Arsenal have completed their second signing of the summer, bringing in Christos Tzolis for £34m from Club Brugge.

The reception to the news was a bit colder than I would have hoped but that is probably more of a reflection of the ordering of when deals will be completed this season. As fans we want to see the big stars signed, and even with his incredible numbers, Tzolis is not that.

If I believed that this was it for the business, I could understand the frustration but I don’t think that this will be it for Arsenal in the attacking portion of the pitch so I am able to put that into context and hopefully that will be the case for most people, especially as the rest of the summer goes on.

As is tradition, let’s go through the numbers for the player and what the club is signing.

If you want the DEEP dive into him I have done that here:

Christos Tzolis: The Debrief

One of the stories that has accompanied this signing is that he was a data driven pick and just looking at the graphics above that makes a ton of sense. He has put up crazy, video game type numbers that would put him in rare company if you include the Belgian League in the stats rankings last season.

The big question surrounding him would be how does all of that translate with a move to the Premier League. We will touch on that at the end. Until then, the stats below are for his domestic league production last season and are normalized to per 90 minutes, they are compared against other wingers with at least 900 minutes played in the top five leagues going back to the 2011-12 season.

Attacking and Creative Metrics:

0.41 - Non-Penalty Goals, percentile: 91.9

0.44 - Non-Penalty xG, percentile: 97.1

3.34 - Open Play Shots, percentile: 98.5

0.13 - xG Per Shot, percentile: 81.2

-0.05 - Post Shot xG Added (The difference in xG of a shot and the estimated finishing quality Post Shot xG), percentile: 7.6

35.8 - On Target Percentage, percentile: 49.1

0.53 - Set Play Shots, percentile: 76.5

20.6% - Shot Usage (the percentage of total shots while playing that the player attempted), percentile: 82.8

23.9% - xG Usage (the percentage of total xG while playing that the player took the shot from), percentile: 87.9

I wouldn’t call Tzolis’s shooting his greatest strength but last season he still put up very good shooting numbers in the Belgian League. Here were his per 90 ranks last season, 6th in shots, 10th in non-pen xG, and 10th in non-pen goals. Those are good ranks for a wide player, I wouldn’t expect him to be an elite goal scorer but he showed good ability to find the back of the net.

Last season he didn’t have a great shot placement season but he was about average for his shooting accuracy. He rates out as a pretty close to average finisher for his career so it is possible that this is just noise but something that could be a drag on the goal scoring if it continues.

Now into the creative numbers.

0.67 - Assists, percentile: 99.9

0.61 - Shot Assisted xA, percentile: 99.9

3.90 - Key Passes, percentile: 99.9

7.05 - Shot Creating Actions, percentile: 99.5

1.00 - Shot Creating Action xG Assisted, percentile: 99.1

4.49 - Shot Zone Pass Completions, percentile: 100

29.8% - Key Pass Usage, percentile: 97.5

This is where he goes from good to WOW.

Even if you discount heavily for the league that he played in, he was one of the most prolific creative players in any league last season. I fully expect the numbers to drop with a move to the Premier League but they are dropping from such a high baseline that even a pretty large drop keeps him in the very good range.

Passing and Ball Progression Metrics:

99% - Pass Efficiency (actual passing completion divided by the expected completion percentage), percentile: 82.4

0.25 - Goal Probability Added through Passing (Measure of changes in the teams chances of scoring/conceding following pass attempts), percentile: 99.8

48.9 - Passing Volume (total attempts), percentile: 89.7

71.4% - Pass Completion Percentage, percentile: 46.8

2.30 - Completed Final Third Entries, percentile: 60.5

5.28 - Progressive Passes Completed, percentile: 96.0

262.3 - Progressive Passing Distance, percentile: 90.4

23.6 - Attacking 3rd Pass Attempts, percentile: 97.6

72.3% - Attacking 3rd Pass Completion Percentage, percentile: 58.9

102.1% - Attacking 3rd Pass Efficiency

2.21 - Long Pass Attempts, percentile: 91.6

59.2% - Long Pass Completion Percentage, percentile: 51.0

Like his creative numbers, his passing is a strength. He’s not breaking the scale here but he does show up quite well, especially for his ability around the final third.

One thing that also really pops here is his total involvement in positive possessions. He isn’t just a final product player and does quite a bit of work to add value all around the attacking half of the pitch.

1.72 - xG Chain (total xG involved in), percentile: 99.1

1.04 - xG Buildup (total xG involved in, excluding the shot and key pass), percentile: 96.7

45.4% - xG Buildup Usage (the percentage of total xG while on the field that he participated in the buildup to), percentile: 95.5

14.8 - Shot involvement (Buildup + Key Pass + Shot Taken), percentile 99.3

Carrying, Dribbles, and Receiving Metrics:

9.21 - Progressive Carries, percentile: 97.1

0.19 - Goal Probability Added through Carrying/Dribbles (Measure of changes in the team’s chances of scoring/conceding following carries and attacking duel attempts), percentile: 92.4

3.32 - Carries into the attacking third, percentile: 88.1

3.18 - Carries into the box, percentile: 98.4

2.74 - Dribbles Attempted, percentile: 31.4

1.17 - Dribbles Completed, percentile: 35.1

42.6% - Dribble Success %, percentile: 50.4

0.96 - Dispossessed, percentile: 87.0

1.72 - Foul Suffered, percentile: 61.8

Tzolis has good ball carrying numbers but he isn’t a “dribbly” winger in my mind. He completed 40 dribbles last season in the Pro League, which was good enough for 13th best but on a per 90 basis he drops out of the top 25. He was top for progressive carries (2nd per 90) so he will drive into space that is available but he isn’t exactly going to use speed or trickery to eliminate defenders or create chaos.

He is a high volume player and when combined with his ability to move with the ball at his feet, he finds himself in lots of dangerous locations.

69.5 - Touches per 90, percentile: 90.8

39.8 - Final third touches, percentile: 97.3

8.37 - Touches in the box, percentile: 98.6

11.1 - Deep Touches (within 25 yards of goal), percentile: 98.2

4.61 - Shot Zone Touches, percentile: 98.4

43.3 - Passes Received, percentile: 99.2

8.98 - Progressive Passes Received, percentile: 99.2

10.6 - Final Third Entry Received, percentile: 96.8

3.21 - Penalty Area Passes Received, percentile: 96.2

0.32 - Crosses Received, percentile: 41.0

1.17 - Miscontrolled passes, percentile: 36.9

2.7% - Miscontrolled pass %, percentile: 62.2

Overall, the numbers look good here. He was able to get more central touches than the typical Arsenal left winger but he is still comfortable playing out near the touchline and receiving after getting chalk on his boots.

Ball Winning Metrics:

4.77 - Possession Adjusted (padj) Defensive Duels Contested, percentile: 47.6

1.00 - Padj Successful Tackles, percentile: 21.6

0.53 - Padj Dribbled Past, percentile: 82.2

31.5% - Tackle % (Successful Tackles/ Tackles + Fouls Committed), percentile: 12.4

19.6% - Dribbled Past % (Dribbled Past/ Tackles Attempted), percentile: 84.2

1.2 - Padj Clearances, percentile: 83.8

1.1 - Padj Fouls Committed, percentile: 55.8

0.38 - Padj Interceptions, percentile: 14.5

0.72 - Padj blocked passes, percentile: 35.6

4.53 - Padj Ball Recoveries, percentile: 48.9

1.51 - Padj Second balls won, percentile: 52.7

The ball winning numbers look respectable here. He was the talisman for Brugge and that can often mean a player doesn’t need to put in a major shift defensively but Tzolis was still there putting in the effort on the wing. That is one of the non-negotiables for Arteta and the current evidence suggests it won't be a problem for Tzolis.

Final thoughts

We have waited long enough and we can’t go any further without looking at the league strength question with Tzolis.

I do believe that the reputation of the Belgian League and the reality might be out of sync but there is no denying that it is significantly weaker than the Premier League. On my implementation of Elo ratings, Belgium ranks as the 6th strongest league in Europe, stronger than the Eredivisie and the Portuguese league.

It doesn’t have the same elite team talents but the bottom of the League is still quite strong overall.

The Belgian league also splits its season into two phases (at least it did through last season). After a standard double round robin, the league divides into tiers and you play the top teams again. That gave him more matches against the best sides than a normal calendar would. Even with this, there is still just no getting around that most of the matches that he played last season were against teams around the bottom of the Premier League level.

To account for this you would probably want to knock off about a third of the production here. When you do that, because he was such an outlier you still end up looking at a player that put up strong numbers overall.

If you want to limit the opposition to matches where he played against teams that were rated as Premier League quality or better and expand to the Champions League you do get a decent sample size of 15.1 nineties and numbers that take a hit, but still show up looking quite good.

None of this is a guarantee that this will work but it is reassuring to see that his production still holds up when you try to account for this.

I am excited for this player. I think that it is the right type of bet on the player profile and it is in the right price range to be comfortable. He's exactly the type of player a Brighton, Brentford, or Bournemouth signs for this price and flips for double or triple the fee a season later, after he's proven it translates at the Premier League level. It would be nice to cut out the middleman for once and keep the upside ourselves.

Welcome, Christos.

I’m going to share a bit of information here with you here that might blow your mind…

Per multiple reputable sources, Arsenal are exploring a monster move that would bring Real Madrid superstar Vinícius Júnior to London.

I know, I know. I hope you were sitting down for that. Sorry to be the messenger here.

In all seriousness, Scott and I haven’t been at our battle stations this past weekend for various reasons, but this saga doesn’t feel like one to end imminently, so let’s take a look at this the CannonStats way.

Would this move be a good idea? What about it would be concerning? And if he came, could Vini really be the star so many Arsenal fans have wanted off the left? Let’s take a look.

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What came back was a bit concerning.

The general rule of thumb is that when a player gets into the final two years of their contract, the club faces the major decision point of extend them or start planning on their exit. According to the contract information on Transfermarkt, Arsenal have 14 players at that point right now, five of them already inside the final year.

That number sounds big but I don’t think that this is a crisis. Most of them are exactly where the club wants them, but it does mean the next six to twelve months are full of decisions that will shape the squad just as much as the signing of new players in this window.

Let’s go through the players that are getting close to the end of their contracts and talk through their situations.

Players in the final year

For this section, the decision on what to do with the players is a pretty straight forward.

Fábio Vieira and Reiss Nelson were sent on loan last season, if there had been a decent offer for a permanent transfer I am fairly certain that the club would have done it. Neither player looks like they have changed their standing for next season and they are available to any club.

I am not holding out hope that there is any fee for Nelson. He might end up as a candidate to have his contract just bought out and given a release to try and find a new club.

Vieira had a good season in the Bundesliga so there is hope that he will have some value in the transfer market.

I’d hope that he can bring in £15m for Arsenal but having made it to the final year of his contract teams might try and see if they can low-ball knowing that he won’t be in Arsenal’s plans.

Gabriel Jesus came back from injury and unexpectedly made some contributions to Arsenal last season. His performance in the low leverage matches was actually decent and maybe that is enough for some club to be willing to take a shot that he still has something to offer.

There is no chance that Arsenal want to extend his contract and the reporting is that he can find a new club. Arsenal are starting with the posture that they would like to get a fee for him and maybe there is a chance that happens but it might depend on the wage expectations.

Christian Nørgaard came in last summer and he might end up with just the single season here. I think that Arsenal would be fine to see him leave and that they will not be extending or using the option that he has on the deal.

Gabriel Martinelli is the outlier of the one year left cohort. He was the only one in this group that actually played a meaningful amount of minutes and would have the expectation to play if he was still with Arsenal after September 1st. His status in the squad right now feels very fluid and it will almost certainly depend on how the rest of the transfer business plays out.

I don’t anticipate that the club wants to try and extend his contract and I imagine that they are open to sell him (but maybe not so desperate that they'd accept just any offer). He reportedly has an option in his contract and this might be something that ends up getting triggered (rather than a full extension) just to keep a bit more flexibility.

Players with two years left

Let’s start off first here with the Arsenal keepers.

For now, Arsenal appear to have both Kepa Arrizabalaga and Illan Meslier as the number two and three keepers respectively. I think having both on two years remaining on the contract here is just fine and there is no need to discuss major changes or extensions.

David Raya on the other hand is a different story. He is the undisputed number one at Arsenal. His current contract would take him through the end of his age 32 season, so any extension would be into the mid-30s. For most positions you might worry more about that but elite goalkeepers routinely sustain highly stable, competitive careers deep into their mid-to-late 30s. Given that Arsenal don't have a successor waiting in the wings, and there are no obvious red flags about his medium-term performance, this is a player Arsenal should be looking to extend..

Moving into midfield now.

When Mikel Merino was signed, I accepted that he might stick around for just the length of the contract that he signed. I am still okay with that if it ends up the case. Merino just turned 30 this June and given that, having him on a deal that goes for the next two years feels about perfect. I think that you can delay an extension decision until the spring or even the summer. With so many moving parts and no rush, it's best to wait for a clearer picture of his role and his place in the depth chart.

The Martin Ødegaard decision is probably the toughest one. I wrote this up much longer at the end of June and there hasn’t been too much else since then that has changed my mind (although I do think that his World Cup was a positive for him).

I think that the club should remain flexible here and see if any major offers come in and if not use the fall to assess how he is doing and if the team is evolving in a different direction where what he offers doesn’t fit any longer.

Now we move to the players whose decisions would be much easier if they didn't have injury questions hanging over them.

The first player we will talk about here is Kai Havertz. It has taken a bit of tinkering to figure out how to best use him but once Arteta did that, he’s turned himself into an indispensable player for Arsenal. Here is how he looks in his time playing as striker only for Arsenal.

Like so many players who show flashes of elite but are mostly just very good, he can be frustrating to watch. I do know that in the current situation, there isn’t a striker on Arsenal that I would rather see leading the line in a game that matters. This isn’t just because he’s a good player (he is) but I believe (plus the numbers back it up) that Arsenal play better when he starts there.

With Havertz starting as the striker in the Premier League, Arsenal have won 69% of their matches and have won 2.3 points per match (87 point pace). In the other matches since he joined, Arsenal have been quite good but the win rate drops to 63% and Arsenal win 2.1 points per match (80 point pace).

Since the start of 2024, here is how Arsenal have performed with him in the team starting.

If I knew that he would be healthy for the next few years this would be an easy choice but that’s not how this works. He’s one of Arsenal’s highest paid players and if he gets a new contract, that’s not going to change. It is a big call for the Arsenal front office, and I don’t blame them if they take a wait and see approach to this one as well.

Before his most recent injury Jurriën Timber, would have been an easy yes. Even now unless there is something seriously wrong, I don’t think that my opinion on him has changed significantly enough that I would be changing my mind. He’s one of the best one-on-one lock down defenders out wide, on top of that he is a highly technical well rounded player. You don’t find these sorts of players everywhere and Arsenal would be silly if they didn’t do everything possible to keep him around longer.

The last group of players here with two seasons left also have an option to extend.

The first one here is one that my heart hates to bring up but my head knows what the answer is. Ben White has been a wonderful player for Arsenal but I don’t think that he’s getting another contract at Arsenal. He’s grown into one of my favorite players in the team and it will be very sad when his time with the team is over.

I think that there is a chance that he might stay with Arsenal past the summer window, which is something I wasn’t sure about in June but the William Saliba injury opens up the possibility of more playing time for him. I wouldn’t blame him if he sought out a team that could offer him a starting role and that might be how things go this summer.

The last one is Declan Rice. Do we really need to say anything here?

Let me know which players you think Arsenal should be extending.

The World Cup is over, the transfer window is rolling and, naturally, everyone wants a striker whether they need one or not.

That sounds simple enough, but there may not be a harder position to define anymore. Some teams want a traditional number nine who can occupy center backs and dominate the box. Others want a runner who can stretch the field, a false nine who drops into midfield or a pressing forward who sets the tone without the ball. The best strikers increasingly have to do a little bit of everything, and this list reflects just how varied the position has become.

Arsenal’s search for another attacking option has been one of the recurring themes of the summer, and they’re hardly alone. Reliable goalscorers are expensive, difficult to find and often come with significant tradeoffs elsewhere in their game. Whether you’re looking for a physical focal point, a transition threat or something closer to Julián Álvarez’s all-purpose profile, there are plenty of interesting options here.

As always, these rankings are purely based on the numbers and should not be used as a replacement for good, old-fashioned scouting. They also do not necessarily reflect my own views of these players. Now, let’s get into it.

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In the modern transfer reporting landscape, you get an update at basically every step of a potential deal. You find out that a team is monitoring, that they have interest in a player. Then they start exploring the parameters of a deal, they engage intermediaries to explore the price points. When there is actually club to club talks or even an agreement that almost seems like old news because we have seen 32 previous updates that led to that.

Having a transfer that comes out of the blue with little foreshadowing is a shock, it is like the classic polar bear in Texas meme, where you are asking yourself what is going on here?

We got one here with the news that Chelsea and Aston Villa had come to an agreement on a £117m move for Morgan Rogers.

I was planning to write more about how Rogers would fit at Arsenal and thinking about getting a post drafted for when this saga came to an end and the signing was actually announced. I didn’t have this on my radar at all. When I first saw the tweet from David Ornstein I had to double check that this was the actual real reporter and that I wasn’t falling for someone trying to be funny or spoofing his account.

This news caught everyone off guard and led to thousands of WOWs and Holy Shits getting sent in group chats around the world.

Now that the shock has worn off a bit, I think it is time to digest what this means for Arsenal. Losing a primary target in mid-July scrambles the plan, and there's no point pretending otherwise. But the more I sat with the price Chelsea paid, the more my shock and disappointment started turning into something closer to relief.

Sticker Shock

It is far too common in this polarized world to have a nuanced opinion flattened out and you have to end up in the pro or anti camp, with no room for fence sitting or uncertainty.

Rogers is a great example of this. He’s got obvious talent, he’s an England international, and on top of that he has 33 non-penalty goals plus assists over the last two seasons in the toughest League in the world.

The list of players that can match his end product over the last two seasons is short.

Yet there is enough in his data where you aren’t certain that this player is worthy of being the most expensive English player ever.

It’s a bit moot now, but I really enjoyed digging into his data because it was so nice to try and understand the disconnect between the eye test and the data test on the player.

When you pay a record price, your money should be buying certainty. This is top 1%, sure thing, no doubts at all, and that is ultimately where this comes into dispute.

The public estimates for the valuations on transfermarkt had him at £77m. My estimate of his likely transfer fee put him at £100m but the actual valuation based on his production set his value significantly lower.

I think that the £54m estimate here is too low, his actual counting numbers, robustness, and physical traits would have pushed my own estimation higher here. I think that a “fair” price would have been much closer to the actual transfermarkt estimate of £75-85m. I think that you could have talked me into adding an extra 15% on this deal for a club like Arsenal that has a higher value on adding marginal points but that gets us into the mid £90m range and this is really starting to get to the levels where you’re stretching the justification for the valuations.

This is obviously not a perfect example (no such thing exists) but let’s take these two players. One is Rogers going for £117m and the other is a player that went for £68m last summer.

This probably isn’t the hardest quiz, Player B here is Eberechi Eze. He was three years older than Rogers is now, but he shared a similar track record of Premier League success and a similar versatility to play across the front line, and arguably was coming off a season of better production. I can understand why Rogers might be more expensive than Eze (age and remaining contract the big factors), but I am not sure I understand why a year later you would be paying a 70% premium on the fee that Arsenal paid to Crystal Palace.

None of this is a knock on the player. Rogers at 23 is exactly the profile you want to buy, and if he continues his current trajectory, £117m might not look too bad. The problem is that "if he continues his current trajectory" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. When you need a best case scenario situation for a deal to look acceptable you know that you have taken a big risk and that is exactly what this looks like.

Does history rhyme?

This situation gives me a bit of deja vu.

In January 2023, Chelsea came over the top for Mykhailo Mudryk to hijack a transfer that looked similarly certain to end with the player wearing red and white. Adam and I spent a good amount of time expressing that we should have more uncertainty about the deal and that this had the makings of a classic “winner’s curse”.

The "winner’s curse" is an auction phenomenon (which is a good approximation of transfers) where the winning bidder overpays for something with an uncertain value. This happens more often than not because bidders are making estimates based on imperfect information, and the winner is the party with the most optimistic estimate, meaning they often end up paying more than the asset's true intrinsic worth.

When you look at the history of the biggest transfers of all time the list is littered with flops and disappointments. Not that the players necessarily played poorly or even all that differently than they had previously but they never lived up to the giant expectations that were put upon them or what was needed to justify what was spent on them.

In the winter of 2023 Arsenal missed out on Mudryk but they were able to pivot to Leandro Trossard. Arsenal fans don’t need reminding but it never hurts, he just left the club having helped win the Premier League with clutch goals and two and half years of excellent performance.

I want to be careful here, because I have far more confidence in Rogers than I ever had in Mudryk, and the point is not that he'll fail at Chelsea. The point is that even though seeing another team swoop in and be able to plop down a larger pile of cash hurts the ego, this feeling and the actual outcome of the squad building are two completely separate things.

I have a ton of faith in Mikel Arteta and he will forget more about soccer than I’ll ever know but that doesn't mean he's perfect, or that he's beyond questioning. I can’t help but look at all of the data and come up thinking that Rogers wasn’t the answer to Arsenal’s left wing issue. He has done his best work drifting inside and he is not a natural fit as a player that spends most of his time near the touchline.

Arsenal are going to be shopping in an expensive tier to improve the team and I am comfortable with that but I’d like the player that they go after to have a bit less squinting and projecting to be able to justify the outlay. We don’t know exactly who Arsenal will pivot towards but this is a great point to plug Adam’s latest wide attackers rankings.

Arsenal still have that gaping hole to address this summer, but with Rogers out of the picture, the money can go toward a player who actually matches the job description: comfortable holding width, stretching a defense, able to beat his man, while creating threat and end product. The worst version of this window was never missing out on Morgan Rogers, it was paying stupid money for him and still not having an answer at left winger. Chelsea just took that version off the table and now it is time for Arsenal to find a new solution.

Playing for France in their semi-final match against Spain, William Saliba pulled up injured in the first half and he knew it was a bad one.

This was not just a nightmare for France, it was also one of the worst case scenarios for Arsenal. Saliba has been trying to play through this back injury for a while now, he gritted his way through the run in for Arsenal and then went straight into the World Cup, all the way playing through pain.

There had already been talk that after the World Cup that Saliba might need more than the standard post tournament rest and his injury Tuesday all but confirms that. Now we are left with the some major questions; how long he will be out for? how will Arsenal look without him anchoring the defense? how do they react in on the squad planning to his absence?

Saliba’s impact on Arsenal

Since being integrated into the team, Saliba has been remarkably durable, starting 163 of a possible 191 matches across the Premier League and Champions League. With/without analysis is never perfectly clean, but the gap here for Arsenal and Saliba is hard to miss.

With Saliba playing Arsenal have been one of the best teams in the world, a +1.3 goal difference backed by a +0.97 xG difference with an average of 2.2 points won per match (84 points over a season) is damn good.

In the mercifully short stretches without him, these numbers drop significantly, points per match drops 10% to a 76 point pace, goal difference drops 43%, and expected goals difference drops 35%.

Arsenal are still a good team but missing one of the best center backs in the world is a major blow.

This isn’t hopeless; Arsenal have played well without Saliba in the team but they have also seen some of the more disappointing results come with him out. This will be a major test for Arsenal as they need to prepare for the possibility that this is an extended spell on the sidelines.

What to do?

There is reporting in L’Equipe that this injury will require surgery to fix and that is something that could mean 4-5 months out of action. Arsenal reporter Charles Watts has clarified that there is no final decision on the next steps or how much time that he could miss.

“On Saliba, Arsenal are waiting to assess him once he's returned. Any suggestion on timeframe is understood to be speculation at this stage because it's just too early to know. Clearly it's a worry, but it's just not known yet how long he will be out for or whether surgery is needed.”

With the transfer window open, and preseason just ahead there is time to assess the internal options while also exploring bringing in a new player.

Arsenal have Cristhian Mosquera, Jurriën Timber, and Ben White who could all fill in at right center back. I rate all of these players highly and would feel comfortable with them starting for Arsenal but these players are also the options at right back.

Arsenal would be looking at three players to cover two positions for potentially the first 3-4 months of the season.

This amount of depth is normally something that you can just about get away with for that amount of time, but it is complicated by the uncertainty around the health of Timber and White.

Timber was only able to play in one match after coming off injured against Everton in March. His recovery has been challenging, the initial prognosis wasn’t that serious but he continued to need additional time. He had still not recovered enough to participate in the World Cup, with the concerning update from the Dutch medical team that he not recovered sufficiently to play in a “medically responsible manner”. There haven’t been any further updates on his status and this will be something that we will watch as the team gets together for preseason.

White’s recovery should hopefully be a bit better understood but his recent injury record is concerning for how much the team should depend on him to be available for coverage. His season was cut short after he suffered an MCL injury against West Ham in May, with a target to be back by preseason.

I always keep a short list of things to watch in preseason, and how the team covers right center back and right back, plus how White and Timber look physically, just jumped toward the top of it.

Unless this turns out much worse than expected, I don’t anticipate that Arsenal panic-buying a defender. In soccer it is tough to go out and look at a short term fix, if you make a transfer the team is making a multi-year commitment and that is a mismatch to provide coverage to an injury that would be months long, even something potentially “free” like John Stones (an online speculation choice, not linked as far as I know) would weigh an Arsenal move against longer contract offers, let alone Arsenal considering his track record of availability.

That being said, going into the summer I did think that there was the possibility of an addition here, especially if the team wanted to try add a different type of profile at right back.

To date there haven’t been too many links to defenders with really only Ezri Konsa rumors floating around. That might accelerate now on this injury news and the season approaching. This is also a good time to plug the lists that Adam has put together to identify and rank potential targets in both center back and full back.

The margins at the top of the Premier League are thin enough that a 76-point pace instead of an 84-point one is the difference between defending the title and watching someone else lift it. Arsenal edged their rivals last season by surviving the attritional nature of the league better than anyone, and while everyone would surely like to avoid a repeat of that, it is looking increasingly like the reality of the modern game.

On paper, Arsenal should have the depth to survive three or four months without Saliba. What they can't afford is to find out in October that the coverage plan was built on Timber and White's best-case scenarios. The next six weeks of preseason will tell us a lot, and might end up defining Arsenal’s title defense.

The World Cup is almost over, and I’ve got a feeling that once things close we’re going to get a lot of transfer drama…so I’d better hurry up and finish this dang series.

If elite wingers are football’s rarest attacking commodity, top-class center backs aren’t far behind. The modern game asks central defenders to do far more than simply win headers and make tackles. They’re expected to initiate attacks, defend huge spaces behind a high line, break opposition pressure with their passing and still handle the game’s best forwards one-versus-one. Finding players who can consistently do all of that is incredibly difficult, which explains why clubs are willing to spend so heavily whenever one becomes available.

Arsenal aren’t desperate for reinforcements in central defense, but William Saliba’s injury in this week’s semi final has certainly caused some fear that Arsenal may need additional depth in the back. Whether any of those fears materialize remains to be seen, but this list includes several names who look capable of making the jump to an elite club over the next few seasons—and a few who may already be ready.

As always, these rankings are purely based on the numbers and should not be used as a replacement for good, old-fashioned scouting. They also do not necessarily reflect my own views of these players. Now, let’s get into the top 25.

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If you have been a reader for a while this is a name that isn’t a surprise for you. Adam’s player rating formula identified him early and has been high on him for a while now.

He ranked 6th in the February update for wide attackers on the ADAM player rankings.

In the final rankings for the 2025/26 season he dropped back a bit but still came in ranked as the 8th best option.

In those posts, we don’t have the opportunity to go deep on all of the players so that gives us a good chance to take a deeper dive into this player.

I am also excited in a nerdy way, because this is a great chance to try and use the tools that I have built out to try and disentangle the large league and team effects that can skew numbers for players.

Let’s dig into this one starting where we always do looking at the high level radars and distributions.

Starting with the wide forward template (generally the role I imagine Arsenal’s wide attackers playing), Tzolis really fills things out. He put together an excellent end product season in Belgium, with excellent goals and otherworldly creative numbers.

Here are the other high level views for Tzolis looking at a few more templates.

One thing that we can’t go too much longer without mentioning is that he did this in the Belgian Pro League.

The Belgian League has gotten significantly stronger lately but there is still a massive gap between the average and top to bottom quality of this league compared to the regular “Big Five” leagues and especially the Premier League.

Here is the distribution of ratings for each team last season on my implementation of an Elo rating system.

The Premier League stands out for its strength and especially the quality of the teams outside of the top handful of teams. The other “Big Five” Leagues are all in a similar range to each other and then comes everyone else.

It is a similar but less drastic story looking at my Pi ratings for teams.

Regardless of the source, the difference in quality is a major factor and this is something that we spent a lot of energy on last season during the Gyökeres transfer but taking into account the competition he played against helped to temper the overall expectations to a realistic level for most smart fans.

When we talk about Tzolis, this is absolutely something we must keep in mind as well.

For the rest of the stats here, I am going to use his Belgian League stats plus his numbers from the Champions League. At the end here we will explore a bit more trying to adjust things for the level of competition as we sum up the final thoughts.

Tzolis for Brugge has played primarily off of the left-hand side as an inverted winger but has occasionally been flipped to play more central or as a strong side winger.

His touch and defensive actions heat map reflect this as well, with very classic left winger zones.

With Leandro Trossard who primarily played off of the left leaving for Besiktas, it doesn’t take a major leap to imagine that if Tzolis signs with Arsenal, it would be to backfill that position.

Shooting

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Are you ready for a big potential transfer saga that drags on all summer long? I think I might be if it is for Julián Alvarez.

There is a big update from the anonymous “in the know” reporter but increasingly trustworthy Hand of Arsenal account on the Alvarez situation today. Here is the summary of the big update: the player’s dream is Barcelona, Atletico’s stance is that they refuse to sell him there, he’d be open to Arsenal (or other moves) if Barcelona can’t be done.

The transfer isn’t fully in Arsenal’s control here but this report suggests that the club is doing the work to be in position, should things break there way and there is an opening.

There are a lot of moving parts here and rather than get too bogged down into the potential saga, let’s do something a bit more useful and take a look at the player and think about the potential fit at Arsenal.

Before we get too far into this, one of the very tough things is trying to fit Alvarez into a predefined position. He is an incredibly unique player that doesn’t really conform to any one position and can fit across the attacking line. Here is where he has played over the last three seasons.

Manchester City used him as the guy that filled any hole that they had in the team, playing him all of the front line. At Atleti they have made him more the centerpiece, playing more striker but with a twist compared to how Arsenal operate, pairing him with a partner and still granting him tons of freedom to float around the final third.

Jumping into the graphics for a quick stat scouting view on the player now.

The production is good, but he doesn’t jump off the stats sheet as an elite striker. If we add in the template for the attacking midfield his numbers pop a bit more.

The last season was also a bit of a “down” year for him. He dealt with injuries and seemed to not quite ever find the red hot form. Here is what his numbers look like for the season’s before this using both templates.

With the way that Arsenal and Mikel Arteta prize versatile complete players, adding Alvarez opens up a ton of potential options for the team.

There is a bit of an idea floating around that the next evolution of this Arsenal team is making a move away from a single striker back towards a more classic strike partnership. That would fit the skills and experience of Alvarez perfectly.

We don’t have the final update on the striker ratings from the ADAM score yet, but in the last update it should be no surprise that the rating system loved the fit for Alvarez as an option for Arsenal putting him at the top of the rankings.

It is not a secret that I haven’t been the biggest fan of Viktor Gyökeres and preferred other options last summer. He came in and was fine, meeting the expectations that I had set for him. One of the major drawbacks was that he often felt like a player that brought down the overall ceiling of the attack, and didn’t bring out the best in the players that were around him. Alvarez with his more 9.5 style and ability to be more than just a target in the box can potentially bring more of that to the team if he is leading the line.

This could be a me issue, but my preference has generally been more towards players that fit the mold of an Alvarez and I think that is what makes me so potentially excited about this link.

So, does he fit? About as well as any realistic target could.

The profile matches the system, the age matches the need, and the flexibility raises the ceiling of the whole attack rather than one position in it.

It felt like last summer Arsenal were so desperate for a striker that they didn’t have the luxury of trying to wait for the “perfect player” and had to pull the trigger and make a compromise choice. I don’t fault them for that and it ended up with Arsenal ending a long wait for the title. If the standoff in Madrid breaks the right way, this is the one you potentially tear up all of the other plans you’ve made and go for it.

The World Cup knockout rounds are nearing their end, but the transfer market waits for no one.

With clubs across Europe busy trying to strengthen before the new season, there may not be a more sought-after profile than an explosive wide attacker. The modern winger is expected to stretch defenses, create chances, score goals and press relentlessly, while beating defenders one-versus-one in an era where organized defensive structures make that harder than ever. There simply aren’t many players capable of consistently doing all of those things, which is why proven wingers have become some of the most expensive assets in football.

Arsenal find themselves among the clubs searching for more firepower out wide. Whether they ultimately land one of the headline names or uncover a less obvious option, the Gunners have been linked with a steady stream of wingers throughout the summer already. Some of those players appear on this list, while others may be names you’ve never heard of…but all have produced the numbers to warrant a closer look.

As always, these rankings are purely based on the numbers and should not be used as a replacement for good, old-fashioned scouting. They also do not necessarily reflect my own views of these players. Now, let’s get into the rankings.

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Arsenal won the Premier League for the first time in 22 years. This is often something that buys the people that helped deliver it good will and credit. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case with many fans and Arsenal’s Sporting Director Andrea Berta right now.

It is transfer season and that always tends to get fans a bit anxious, especially when other clubs are already making moves and Arsenal haven’t. This undercurrent of discontent came to the surface more when the anonymous but seemingly well connected twitter account HandofArsenal posted a long update that was critical of Berta’s process so far this summer:

Important to ensure discussions are not labelled as crash outs. I dont have the privilege of recording a video so Im just going to explain my fair and honest thoughts thus far.

Fans are not angry at Monga going to City its more so the laid back approach of trying to outsmart a market where money talks.

Losing out on a talent who badly wanted Arsenal over £3/4 million is not being “disciplined”its just dithering and stubbornness. He would have gone on loan, a club would have covered his wages and you could have flipped for profit but Andrea took too long and City should have never even had a chance. Its just the truth.

Not paying ungodly amounts to Tonali’s agents is fair and the same can be said about his wages and £100m fee. I find it hard to believe fans would have been angry at signing Fernandes for £85m if that who YOU really want. The market has shifted and we need adapt. Lowballing Newcastle for a midfielder who improves us massively is just a piss take. Make a serious offer and get it done if HE is the ONE. That is what fans are saying.

Villa have told us £130m for Morgan. If YOU believe that is way too much, make a FAIR offer and lets see how they react. Barcola is not any cheaper so just make your mind up.

Rice, Saliba, Timber and Saka are struggling and we need to ensure they are taken care of while having adequate cover to begin our title defence.

Mikel always calls for fair critique and as a fan its fair to express concerns. I personally dont need transfer dopamine but im just asking to move correct and that is based on information I have. Im sure the club will make moves, lets get a move on.

We are Premier League Champions, move like it.

This was the trigger that got the conversation about Berta going. I posed the question to people that weren’t satisfied or sold on him on social media and I think that it boils down into three main questions.

1. Whether last summer's window was good or just sufficient?

2. Whether the credit for it belongs to Berta, to Arteta, or to a deal done before Berta walked in the door?

3. And whether the approach that won a title, depth over stars and discipline over urgency, is the same approach that can defend one?

Let’s go through them in order here.

Was last summer's window good, or just sufficient?

For Berta we only have a single summer window to try and draw conclusions from, and even here it is always tough from the outside to make judgements because we don’t always have the full picture into the plan and process.

Looking at the moves that Arsenal made in their busy summer is something that I wanted to dig deeper into and I still might do that if there is more interest in it, for now we can do a quick fire version.

One of the things that has been a hallmark of Arteta‘s time with Arsenal is that there seems to always be a plan for the summer that directly addresses one of the major issues from the season prior. The 2024-25 season was marred by injury and the depth of the team was lacking to ensure that the level didn’t fall too far. This seems like exactly what the window was designed to address, with Arsenal adding eight players and only having one departure from the first XI in Thomas Partey.

One of the first steps on seeing if a player was able to make an impact on a team was looking at their usage over the course of the season. Here is Arsenal’s minutes distribution from last season with the minutes from the Premier League and Champions League, with the new signings highlighted.

Of the eight players signed, six played at least 1,000 league minutes and eclipsed a third of the available minutes in the Premier League and Champions League, with only the true “backup” (Christian Nørgaard and Kepa Arrizabalaga) type players not getting over that threshold.

Arsenal in 2025-26 had another injury hit season. Here is the injury burden for the Premier League last season with Arsenal above average for total injuries and matches lost.

According to the data from Transfermarkt.com, Arsenal had the second most total injuries in the Premier League and lost the 6th most matches to injury last season. It wasn’t quite as bad as the 2024-25 season where Arsenal lost 365 matches to injury and 2,140 days but these are still the type of injury total’s that can derail a season.

Arsenal being able to have the depth available from the big transfer window made it so that the level of the team, even when the first choice players weren’t available remained high. Here is the xG Difference by match last season in the Premier League and Champions League that really illustrates this well.

One of the hallmarks of the team was the consistently good play without major prolonged dips. This was what ultimately separated the team from the challengers, who had extended periods of poor play where they couldn’t keep pace with Arsenal.

Bringing this back to the Berta conversation, I think that there is a valid point that the level of the team was already high, and capable of winning the Premier League. The team had come within a few bounces going their way of winning the League in 2022/23 and 2023/24, with a still strong but injury hit 2024/25 where they advanced to the Champions League semi-final.

So while this was the season that Arsenal got over the line, it’s not quite as easy as pointing to that as the final answer for this conversation. The team had already been built into one of the best teams in the world previously, with players that were brought in before he arrived. The players that were signed made major contributions to winning the title and reaching the Champions League final but I think that it was fair to say in season one, most were not massive needle moving players.

Let’s go through the players that made significant contributions to the team here quickly.

Martín Zubimendi was probably the closest player that Arsenal had as a needle mover addition in the summer. He was the one that came in with the clearest path into the first XI and played the third most minutes for this team behind David Raya and Declan Rice.

His production wasn’t perfect and there are still parts of his game in midfield that I think need to be compensated for, primarily ball progression from the defensive and middle third, but he was still in the conversation for one of the most important signings any team made in the Premier League this season.

I’d give this a solid 7.5/10 signing. The end of season dip dropped this down from rating higher but this was a good signing.

The story and the vibes of signing Eberechi Eze can’t be topped but his overall impact did leave something to be desired, even if he did deliver on the promise that he was a moments player.

I think the biggest frustration that I had with Eze was that he could disappear from games a bit too easily, maybe this because he often replace Martin Ødegaard in the team and when he plays Ødegaard is often the player that things flow through, that is just not Eze. His production overall looks solidly above average but it was pretty heavily concentrated in a few matches.

Eze has obvious talents but it did seem like last season, he wasn’t able to show them off consistently enough for Arsenal. There is still potentially a question of where the best place to play him and what role he should have in the team as the planning for next season gets underway here.

I’d give this a slightly disappointing 6/10 signing. Eze was available all summer and Arsenal seemed reluctant to pull the trigger early when they had the option, only going back when Kai Havertz got injured. I think the season confirmed that the reluctance might have been warranted here, and even though the story was perfect, the fit with the current team might not have been.

Without Viktor Gyökeres, Arsenal would have been in a similar striker depth crisis again (assuming Arsenal held out for perfect, it’s hard to totally play out a different scenario). He’s a player that still divides opinion, but I would give him a passing grade for his first season’s performance.

This was good, but not great performance. He had lots of frustrating moments but I think to be fair you could see that he grew and adapted to the Premier League as the season went along. I would still think that he isn’t the answer for the position long term but he can continue to contribute to the team in meaningful ways.

This is a 5/10 signing from me. He met my expectations but I think I set them at a fairly low bar.

Noni Madueke is the type of player that I like and rate highly but I totally understand that he will frustrate a majority of fans with his play. He’s an undeniable talented player and shows that over 90% of the pitch but when it comes time to deliver the final action he goes from phenomenal to “what the hell is happening here?” quickly and too often.

The most concerning stat here was that his shot numbers cratered at Arsenal, he went 3.06 open play shots per 90 at Chelsea last season to just 1.32 with Arsenal with a corresponding drop in his expected goals and without a bump up in the average quality. His shot volume was one of the things that made me so excited about him and where I thought his end product could still take a step forward and that just didn’t happen.

That being said, looking at the stats that try and measure how a player changes the team’s overall chances of scoring and the threat created his ability to do most things at a high level shine through. Here is the Goal Probability Added and xThreat rankings for Arsenal from last season in the Premier League and Champions League.

I’d give Noni the same slightly disappointing 6/10 signing, that I gave Eze. I had higher expectations for him and I thought that there was a chance he could offer something more on the left side, but we never really got to see that last season. This was also a situation where having a player of this caliber covered for Bukayo Saka still struggling with injury, he’s not Saka but the drop off in the team with him on the right made a big difference and unfortunately that might be a problem going into next season as well.

Piero Hincapié was a bit of a surprise signing last season and it was made permanent at the beginning of the month. Hincapié provided important cover at both left back and center back and while he wouldn’t be the first choice at any of the positions, the best compliment you can give him is that if his name was on the team sheet, you didn’t feel worried that he’d be a weakness.

I think that there is still potentially more in the player that can be unlocked playing a full back, especially one that is comfortable playing as the player on the touchline in the final third. That gives a great change of pace option and needed backup to Riccardo Calafiori.

I’d give this a solid 7/10 signing.

Cristhian Mosquera was the cheapest of the primary signings and the one that surprised us most in a good way. He ended up playing much more than I expected this season and was often thrown into some very tough situations that can eat up a young player but he handled himself well.

He’s a center back by trade but did an admirable job filling in at right back for the annual injury crisis that the club experienced there. It’s a bit of a bummer that one of his last actions was giving away a penalty in the Champions League final because that is not a fair reflection of his contribution to the team over the season or even in that match.

I’d give this a solid 9/10 signing. For a €15.0m it is hard to imagine getting more than this, and even if Arsenal only wanted to flip him, I could imagine a team coming and doubling up Arsenal’s money easily here. I think that he will stick with the team into next season and he will continue to get opportunities at center back.

Looking back now at my ratings for the moves, I think that there is some merit to the critique that this was more of a sufficient window than a good one. The window overall did accomplish what the team set out to do, but it raised the floor of the team rather than pushing up the ceiling, at least in season one for the players that were added.

Whose window was it anyway?

The Athletic in their deep dive into the story behind the move for Zubimendi had this very interesting nugget that is directly relevant to our Berta analysis here:

In the early part of 2025, Real Sociedad officials travelled to London to conclude the agreement. By the time Andrea Berta arrived in April, the deal was all but done. Berta may have pursued a different profile if given more time — during his time at Atletico Madrid, Zubimendi was not a player Berta coveted.

This deal was completed with Berta as the Sporting Director, but the reporting suggests that this was not his move and it may not have been a move that the team had made if the timing of when he joined were different.

The Zubimendi deal, especially for the first 80% of the season, was seen as one of the better moves that Arsenal made in the summer. Berta didn’t force a pivot away from the deal but the reporting suggests that he wasn’t pivotal or potentially even his preferred player.

This carries over into the other high profile transfer that happened last summer with the striker situation. A move for Benjamin Sesko had serious groundwork done previously under Edu and Ayto like there was for Zubiminedi, but there was time for Berta to make his stamp on this deal preferring the Swedish striker.

Again, from The Athletic and their reporting on the background of the Gyökeres signing.

The preferred target at that stage was RB Leipzig’s Sesko — a deal Arsenal had explored in the summer of 2024, and planned to return to this year.

In March, Edu’s interim successor Jason Ayto was planning a visit to Germany to try to make advances in that direction. It appeared Arsenal were set for the summer of Sesko.

Then, at the end of that month, Berta was appointed, and the dynamic changed.

Ayto’s Germany trip was shelved, and Gyokeres’ name came firmly into contention. Berta was a longstanding admirer of the player, and felt he could be the forward Arsenal need to help them end their current five-year wait for silverware.

This post isn’t an attempt to re-litigate the transfer, this is just pointing out the fact that Berta did believe strongly enough to have Arsenal deviate from the path that they were on for the striker target. We can’t go back and replay the season in that other scenario, and we can’t know for sure how Benjamin Sesko would have played for Arsenal, the reporting suggests that Gyökeres was his man.

That won’t stop us from wondering what if and it will be something that almost certainly will come up for years to come. At the end of the last season, here is how both of the strikers compared to each other in the Premier League.

For better or worse, that is going to be his signature call from transfer window number one with Arsenal.

The Sporting Director isn’t personally scouting, doing the data analysis and building the short lists on their own. They are the head of the apparatus that is responsible for that and they take into account the input from the coaching staff preferences and the constraints that the club must work under from ownership.

The cleanest reading of this is that, Berta executed the architecture of a squad building plan that was largely finalized before he took charge. Ultimately, the buck still stops with him and he has in his year plus in charge revamped and rebuilt the recruitment team that built the foundation of this Championship. This will say less about last summer and much more about what is coming up in the next windows.

Can the approach that won the title defend it?

This question is much harder to try and address than the others. We almost need to wait and see and time will tell, but that isn’t satisfying right now.

The approach last summer was depth and quantity favored over targeting select stars and quality. The Berta m.o. was to monitor a number of different situations, use media reports more than the previous Arsenal recruitment and to be willing to be disciplined and patient for the opportunity to present itself. This is a major deviation and contrast to Edu’s time at Arsenal where it seemed that Arsenal had a few clearer targets that they dialed into and had a long term courting process to bring them into the team.

There were times, where Arsenal were so assured in their evaluations and fit that they would go beyond what was seen as a prudent valuation, paying over the odds to get their man. We don’t have the perfect information on the decision making here but that might be changing here now with recent examples:

• Feeling that Sesko was too expensive for the current level of the player.

• The Jeremy Monga saga where Arsenal had the inside track and looked to save £3-4m, instead of meeting the ask from Leicester.

• Walking away from Sandro Tonali and Mateus Fernandes at the asking/final price

• Low balling Newcastle in the pursuit of Bruno Guimarães

• Balking at the price tags for Morgan Rogers and Bradley Barcola

I am sympathetic to this style of negotiation. If you are never able to walk away or to credibly say that this is our number, that is a reputation that a team will develop and a team will continue to get exploited to have every last pound extracted. It’s not our money, but we all understand that Arsenal operate under an actual budget constraint and that money spent has an opportunity cost and could have gone to something else to potentially improve the club.

Last summer also saw a comfort in targeting fully peak age, big money signings, that we hadn’t seen to this extent previously at Arsenal. Eze and Gyökeres were both 27 when they signed, coming in on hefty fees and wages, these are the types of moves that are made for the short term to exploit the current window and not exactly to extend it and keep it open longer.

This nearly worked to absolute perfection last season with Arsenal getting over the hump winning the title and reaching the finals of the League Cup and the Champions League, but this does shorten the refreshment of talent timeline and demands continual churn in the team and an improvement on the ability to sell these players on the backside of their contracts.

The question is whether that's his philosophy or just what year one required, as the summer goes on we will be able to answer this more clearly.

Final thoughts

Coming back to the three questions that started this.

Was the window good or just sufficient? My ratings on the transfer’s from last season average out to roughly a 6.8, and I think that’s the honest answer: a bit better than sufficient, and sufficient was enough. The window was designed to raise the floor of the team and the extra depth and the consistently high floor is what won Arsenal the Premier League. What it didn’t do was produce a needle mover, and that is the itch that fans are feeling now. Liverpool and Chelsea have “won” the last couple of transfer windows and that didn’t translate on the field, Spurs are going big now with the early moves and big spending. This same pattern played out last summer and Arsenal ended the window in a strong position and that could be what plays out again here.

Whose window was it? The reporting on the big transfer postmortems makes it fairly clear that Berta executed a plan that was largely in place before he arrived, with one signature call in Gyökeres and one clear personal win in Mosquera. It’s hard to make a final judgement on a player after a single season, so we will continue to see how the last transfers perform this coming season. That’s not nothing, but it also means his actual body of work at Arsenal is thinner than one title suggests. The rebuilt recruitment operation is his now, fully, and this is the first window where the process and the results belong to him alone.

Can this approach defend a title? This is the one we genuinely can’t answer in July, so instead of pretending, I’ll make it a short list of things I’d like to see from Arsenal this window, and I’ll come back to this list in September:

1. A big bet on a needle moving talent, a real first XI upgrade and not just more depth signings. We can’t lose the depth, but making a big swing is where he will earn his money.

2. A real sale that doesn’t feel like a major discount to be rid of deadwood, because moving players out is the skill we haven’t seen at all yet. This is probably the hardest of the tasks at Arsenal because you can’t just throw money at the problem.

3. Building not just for next season, but for 3-5 years from now as well, after missing out on Monga, it is important to keep the pipeline stocked with talent beyond the first team. A coach can and probably should be focused on the short term, the Sporting Director needs to have the long term view in mind as well.

The title buys Berta the right to be judged patiently. It doesn’t buy him the right not to be judged. It’s far too early in my view to make a final judgement on his job performance but the early results have been mostly fine with me, I don’t think he’s been perfect nor has he been a disaster. Let’s see how things look when September rolls around.

The Arsenal interest in Bruno Guimarães continues to heat up.

The latest news from David Ornstein in the Athletic is that he has informed Newcastle of his wish to join Arsenal plus a second bid improving upon the one made in June.

I have already gone more in depth on what the player can do in the stats scouting article and more recently when the links to him first started. So that would be the place to go if you want to learn more about the player, instead today I want to dig more into what factors should be weighed up here in trying to decide if this transfer makes sense or not for Arsenal.

For this we will break it down into trying to figure out what a fair price range would be for the player, making the case for it, talking about the opportunity cost and alternatives. Lets get into it.

Attempting a valuation

I have always been fascinated with trying to think about the valuations on players. My University degree was in economics and thinking about the market (and non-market) forces at play to value unique players is right in the wheelhouse of my interests.

I have played around with valuation models in the past and I have incorporated what I have learned and done further back testing to build an improved updated version here. I will do a full write up at some point but here is a high level view of things.

The estimated fee model is built from the player's last three seasons of performance, weighted toward the most recent, and it accounts for age, position, minutes played, contract length, and the level of competition. That output gets anchored to transfermarket’s estimates and calibrated against real completed transfers (adjusted for transfer inflation). It also knows English clubs pay a premium for the same player, which is why the Premier League number runs a bit higher. I purposefully include a range to be upfront that this is an estimate, and to capture the band where the fee most likely lands (historically, 90% of transfers fall inside it).

The second model is based on the “CannonStats Rating” an attempt to get a player’s skills and statistical output down to a single number, this is a very tough task and it will come with all of the usual caveats about data. I think everyone in analytics has to try at least once this and I have gone through many iterations of this over the years trying to find just the right weights and information to include. From this we use historical inflation adjusted transfers, age, position, minutes played, contract length, and the level of competition to estimate a player’s value if he were to be sold.

Here is what all of this gives us for Guimarães.

The transfer estimate model is at £50m, this is a bit lower than Transfermarkt’s £60m and Fotmob’s £54m but at least in the same ballpark. There is a fairly large spread on the estimated fee with the upper bound (which seems likely here given Newcastle’s stance) sitting just under £70m.

My rating system really likes the player and even with his age, this puts the valuation higher at £57m. The upper bound here is significantly higher pushing to £82m and this is a reflection of the fact that when you get into the elite tier of players, transfer fees start behaving in a more exponential fashion.

Making the case for just paying up

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Besiktas have agreed a €20million (£17.1m, $22.9m) deal with Arsenal to sign Leandro Trossard.

The deal consists of an €18m fee with a further €2m in add-ons but the transfer is not yet completed, with wages up to around €9m and personal terms in the process of being finalised… The deal is considered unlikely to progress until after the national team’s run in the World Cup ends.

This move isn’t unexpected, with Trossard on most people’s lists for a potential sale this summer but I have to admit I am still a bit bummed to face the actual reality of Arsenal without him in the team.

He’s been a player that was a bit of a second choice, or after thought his entire stint at Arsenal but he’s fought hard and will leave the team as a cult hero and well deserved Premier League Champion.

He joined Arsenal 3.5 years ago and was arguably the third choice player that January after chasing Mykhailo Mudryk and flirting with João Félix on loan. When he signed for Arsenal that winter these were my final thoughts on the player:

I look at a move like this and see a player that while not flashy and exciting like a Mudyrk. We can’t project a massive upside onto him and see a player who COULD become a top 5 attacking player in the world. With Trossard, we know much more what he is and that is less likely to change. I can totally understand why that might feel a little underwhelming to fans, in hypothetical transfers the right tail outcomes always come true and that’s just not as exciting with a 28 year old.

I do believe that he comes in with a very high floor. He is a finished product (maybe at the end of his prime with hopefully a graceful decline over the next couple of years) and coming in from a Premier League team, who play in a similar style. His adaption should be as minimal as possible, giving him the best chance to make a positive impact over the next few months.

I am happy to say that I really liked the move for Arsenal but even as a cheerleader for the transfer, I was probably too pessimistic on how good the best case could turn out for Arsenal.

He was able to make the expected instant impact down the stretch in the 2022/23 season and then just never stopped making an impact for Arsenal.

I thought that he would lose his place to Gabriel Martinelli, or Eberechi Eze, or that he would get sold last summer but nope, he knew that he could make an impact and fought to make sure everyone else knew it too.

This meme from friend of the newsletter , that adapts the classic Moneyball philosophy sums things up pretty succinctly and perfectly.

Since joining Arsenal he has scored 34 goals in the Premier League plus Champions League. He has been incredibly good at finding pockets of space inside of the box and his incredible ball striking has turned good looks into goals at an elite rate.

Since Trossard joined Arsenal in January of 2023 in the Premier League plus Champions League, he has provided the third most non-penalty goals, the third most assists, and is also third for the combined goals plus assists.

His output was also incredibly consistent over his 3.5 years with Arsenal, here are his goals plus assists tallies by season for Premier League plus Champions League.

• 2022/23 (partial season): 10 np G+A, 0.83 per 90

• 2023/24: 18 np G+A, 0.70 per 90

• 2024/25: 19 np G+A, 0.51 per 90

• 2025/26: 16 np G+A, 0.53 per 90

His end product has also been incredibly clutch. He has scored 20 goals that gave Arsenal a lead or brought them back to level, with an additional 6 that pushed the margin to a more comfortable +2 level.

None of the goals however will be remembered like the one he scored against West Ham to give Arsenal a late lead in a game that kept their gap at 5 points on Manchester City in this last season. If you needed a goal in pivotal situation, Trossard was one of the players that you wanted on the pitch for Arsenal.

His assists haven’t quite been as skewed towards “clutch” but he’s added an additional 10 assists that moved Arsenal into a winning position.

The business of selling Trossard itself is hard to argue with.

Trossard turns 32 in December, €20m is a fair price for that age profile, and this is exactly the kind of sale that a club with Arsenal’s ambition, and desire to continue to push to improve is supposed to make. Knowing a move is right and feeling good about it are two different things, though, and this one lands squarely in the gap between them.

What I’ll remember about Trossard is that he was the rare signing where knowing exactly what the player is turned out to be the whole point. He arrived as the sensible third choice behind flashier names, I projected a productive but graceful decline, and instead spent three and a half years refusing to hand his minutes to anyone. No massive upside story, no highlight-reel dribbling, just a player who found the soft spot in the box, struck the ball as cleanly as anyone in the squad, and delivered over and over in the minutes that decide seasons.

Trossard leaves as a Premier League Champion and a cult hero, which is about the best possible outcome for a January signing nobody was excited about. His contributions to this run will be remembered for a long time and every Arsenal will carry a soft spot in their heart for him.

Thanks for everything, Leo.

I had a bit of a weird feeling come over me as I sat down to write this: sympathy for Aston Villa and Newcastle.

Over the last few seasons these clubs have clearly wanted to spend more on the talent in their squads, but the rules in place have done exactly what they were meant to do and given them a hard limit.

I’m not against spending rules. Guardrails to protect the solvency of these privately owned but very much community and public institutions are prudent. As I understand it, the gripe from Villa and Newcastle (and others) is that the rules as implemented are a continuation of the structural unfairness that has always been built into the game.

It’s the same feeling I get when I see a “smaller” team hit on less heralded players through good scouting and development, only to have that team picked apart as the bigger clubs come in for the talent.

It only goes so far, though, because I have the same tribal streak that’s inherent in most Premier League fans, and you can only feel bad for fellow teams for so long. The structure and hierarchy of the sport isn’t new, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone. Even as an Arsenal fan, where we sit in a privileged spot able to scoop up plenty of that talent, we understand that there are still a handful of clubs above us (more when we were at our recent low point) with the ability to do the exact same thing to us.

There were proposals to move towards a more American-style cap that would have been the same for everyone, but that was voted down. I’d have been interested to see how that changed the game, but it was a radical proposal, one that would have shifted the whole landscape of the league and potentially the Premier League’s spot as the de facto Super League.

That last part is really the key here. The current Premier League feels like it’s in a pretty good place: enough overall balance between the teams, but still room for clubs to build themselves into long-term good sides. My own view is that you don’t want perfect parity. If all of the teams are too equal, it starts to feel like a season is too much up to chance. The other extreme isn’t great either. Look at France and Germany, where one team is such an overwhelming favorite that the title race can feel like a formality, just confirming what was expected all along.

To a certain extent we saw that in the Premier League last season. The quality top to bottom has never been stronger (as you can see any time a PL team faces a non-PL team), but the gap inside the league was more compressed. The story of the season became that it was the worst ever, because people have come to expect a more stratified league with clearer tiers, rather than one where the margins are this fine.

Everyone is aware of the pecking order, and how talent flows up towards where more of the money and prestige sits. Spending rules themselves aren’t new. The current version is (and it’s actually a bit looser than previous ones), but the concept has been around for nearly a decade and a half now. The rules predate the current ownership at both clubs, and both have had a voice in shaping the latest regulations that came into effect this season.

The exact thing Villa and Newcastle want, a quick, owner-funded route to the top of the pile, is exactly what the rules were designed to slow down, a direct response to what clubs like Chelsea, Manchester City and PSG had done previously to shake up the established order. It can feel unfair, and it no doubt is unfair, especially because it looks like the ladder has been pulled up.

Like the saying goes, life isn’t fair, so you have to deal with it and just try to be better/smarter/luckier than everyone else to build something that can take you where you want to go.

We’re now neck-deep in the World Cup knockout rounds, so naturally it’s time for another rankings article.

This time we’re moving out wide to arguably the most demanding position in modern football. Gone are the days when fullbacks were simply asked to defend wingers and occasionally overlap. Today’s elite players are expected to progress the ball, create chances, defend one-versus-one, tuck into midfield, press high and somehow still have enough legs left to sprint 70 yards in transition. It’s one of the hardest positions to fill, which probably explains why just about every top club seems to be looking for one every summer.

Arsenal are certainly no exception. Whether Mikel Arteta ultimately sticks with Ben White and Jurrien Timber or looks to add another option on the right, the Gunners have been linked with a steady stream of right backs over the past few months. With that in mind, this list should offer a few names worth keeping an eye on as the transfer window unfolds, alongside plenty of left backs and versatile options capable of playing on either side.

As always, these rankings are purely based on the numbers and should not be used as a replacement for good, old-fashioned scouting. They also do not necessarily reflect my own views of these players. Now, let’s get into the top 25.

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Here is David Ornstein with the big news:

This could be a bit of a double gift to Arsenal. First, Diomande was one of the main targets for Liverpool to replace Mohamed Salah, so it is always a bit nice to see a rival miss out on a major signing. Secondly, this could be one of the dominoes that frees up Bradley Barcola to leave Paris this summer.

Barcola is at the pivotal two years remaining on his contract situation and the reports suggest that he is frustrated that he is behind some of the other highly talented attackers in the PSG squad. PSG seem open to selling him if there is no path for him to extend his current contract, but it would have been based on a replacement coming in for him. That is exactly what Diomande could be here.

The left winger market isn’t the strongest right now, and that makes me quite interested in the potential of Barcola, especially given the production that he has put up at PSG.

Arsenal have been linked with him but so far he has seemed like more of a secondary option to Morgan Rogers. I am a fan of Rogers talent but I am not sure I see him as a potentially elite left wing type player.

The stat comparison of the two players on the winger templates seems almost unfair.

This is more of a quick post than a deep dive and their some reasons that the numbers for Barcola could be inflated here. He plays in Ligue 1, where the quality of the opposition isn’t as deep as it would be in the Premier League, it is still a talented league but it is much more of the 5th toughest of the “Big 5” Leagues. PSG are also a “Super Team” and playing with other extremely talented players can inflate a players numbers, especially when combined with having a big talent edge in every match played.

That being said I am still on board with this player and I think that he would fit Arsenal’s squad needs quite well.

Maybe there would be more to the plan with Rogers and the club don’t view him as a wide player. Maybe Eberechi Eze would shift to a wide left role? Maybe there is another winger that the club is after and Rogers is a central player? I guess we will have to wait and see because from my own perspective, if Barcola is available that seems like a more logical target for Arsenal given that the left wing is basically the major first XI weakness in the squad.

It can be tough buying from a team like PSG, you’re not likely to pry away one of their starters if they want to keep them, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia seems like he would be a pipe dream here. You could potentially get one the players that is just outside the first XI and that fits this situation nicely.

In a way this sort of reminds me of the Alexis Sanchez opportunity that Arsenal were able to take advantage of. Barcelona brought in Luis Suarez and that made the path to playing time tough for Sanchez and Arsenal were able to capitalize beating Liverpool to the signing. He was a cast off but he sure didn’t play like one and was able to thrive at Arsenal in a more primary role than what he was able to have in Spain.

Barcola wouldn’t be cheap and there would be a number of teams (including Liverpool) that would be interested in trying to sign him but given the state of the squad I’d really like to see Arsenal enter the race here for this player if he is available here.

We will watch this as the summer goes on here.

Everybody loves a 10, until that 10 has a game or two that isn’t quite what they were expecting. Or at least, that feels like the story of Arsenal’s primary creator role the past two seasons, doesn’t it?

With rumors circulating Arsenal made an offer for Bruno Guimarães this week, there are some big questions about the future of Arsenal’s midfield, including whether they’ll even use an advanced creative passer in their primary XI.

The number 10, or most advanced midfielder, is typically thought of as the creative spark in any good side, and for now that viewpoint does seem to be holding up, with names like Florian Wirtz, Cole Palmer, Bruno Fernandes, Rayan Cherki and others still considered the pinnacle. But a shift such as what Arsenal may be considering could also signal a bit of a paradigm shift to more me-first/shoot-first attacking midfielders in the mold of Ebere Eze and Morgan Rogers, with strings being pulled from a bit farther back.

If that happens, the ADAM formula will adapt, but for now it does still place a heavy tax on creative passing. With that in mind, remember that this list is stats-driven, and always do your homework and watch games before making up your mind on players!

Now, that’s enough chatter, isn’t it? Let’s get into some stuff.

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Arsenal are set to make a move for Newcastle United midfielder Bruno Guimarães after holding exploratory talks.

The Gunners have explored approaches for either Guimarães or his club team-mate Sandro Tonali as they look to bolster their midfield.

During discussions aimed at checking the financial conditions of a deal for Guimarães, it is understood a fee of around £60m was initially intimated with the 28-year-old’s representatives.

Arsenal are now poised to make a fresh offer as they remain in talks over a deal for the Brazil international, but it is understood Newcastle have not yet had an official approach.

This is far from the first time that Guimarães has been linked to Arsenal. Before he moved to Newcastle in January 2022, one of the other serious destinations was North London. We also saw the rumors come back two years ago in the summer of 2024 that Arsenal were exploring a move. Here was my stat scouting from that time.

Maybe the third time is the charm?

I was very skeptical of the links this morning, thinking that this was noise from Guimarães agent, using Arsenal as a stalking horse to try and put some pressure on Newcastle for a contract extension (his deal at Newcastle goes through 2028). With multiple reports today, from sources that are actually connected with Arsenal, there seems to be some actual smoke here to this rumor.

At least enough that I want to share my thoughts on the potential move and think about the actual fit.

Let’s start where we always do with some high level graphics about the player.

Guimarães continues to be one of the more well rounded midfielders in the Premier League, offering a solid combination of ball progression and ball winning, with some attacking threat added on top.

The other big positive for him is that he has an excellent track record of production, with his previous Premier League seasons all looking similarly close to each other for total production.

It would be hard to find a better ready made option that you could plug into a Premier League midfield than Guimarães. On top of that, last season he showed off his versatility playing all over the midfield for a Newcastle that was struck by injuries.

It’s hard to fully picture what the plan is here at Arsenal if this move is finalized. He would not be the type of player that I don’t think would be happy with a Christian Nørgaard type role, so it would seem like he would come in to take minutes off of the likes of the other midfielders.

Last season, Arsenal did rely very heavily on Declan Rice and Martín Zubimendi in midfield, with each playing over 4,000 minutes last season. Here is the team minutes distribution for the Premier League plus Champions League.

I have always been a fairly strong believer in, you want your best and most important players playing a lot, but given the demands that the modern game is putting on players, the total minutes load for a player at the pinnacle of the sport is getting pretty crazy.

This is still the type of move that is bigger than just taking some more rotation type minutes off of the incumbents and does, at least to me, signal a fairly large reduced role or even an exit could be in the cards. I just talked how Arsenal are facing that tough decision with Martin Ødegaard today and this is something that could hint at it as well. This could also be Arsenal viewing Zubimendi’s first season as less than a roaring success and with other moves planned trying to add something more to the position.

Like I said, it is hard to see the plan right now without getting a better view of how the rest of the summer could play out.

My view previously saw Guimarães always as more of a 6/8 type midfielder and I could imagine that you could see him successfully step into the role that Zubimendi had last season.

He is a much more progressive passer, and that is the one area that I think that the team struggled with having Zubimendi playing deep, especially during the Ødegaard absences. So if the plan is to move away from the Captain having such a load bearing role in the team and trying to play with a truer “10” or a second striker, having Guimarães partnering Rice on paper looks like a real option here.

I have long talked about that trying to find a player that does similar types of things to Ødegaard is tough, but Guimarães is one of the players that does come the closest here. Looking at their radar charts from last season really shows the similarity here.

This is more of an eye test and gut feel move, but I’d feel more comfortable with Guimarães playing in a double pivot behind a “10” than I would with Ødegaard, even if the overall stats here aren’t all that different. We haven’t really seen that scenario tried, so maybe that is why I am skeptical of it but maybe that would work and save the hassle of bedding in a new player.

That is really the crux of the decision about the transfer. Guimarães isn’t an over the hill ready to retire type player but he also isn’t a spring chicken at 28 (turning 29 in November of the next season). Given that Arsenal already have Rice (27), Zubimendi (27), Ødegaard (27), and Mikel Merino (30), they aren’t hurting for prime age midfielders and experience and probably could use someone a bit younger to start bedding in.

The plus side here is that even with his age, he has been a robust player (if he played for Arsenal perhaps he would be described as potentially ran into the ground). Guimarães has eclipsed 2,400 league minutes in each of the last four seasons, including making 38 and 37 starts in 24/25 and 23/24. He has played over 18,000 minutes since 2019 in his domestic league plus European play. He has been quite good at being available with an injury record that is quite clean.

His worst injury happens to have come last season which isn’t ideal but that has really been the only time he has been sidelined by injury for an extended period.

Final thoughts

Bringing it all together, I would be excited for this deal.

It would depend on the price and how it effected the rest of the summer business and how the squad all fits together to have a final verdict but he’s a damn good player, and I like when Arsenal sign those guys.

Given that I think that Arsenal could sell Ødegaard for something in the £60m to £80m range, I would expect to pay something similar here. Their ages and profiles make them solid comps for each other and I think that they would be looking for contracts in a similar ballpark. Ødegaard might have a bit more of an injury concern that discounts him but not so much to really throw things off here.

I do have a bit of that, “but why?” bouncing around in my head given the current midfield but sometimes at the beginning of the summer it is hard to see the full plan for how the squad will look in September.

If we get more concrete links where this looks like it could happen, we will dig deeper into the stats but for now let’s see how you guys are thinking about this potential deal with poll.

Things change fast in the Premier League. 18 months ago if someone floated the idea of Arsenal selling Martin Ødegaard that would have been seen as unserious hyperbole or link chasing behavior.

He was the captain, the creative heartbeat of the team, and was in the conversation for the best midfielder in the world.

Here we are now and it doesn’t seem so far fetched that it could happen. The reporting out there is from generally solid sources and it seems like something that should be taken seriously. The BBC's Sami Mokbel has spoken about Arsenal being willing to listen to offers "for the right price," football.london puts him among a group of first team players facing uncertain futures, and there have been links to Bayern Munich with quieter inquiries out of Italy.

This isn’t a fire yet, but there might be the start of a bit of smoke building here and the fact that this is a discussion at all tells you how much things have changed.

This is a big deal and it deserves a good hard examination, so let’s get into it.

The injury cloud hanging over everything

It’s hard to go too much further without talking more about the injuries and the effects that they have had on him.

Ødegaard has been a robust player over his career and had maintained a relatively clean injury history. From the time he joined Arsenal on loan through the end of the 2023-2024 season he had missed just 6 total matches due to injury.

Since then he has been hit with a number of injuries and that has seen him miss 45 matches in just the last two seasons.

Even more than the time that he has missed, watching him play you can see that it seemed to take quite a bit out of him. From the outside this looks especially true with the ankle injury that seemed to take a good portion of the 2024-25 season to fully heal and for him to regain the trust and strength that he had previously.

I am cautiously optimistic that the type and reasons for the injuries are more freak occurrence than worrying for long term need to be managed types. He has suffered injuries that are much more contact/collision based than the soft tissue types.

The player he still is

One of the hard parts of being online and discussing soccer is that opinions are so often flattened and there is a loss of nuance. These are the times where I am thankful to be able to talk or write at length to fully express these opinions.

Ødegaard is a great example of this.

He has declined and or seen his production affected by injury over the last two seasons in comparison to what he was able to do in the 2022-2024 period.

His decline has not made him a bad player or one that is useless. In fact it is quite the opposite and he is still quite good and very talented!

You can and should acknowledge that the production has fallen off, especially in front of goal where he has just 6 non-penalty goals in the Premier League plus Champions League over the last two seasons (just 1 last year). Acknowledging this truth doesn’t automatically mean that he has become useless or unusable player either.

Here is his radar and distribution chart for the Premier League and the Champions League for the last two seasons.

He isn’t pushing himself into one of the top midfielders in the world discussions off of this but he still shows up as well rounded and productive midfielder, especially when you look at it on a template that highlights his strengths as an advanced midfielder.

The 2022 through 2024 seasons were clearly his peak and he had put himself in the conversation for the best midfielders in the game. He showed the ability to be a threat around the box playing much more as a “10” in 22/23 and then adapting to a deeper more “8” ball progression focused role in 23/24.

I want to stress this again, even though he has fallen off of his peak, he is still producing excellent overall numbers.

The contract clock and what a fee should look like

There is a classic cliche that at the two years remaining on a contract, that is the time that you have to make the big decision on a player to sell or extend their contract. I think that for the vast majority of player cases that is true but it isn’t perfect for all 100 percent.

I think that this Ødegaard situation is a real tough one. If you are Arsenal you probably aren’t in a rush to want to extend him, like we have just talked about his production is down. There might be a good explanation for why, with a reasonable expectation that he can bounce back. To what extent he can bounce back and how high the probability of that bounce back are major unknowns right now.

That is not the situation that you want going into a contract negotiation, especially for a player that I think would have every expectation and basis to be highly paid. I don’t know or have any sort of inside information here and maybe the player is willing to acknowledge the uncertainty there as well and would drop the demands or make things a more incentive based, but I always have my doubts on these things and never begrudge players trying to maximize their earnings.

These same issues will pop up for any team that would be interested in buying him from Arsenal as well. The market of teams that could realistically afford the combination of fee and wages is already limited and then adding the uncertainty around the injuries/decline and that might limit things further.

For Arsenal, I think that they would not feel desperate to sell at just any price and would expect to get a sizeable fee that would be in line with selling a top player who is still in his prime. Transfermarkt values Ødegaard at €65m, the rumors out there suggest that Arsenal would be starting the bidding at £80m. When I posed this to my followers on social media the general view was that the floor here among fans is probably in the £50-60m range. I’d generally agree with that, with my own floor here at about £60m, it would be really hard to accept losing him without getting back money that would cover most of what would need to be spent to replace him.

I would really dislike selling him within the Premier League, that is where the fee would be the highest but it is just so distasteful to imagine him playing for another team and seeing him at least twice a season.

I think that Ødegaard could be a good fit for Serie A but there has been fairly limited appetite or ability to pay big fees in Italy these days. Juventus have come the closest recently pushing €58m for Teun Koopmeiners in 2024 but outside of that you have the weird Douglas Luiz swap deal and that’s about it for deals over €40m. Inter have been rumored but this would be potentially their record signing and be far the biggest they have spent post Covid (current biggest fee paid since 2020 is €43m for Achraf Hakimi).

In La Liga, Barcelona and Real Madrid could afford him but Barcelona are well stocked at midfield and he’s already been through Madrid and left. Atleti have been known to spend and they might have a bunch of money coming in if the sell Julian Alvarez, so maybe that could be a dark horse option.

In Germany you have Bayern, and this has been one of the most realistic current links. Bayern can afford the fee and wages, plus they have had quite a bit of success bringing over players from the Premier League recently. Dortmund will spend money but they are usually more of a bargain hunter when it comes to players that are in their prime.

Last you have PSG in France, I think that he could do quite well there but they are again a team that is well stocked at midfield and I don’t see them in the market right now without major injuries or departures.

The replacement problem

Now we are into the meat of where I see the problem.

As much as a certain segment of the fan base seems ready and to a certain degree already has, moving away from Ødegaard isn’t easy.

I looked into this back in November of last season and the analysis remains true.

I am going to copy over the main conclusion from that post here because it nails the nuance here.

1. Martin Ødegaard is a very good player, one of the best ball progressors in the world, with a unique ability to help the team get into the final third AND get the ball into the box. When you lose a player like this, it is going to have a major impact on a team’s ability to control games and generate the high attacking numbers that we have come to expect. Arsenal experienced that when he was unavailable last season, and they are feeling that again with him out this year.

2. Arsenal have done a good job adding additional depth and making adjustments with the tactics to help mitigate the loss of the season, and that was not something that the team was able to do to the same extent in the past. Arsenal have not played in the same way without Ødegaard, but they have managed to produce results and underlying performance numbers this season that have been similar to what they have done with him. That is a big improvement from what we have seen previously.

Arsenal have remained a strong team in the absence of Ødegaard but one of the major complaints about the team is that they have not been at their best generating attacking numbers, especially from open play. My view is that this is one of the primary areas where a healthy Ødegaard makes the biggest impact on the team, through his ability to connect defense to attack and to move the ball into the most dangerous shooting areas.

Eberechi Eze was one of the main players that Arsenal turned to last season to try and take up the role and while he popped up with some pivotal moments and was a key player to deliver Arsenal the title, it is hard to say that he fully replaced what Ødegaard brought in midfield with his passing, ball progression and creativity.

I wouldn’t expect Martín Zubimendi to be able to replicate the hybrid 8/10 role that Ødegaard has. He plays a deeper role and while he can pop up closer to goal, I view that as a secondary type skill rather than something that should be his primary goal.

Zubimendi had a good first campaign with Arsenal, even with some fading down the stretch. I expect he will continue to play a big role in midfield but I think he will be a player deeper and even there he is unlikely to ever turn into a classic deep lying playmaker that puts up monster ball progression numbers.

Arsenal have been linked with some players outside of the club as well, but at least in the short term I’d have concerns that they would be able to fill the hole as well.

When I was doing the Stat Scouting of Morgan Rogers I expressed my doubts about his suitability as an “8” and my view hasn’t really changed in the last week. The comparison to Ødegaard shows that even though they nominally play in similar parts of the field, they do so in different ways and with vastly different strengths and weaknesses.

This isn’t to say that you couldn’t slide Rogers into the “Right 8” or “10” position and still play well, I think that you would really need something else in the other midfield spot(s) or fullback to pickup the missing ball progression.

One of the other names that is on people’s lips is Bournemouth’s Alex Scott. He’s a very intriguing young player that has taken a big step forward this last season for Bournemouth. He found himself in the top 10 of the most recent rankings for the box to box role as well.

He’s a player that I think could blossom into the type of player that Arsenal would want here but if we are talking about the next 1-3 seasons, the shoes could end being too large to fill.

Final Thoughts

I wish I had a crystal ball that could help answer the pivotal question about the injuries and how many minutes you should expect from Arsenal’s captain over the next 2-3 seasons. That would make this a much easier decision to make.

If he was going to go back to generally available and healthy for the vast majority of matches I think that giving him a 2+1 extension on top of his current deal would be a pretty easy decision. We unfortunately don’t have that and have to deal with this uncertainty.

For Arsenal because they are in such a healthy financial position coming off the Premier League title and Champions League final run, they should hopefully feel no pressure to make a decision here and be willing to be comfortable if it comes to it letting him become a free agent at the end of his contract.

Arsenal get a fair amount of criticism for being poor sellers (Arsenal’s record sale is still Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain) and that is because they often sell only when they are comfortable that the player isn’t going to make a major first team contribution. That’s a poor way to operate when selling is a key pillar for revenue generation but it is probably the more optimal way of being able to build a strong team capable of winning things.

If Arsenal wanted to sell now they probably could get a new record sales fee, it may not be at their ask or even at the fan floor level but if they were truly motivated to sell could make that happen.

My opinion is that this is not the optimal path for Arsenal to take. I think that Arsenal should be open to the idea of a sale, but it should be a valuation that has this make a ton of sense for them and funds the future buy to try and make the team better 2-4 years from now and keeping this title window open longer.

I also believe that while this 2 years remaining is often the best time to try and extend, it isn’t here and being willing to ride the risk of waiting a year will give the team pivotal information if they don’t have a buyer at a high asking price. If you go this path and Ødegaard has an amazing year, you’ll end up paying more 12 months from now than if you locked him up now, that is a real risk here. You also protect yourself from the downside that the injuries are not just freak one-off occurrences and that he is fully in the decline phase, you would have loved to sell now if that ends up the case but that is also the risk you accept here.

Overall the last contract that Odegaard signed took him to just about that perfect age and covered what should be his main prime years as a midfielder. I think that when Arsenal inked that deal they would have done it with the idea that they would be totally comfortable having him see it out completely and leaving as a free agent.

Given the options of selling low, extending now, or taking a season to wait and see, I am going to pick the wait and see path.

Football spent about fifteen years searching for specialists before realizing it actually needed complete midfielders again.

Managers want these players to press like defensive midfielders, create like attacking midfielders, carry the ball through pressure, arrive in the box, cover wide areas and somehow still have enough energy left to do it all again three days later. Unsurprisingly, truly elite box-to-box midfielders have become some of the most valuable players in the game.

Some dominate through passing, others through athleticism, ball-carrying or defensive work, but the common thread is versatility. The best midfielders today aren't specialists. They're complete footballers capable of influencing every phase of play.

That complexity also makes this one of the more interesting ranking exercises each year. That's where the ADAM model can be useful, helping identify players who consistently impact matches regardless of tactical setup, league or style of play.

As always, these rankings are purely based on the numbers and should not be used as a replacement for good, old-fashioned scouting. They also do not necessarily reflect my own views of these players. Now, let's get into the rankings!

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