lorddulaarsenal At one point he seemed to want to create a team full of technicians - hence Zinchenko, Ceballos, and Jesus. Only after we’d be beaten by City a few times it dawned on him that we needed to be physically stronger - hence the current style
We still have a team full of technicians though.
HomeSteak From this current team, bar Saka, don't think anyone in that front 3 scores those goals.
Have to agree. I believe Trossard is the closest to that and his signing was meant to be for the "player who scores those goals". They probably thought Mudryk was the same. The point is it doesn't have to be a striker, it can be anyone in the front 4-5.
It seems like we're stuck in a place where we can only have one top attacking combination at any one time, Cesc and van Persie, Ozil and Sanchez, Auba and Laca, Ode and Saka. You add any of those partnerships to this existing team and we win. The biggest disappointment has been Martinelli's drop off, because he was supposed to be in the same group as Ode and Saka.
I mean the good thing is unlike those guys Ode and Saka are both still young and are not going anywhere, and it’s hard to imagine we wont sign another big money forward by the end of next summer.
But we need to get it right, would be a tragedy if we end up splashing big money on a Mudryk and waste our chance of domination.
I know some have gone off him but my money is still on Nico Williams. If he’s having an off season then it just means he should be a bit cheaper.
Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert re-loaned him and played him a lot though
lorddulaarsenal true. Thought he was pretty shit for us really. He had that standout performance against Burnley at home and put in work in our FA Cup winning campaign, but little else.
We'd be looking at 2024 very differently if the Premier League had advanced City's case in any way quicker, and if we hadn't had two or three absolutely deranged refereeing decisions against us this season.
We might be the champions already, and have just pulled back in line with Liverpool having played a match more.
Instead we got stuffed by one of the greatest league finishes ever and now we've been pegged back behind a posse of jaggy ventolin abusers.
Here's hoping we can fight on while Saka's out and take this season to the end.
This January is Mikel Arteta’s 11th transfer window as Arsenal manager. He has recently passed his fifth anniversary in charge. In total, he has signed 30 players for a gross spend of £714million ($896m).
Despite two-and-a-half years of competing for the Premier League title, there remains a nagging sense that Arsenal are still a couple of finishing touches away from truly completing the transformation of the squad.
The one area of particular focus in this regard is the forward line. Arteta has six options — Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz, Gabriel Martinelli, Gabriel Jesus, Leandro Trossard and Raheem Sterling — for three positions.
The manager’s mantra has always been that they can win without relying on a superstar goalscorer, as Liverpool have in Mohamed Salah or Manchester City possess in Erling Haaland. But the decline in open-play chances over the past two seasons has called the theory of collective firepower into question.
In this context, it is interesting to reflect on a major idiosyncrasy of Arteta’s five years in charge — the lack of investment in the forward line.
He has signed just six wingers and strikers in that time — one of whom was then-32-year-old Willian on a free transfer in the summer of 2020, who left a year into a three-year deal. Another was Marquinhos, who was signed at 19 for £3m and has played just one minute in the Premier League. He is currently on loan at Fluminense.
In comparison, he has signed five goalkeepers, 11 defenders and eight midfielders. In both volume and cost, Arteta has invested more than double on those tasked with stopping goals versus those charged with scoring them.
Using figures reported by The Athletic at the time, he has spent £299.2m on the first (or defensive) third of the pitch and £275.4m on the middle. Just £140m (19 per cent of Arsenal’s spending) has been put into the final third — and that figure includes £65m on Kai Havertz, whose signing was predicated on the idea of him playing in midfield before happenstance aligned him with the No 9 role.
Never did I think I would see the day an Atheltic article does not suck off Arteta. Not that it's anything bad, but usually they just call him a genius and tell strange stories about him, almost mythical
https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/premier-league/einkaufswert/wettbewerb/GB1
We have the 4th most expensive squad in the league. Liverpool have the 6th. Both teams are over-achieving.
Chelsea and especially United, massively underachieving.
daredevil Or that the likes of Man Utd and Chelsea have massively overpaid for a lot of players relative to their actual quality...
That can certainly be true as well, but there is a correlation between squad cost, wages and league position.
A general correlation if you look at large sample sizes, yes.
That you can definitely say that United's squad is better than ours because it's more expensive and that we need to overperform for our squad to finish above theirs, no.
No-one would say that and United are a clear outlier. But you can see with Chelsea that if you keep throwing money at it, eventually you will fall into good decisions.
Saw the Orbinho stat about today been the 9th game where Arsenal scored 1 or 0 in the league this season and we've dropped points in 7 of them.
It's hard to look beyond the attack as not being good enough to kill matches and score enough goals to protect us from some of the variance we've fallen foul of.
It will be a terrible outcome to have wasted the chance when City have dipped not too be there to take the title. We need to try and make something from the season in terms of showing tangible progress to bring a winning team under Arteta.
