Arsenal did not screw up their summer business

Arsenal addressed the biggest needs and weren't perfect, that doesn't mean it was a bad summer either

Online (and on a certain podcaster who I love but think he’s off here) there is a bit of a refrain that the team set themselves up to start this season with a bad summer to prepare the squad for what was to come.

I can't help but hear this and say no.

Arsenal’s summer business was not bad, it was far from the 2 or 3 out of 10 that people will say right now. If you are saying it was this bad, it is almost certainly heavily post hoc analysis from the injuries that the team has suffered and/or coming from a very different rating for the team's needs at the start of the window.

Let’s start the analysis of this by taking a trip in the time machine back to the February to May period at the end of last season. Looking at the squad at this time, the biggest holes in the first team and the biggest question week-in and week-out for who would be playing in what position were left back and left midfield.

Arsenal had Oleksandr Zinchenko as the only true left-back in the team, it is pretty safe to say whatever your opinion of him on how good he is, Arteta was becoming reluctant to use him and wanted to move to a different sort of player. The team had Jakub Kiwior who filled in admirably but is much more of a centerback than left-back. The team had the option of being able to use the versatile players Jurrien Timber and Takiherio Tomiyasu in the position but it can still be a compromise to have an opposite-footed player on that side.

At left midfield, Arsenal had come into the season with a plan to use Kai Havertz there but he moved up the field cementing himself as the team’s center forward looking like an excellent player in that role. Arsenal had Leandro Trossard, Declan Rice, Emile Smith Rowe, and Fabio Vieira as options for the spot but I think most would agree that looking outside the club to fill this position would be best.

It would have been nice to have more attacking power, which is always nice to have, on a similar vein it would have been nice to have another creative option in perhaps an up-and-coming player (or even a player at the end of the career) and for the future of the squad it would have been nice to look at a defensive midfielder given that this summer Arsenal will have decisions to make on Jorginho and Thomas Partey as they come to the end of their contracts.

You would maybe hear it now, that the team still needed a “Killer Number Nine” but at the time Havertz had been that and I would argue, has continued to show he is doing very well in that role.

Maybe you have a different view of what priorities were or should have been but this matches what I wrote at the time before the window opened and given the business the team did, matches what the club thought as well.

The transfer priorities for the club in the summer were something like this: