Matteo Guendouzi’s agent has justified his client leaving PSG when he was 14 saying he wanted to go to a smaller club where he could play straight away.

Matteo Guendouzi is all the rage in France at the minute. In Paris, questions are starting to be asked about how the kid who joined PSG when he was just six-years-old ended up at Arsenal by the time he was called up to the senior international team.

Expected to get his international debut tonight against Andorra, the 20-year-old signed for Arsenal from Lorient in the summer of 2018 as a relatively unknown player. Now, everybody knows his name and his face.

“When Matteo left PSG, it was to try to have playing time as quickly as possible,” Guendouzi’s agent, Philippe Nabe, told Le10Sport.

“After that, there are peculiarities in relation to his playing profile. He was relatively frail at the time, and Paris relies more on athletic profiles, including Boubakary Soumaré now in Lille, who was competing with Matteo.

“So we had a choice to make relatively early, and the contractual situation allowed us to leave the club at that time, because Matteo had not had an aspirant contract proposal before April 30. So we could go to Lorient, but that was the idea. Join a more modest club to allow him to play as quickly as possible.”

It certainly worked.

Guendouzi joined Lorient’s u19s in 2014 on a free. Two years later he was moved up to their B team, aged just 16. Eight months after that he was in the Lorient first team where he made 30 appearances before Arsenal came calling.

He has already made 52 appearances for Arsenal.