He’s 21, a full senior international, and won 4 individual awards in the Championship. He’s not a youth player.
That is certainly one way to phrase it, if you think of youth as an age, and experience as a title. In the context, I was more thinking about his experience than his age, tbh.
You could also say that he’s played 167 mins of PL football for Man Utd and 37 Serie A mins for Atalanta, and 180 mins of European football for Man Utd and Rangers together. His ‘full international senior’ title could be rephrased as being subbed in for a sum of 79 mins in AFCON qualifiers and 59 mins of friendlies for Cote d’Ivoire.
This equates to about 5 1/2 games of adult football at a level vaguely close to where he is supposed to come in, which I guess it’s fair to say there are 18 and 19 year olds with favorably comparably experience at the level we’re talking of.
He last played a competitive game for this team one and a half year ago, never played for this manager or under this system, lacks most of a preseason and has not played a competitive game in six months.
Thus, in the context of 9-10 players injured and a team that desperately needs to be able to find their relations to make the system work at least a bit, This is the situation where you keep as much consistency as you can, even at a cost of form. It is not the situation where you try out or blood in an extra player with ‘youth level experience’, to put it that way. That wouldn’t be brave, it would be unintelligent.
Of course, Amad may be tearing up the training ground as we speak, showing an eerie understanding with Wan Bissaka and Bruno, and convincing Ten Hag that he has fully grasped all the internal movement and positioning principles through video studies, in which case he’ll probably be getting at least as many chances as Pellistri does. But I think he’s going to have to use them even better than Facundo to convince any coach that he shall comtinue playing ahead of even a dismal form Antony, who at least knows when to overlap defensively and how to bring the ball out of the first third. That’s what I think.