Young players are usually asked about their own game. Every so often a midfielder uses the same interview to point at a teammate who never makes the headlines and call him the smartest footballer in the division.
Those answers travel further when the name used to wear red and white. Academy graduates who leave for a transfer fee become a what-if the moment the next manager arrives.
A hundred league games at three different clubs is the quiet proof. Versatility is how a winger becomes a midfielder and then a creator without anyone rewriting the scouting report.
READ MORE: Arsenal star confirms move to Manchester City via Instagram
Josh King has named Alex Iwobi as the Premier League player with the highest football IQ. The 19-year-old Fulham forward said it in a Q&A with the league’s official media on TikTok.
Iwobi is King’s teammate and an Arsenal academy graduate. He recently became only the fifth player in Premier League history to make 100 or more appearances for three clubs, after Gary Speed, Rory Delap, Gareth Barry and James Milner. He is the first African to do it.
He left Arsenal for Everton in 2019 for an initial £28million, a sale that helped fund Nicolas Pepe. Mikel Arteta was appointed that December. Iwobi had already gone.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE NOW.ARSENAL WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT TO KEEP UP TO DATE WITH ALL THE LATEST NEWS!
The career since then is why King’s answer lands. At Arsenal he was an academy winger. At Everton under Frank Lampard he became a box-to-box midfielder. At Fulham under Marco Silva and now Alvaro Arbeloa he is one of the side’s most creative players.
Arsenal Insider argues that profile is close to what Arteta likes: intelligent, technically neat, always available and hard-working. Whether he would have thrived at the Emirates after 2019 is guesswork. The sale happened months before the new manager walked in.
King himself is the other half of the piece. The 19-year-old has started the season well enough to attract interest from Arsenal and other clubs and was left out of Thomas Tuchel’s latest England squad.
That is a separate conversation. The line from the Q&A is about Iwobi, not about a January bid for King.
Pepe never became the player that fee demanded. Iwobi has simply kept playing, changing position each time a manager asked. King’s compliment is that the reading of the game never needed changing.
Arsenal will not get that version of him back. What they get is a reminder that the smartest footballer in the league, according to one of Fulham’s brightest young attackers, used to be theirs.
Arsenal - Thomas Tuchel
Arsenal - Thomas Tuchel
Arsenal defender William Saliba
Arsenal defender William Saliba