joined Arsenal at the age of eight. Quickly, he stood out due to his pace and power.
He regularly played in the older age groups and in several positions, showing the versatility that would become key to his breakthrough.
“If you were to say me, back then, did you see Bukayo becoming such an outstanding right-winger, I would have said no,” Dan Micciche, who coached Saka at youth level for Arsenal, tells Standard Sport.
“Not because he couldn’t play right-wing, but he was a really good left-back! He was such an intelligent boy and physically capable, which is what the modern player is.”
Arsenal were so convinced by Saka’s talent they offered him scholarship terms two years early, when he was still playing for their Under-14s.
Belief and bravery
Weeks after his 17th birthday, and in front of fewer than 8,000 fans in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Saka made his Arsenal debut, his promotion perhaps the greatest legacy of a strange, hinterland period under Unai Emery.
It was Gunners legend Freddie Ljungberg, though, who had the greatest impact on the teenager’s early career, coaching Saka in Arsenal’s youth teams and then championing his talents once promoted to Emery’s staff.
It seems odd now, given Saka has become Arsenal’s most reliable threat on the right-wing since Ljungberg, but it was also the Swede who deployed him at left-back during his interim spell in charge.
Saka, though, always believed he was destined for the top end of the pitch and Arteta soon conceded that he was right.
In 2021-22 he reached double figures for goals for the first time; by last season it was 20, as well as 14 assists.
Like every great forward, Saka has had to adapt to “special treatment” from opposition defenders, of means both fair and foul.
Saka has studied his own game, learning to avoid big tackles and infusing it with the kind of unpredictability that saw him beat Caoimhin Kelleher high at his near post on Sunday, when the conventional finish - as is his trademark - would be to curl to the far.
The 23-year-old has become a slave to recovery, with a strict post-match diet and sleep routine, and what might as well be a season ticket to the ice baths, saunas and massage tables at London Colney.
The volume of games Saka has played already - closing on 250 Arsenal appearances, as well as 42 for England - has led to fears of burnout but neither he nor Arteta are worried; both believe Saka can be one of the best players in the world and know that calibre of performer must be almost ever-present, for club and country, too.
Defiance
It was the post-lockdown summer of 2021 that really launched Saka’s international career and, in the case of a lesser character, might have come to define it.
Perhaps, thanks to the defiance shown in the aftermath, it still does.
The youngster was the breakout England star of the home Euros, the smiling, unifying face of a communally joyous summer.
But his penalty miss in the final’s shootout defeat to Italy brought it to a cruel end, or at least would have done had it finished there, and not with the abhorrent racist abuse that followed.
Arsenal circled wagons. Arteta was key, but Josh Kroenke, the director and son of owner Stan, and chief executive Vinai Venkatesham both sent messages of support, too. Venkatesham contacted staff, many of whom had known Saka as a child, to assure them he would receive everything he needed.
It was also the start of Saka’s close bond with Henry - they message after most matches - and even a much shorter-lived one with Tottenham supporters, who applauded their rival during a pre-season friendly.
“I think that is now part of him and his history as a football player,” Arteta said at the time, straying eerily close to Dumbledorian philosophy: “That scar is going to be there and he is going to use it in the future, that’s for certain.”
Saka’s record since is almost exemplary, a product of his resolution to become an expert taker on the back of that Euros, where the penalty he missed had been the first of his senior career.
And yet, for the regard in which he is held and the knowledge of what he suffered, still now you sense a nervousness as a spectator whenever Saka stands over the ball from 12 yards, as if the stakes are just that little bit higher.
It was tangible at the Emirates in April 2022, when a stoppage-time clincher against Chelsea was his first post-Euros penalty; even more so in Dusseldorf this summer, when a shootout effort scored in the quarter-final win against Switzerland brought the redemption arc full circle.
Influence
So much achieved and yet only now does Saka even start to head into what should be his prime.
On Monday night, he was ranked 21st in the Ballon d’Or shortlist, but there is no reason he cannot one day claim the prize.
That Spain and Manchester City’s Rodri did so this year tells you Saka needs trophies.
Arsenal have come close, Premier League runners-up in the last two seasons, and if the past fortnight has told us anything, it is that only with Saka can they hope to get over the line.
For England, too, he has become essential, and the World Cup in two years’ time ought to come at his peak.
End the country’s 60 years of hurt and he will become an instant England legend.
The man himself, though, will not let ideas of such glory go to his head.
He has a tight network around him and one of the first things Saka did when he secured his first big contract at Arsenal was a buy a house for his parents.
They, and his girlfriend Tolami Benson, form a close group who share Saka’s humble outlook.
Even now, as one of the most influential people in London, Saka has not forgotten his roots.
He often visits Arsenal’s academy in Hale End, where one of his shirts hangs on the wall.
Written on it is a message to those hoping to follow in his footsteps: “Work hard and enjoy the journey”. His own still has a long way to run.
