Tipped by Arsenal academy scout Shaun O’Connor as “the best player who has ever walked through the doors at Hale End”, Patino was discovered playing for Luton Town’s age group teams when he was 11 – and by the time he was 16 he was already being talked of in hushed tones by excited fans as a star of the future.
Now 21, his career hasn’t quite gone according to plan. The midfielder left Arsenal without making a single league appearance and with a string of disappointing loan spells under his belt.
Sold to Spanish second division side Deportivo La Coruña in the summer, Patiño – the tilde has recently appeared as a nod to his Galician heritage - has hardly seen the field of play and hasn’t been given a minute of game time in 2025. So what went wrong, and why has a sparkling talent’s dream turned sour, both in his home country and that of his grandparents?
What happened to Charlie Patiño – and why didn’t he make it at Arsenal?
Much of the early hype surrounding the teenage Patiño focused on the assets he had in abundance – his assured technique, silky touch, and promising passing range. The comparisons that were struck were with players like Andrea Pirlo, conductors with cultured feet and the vision to match.
““His first touch was unbelievable, his vision, his awareness of space,” said Brian Stapleton, the scout that discovered Patiño. “He was way above his years, he was on another planet to anyone else on the pitch.”
As he rose through the youth ranks, it seemed as though little could stop him from fulfilling his destiny as one of England’s great technical forces. He was rising steadily through England’s ranks, representing the Young Lions from Under-15s up to Under-21s, and made his debut for Arsenal in a League Cup win over Sunderland in December 2021, at the age of just 18, scoring on his side’s fifth and final goal.
In short, everything was going perfectly until the 2022/23 season, when Patiño (still curiously overlooked for minutes by Mikel Arteta) was sent out on loan to Championship side Blackpool to get some experience. It was in the bruising environment of the second tier that Patiño’s flaws began to reveal themselves.
The youngster had a fine touch and his passing was immaculate, but he struggled in close quarters with bigger, tougher midfielders and seemed to find it a struggle to keep up with the heightened pace of first-team football in an environment in which almost every team presses and hassles the opposition incessantly.
There were some good moments over the course of the next two seasons, during he was a regular for both Blackpool and Swansea City, but over the course of 72 games at the EFL level he continually found it hard to find time and space to use his skill while being shrugged off the ball all too easily in one-on-ones. It started to become apparent as to why Arteta never gave him more chances in the Arsenal first team.
By the end of the 2023/24 season, it was clear that he wasn’t breaking through with the Gunners. He had just one year left on his contract and just 11 minutes of football under his belt for the club at whose academy he had spent his formative years. A change of scenery was required – and it came in the form of a deeply romantic move to Deportivo, the fallen giants of Spanish football whose fans included Patiño’s own grandfather…
The Deportivo dream that’s slowly becoming a nightmare
“My dad was always a Depor fan,” he told The Guardian shortly after completing a £1m move to Galicia in August. “My abuelo was a massive fan. So I grabbed the opportunity with both hands… I wanted to try Spanish football, which suits my style and to hear about Depor, which runs in the family, was perfect.”
It wasn’t just posturing. Although Patiño’s Spanish isn’t entirely fluent, Deportivo ran through his veins and his social media posts contained tributes to the greats of the SuperDepor era – Juan Carlos Valerón, Djalminha, Jacques Songo’o – and to their league title, a feat he was too young to have seen but the glory of which was absorbed through his family. There is a photo of a young Patiño, still a small boy, in a Deportivo t-shirt and scarf.
Deportivo are in La Liga 2 these days, slowly making their way back up through the ranks after a long, slow and painful decline ended with them playing in the third tier in 2020. They’re stuck in mid-table, perhaps a little too close to the relegation battle for comfort with ten games to go, but likely to survive comfortably enough. Patiño, unfortunately, has hardly been involved.
If playing at Deportivo’s famous Riazor stadium became a new dream to focus on after he fell short at Arsenal, it’s one he has yet to achieve. Patiño has made just four appearances for his new sides, all away from home, a sum total of 153 minutes of action.
There have been some minor fitness-related frustrations but fundamentally, the coach has simply preferred other players. Patiño is often on the bench, but seldom gets onto the field of play, and hasn’t played at all since the turn of the new year. His social media platforms have fallen silent, and one wonders whether he will see out much more of his four-year contract.
With most ‘wonderkids’ who fall short, there are obvious causes – injuries, often, or perhaps attitudinal problems or simply the crushing power of all the pressure that comes with being hyped as a generational talent. With Patiño, however, the reasons that his career are stalling are less clear.
In interviews he comes across as calm, unflustered, aware of what he needs to learn and the parts of his game that he needs to work on.
“I’m still very young. Now I want to show what I can do here,” he told The Guardian when he first moved to Spain. “I’ve been watching, analysing. This is my game: pass and move, drive, create. Simple. Effective. Brilliant basics. Don’t over-complicate but play with intent. I’m new; when I get my chance, I’m going to take it. It’s patience, timing. Wait, be ready.”
So far, that chance has not come with his new club. But as he points out – he has youth on his side. Still just 21, Patiño hasn’t been consigned to the long list of failed starlets alongside Freddy Adu and Nii Lamptey and Kerlon and so very many others. Maybe he can still turn things around in Spain, or maybe he will find the right fit for his style of play somewhere else, not that football offers those who fail many second chances. He still has time: just about.
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