Arsenal’s Striker Crossroads

The next 5 months will decide on if Arsenal want to extend Havertz, back Gyokeres, or go in a completely new direction.

When Kai Havertz tore his hamstring in February of last year, we knew that he would miss the rest of the 2024-2025 season, but I don’t think that anyone anticipated that we would get to the beginning of January 2026 and only see him on the pitch for 31 minutes.

If you told Arsenal fans back then this disappointing news about Havertz journey back to fitness but also raised their spirits with the news that Arsenal would be on top of the Premier League and Champions League tables, they would probably assume that whoever Arsenal had brought in was having a fantastic campaign in his stead.

This puts Arsenal in a bit of pickle. There are two massive unknowns for Arsenal here:

• Can Havertz bounce back and build on his fantastic 2024 form after such a long injury absence?

• Will Viktor Gyokeres make the adaption to the Premier League and be able to turn around his slow start to life at Arsenal?

This summer Havertz will be at the crucial decision point where he has two years remaining on the contract that he signed when he joined Arsenal. This is the spot where you typically want to have a decision on if the player has earned a contract extension or if you want to move on from them.

The next 4 to 5 months in the second half of the season will provide pivotal information on what the future of Arsenal’s striker position, as Havertz recovery and Gyokeres from will be under the microscope.

Havertz’s Arsenal Journey

Havertz adaptation period at Arsenal wasn’t perfectly smooth.

He came into the club with the burden of moving from Chelsea, combined with a fairly large transfer fee and a wage that put him among the highest earners at the club. He was also coming into to replace Granit Xhaka who had rehabilitated his image at the club and left as a favorite among the fans.

Where he really started to take off was taking up the role of striker after Gabriel Jesus suffered another long-term injury. He moved into that role starting with the FA Cup tie against Liverpool that season and never really looked back as he and Arsenal went on a fantastic run that fell just short.

His 2024–25 season basically picked up right where the second half of his first year at Arsenal left off continuing with very good striker production.

As Arsenal struggled with attacking injuries, he was one of the players that helped keep the slim hopes for the season alive. That was at least until he also went down with injury and led us to this spot.

Havertz with at Arsenal finds himself in a tough spot. He’s not someone you’d call a top-tier or elite forward, but the list of players who provide more total value to their team is pretty short. This is basically the dreaded Oliver Giroud zone, and I think that you can make a point that is where Havertz falls.

This is very good production and there is no real debate around that. I know that there is a subset of fans that think he is totally useless as a striker and that is just not a position that can be held. That being said, he is not without flaws either and while it is not exactly easy to upgrade on him on some of the pure in the box attacking numbers, he is in the just good to very good range and that will leave you wanting that little bit more.

His shooting volume has never been spectacular, he’s at 2.5 shots per 90 total going back to January of 2024, with just under 1.9 shots from open play per 90. He makes up for this with excellent shooting locations and a high average quality of chances that he turns into shots.

This really pops on his shot map, where it is good volume but with lots of big dots and excellent overall quality.

This is something that perhaps his absence has shown as something that we took for granted while he was playing. He developed a very good understanding with his teammates to end up in good positions to get on the end of the passes that they aimed in his direction leading to a number of very good chances. This season many of those same deliveries have been there but with no striker in the position to get on the end of them.

Gyokeres’ hasn’t stolen the shirt

It’s never easy to join a new club and that is always made more difficult moving from a new league. It was expected that there would be an adaption period for Arsenal’s new striker and how the start of his time with the club has gone was not how the club would have planned it.

His transfer ended up dragging on a few weeks longer with Sporting fighting tooth and nail to max out the potential transfer fee (as is their right) and that made it so that he missed out on a good portion of the Arsenal pre-season. He was also thrown straight into the deep end as THE GUY with Havertz only available to play a half hour in the very first match of the season, leaving Gyokeres as the only fit senior striker for most of the season. To top it off, just as he was seemingly rounding into form he suffered his own injury that kept him out for a few weeks.

In a perfect world he would have had those few extra weeks to get to know the Arsenal system and could have split time with Havertz as he adapted to Arsenal and the Premier League. That hasn’t been the case and at the halfway point through the season, Gyokeres has not made the striker position his own.

His shooting numbers are not that far off of Havertz but ever so slightly just worse.

• Shots 2.56 to 2.53

• Non-pen xG: 0.39 to 0.49

• Touches within 25 yards of goal: 7.51 to 7.45

What he has not done is match all of the other stuff that Havertz was able to do as a striker. Most people were not the biggest fan of Havertz in midfield, but he was capable of doing that with his technical level and I don’t think that you could say anything remotely close with Gyokeres and that shows up in the creative and overall passing numbers.

If he was going to make people forget about Havertz, it would have been by maxing out the production that he got inside of the box and so far, that has been a bit disappointing.

He has also had his start of the season coincide with a cold run of finishing; he has had chances worth about 7 goals and only turned them into 5 non-penalty goals.

Gyokeres’ impact could be something that goes beyond just what has done and people have made that case. He shows up really well in the with and without numbers (which are a nice thing to look at, but given the type of sport this is, don’t work as well as they do in other sports with free substitutions and more different combinations to be able to compare against) and he always seems to draw the attention of defenders.

I don’t dismiss that these are positives for him and I think that he is adding more to the team than his mediocre attacking numbers would suggest, I also think that with attacking players it is not really a great sign that you are having to squint and point to these sorts of things to make the case for a player.

He came in as a prolific goal scorer, and that along with his ability to get shots were the big selling points of the player and were things that directly addressed what the current Arsenal options as a striker lacked. Even adjusting down the expectations for him, he hasn’t hit them. A half season is not enough to make a final conclusion on the player by any means but given that Gyokeres was signed to complement and/or replace Havertz, that we are still uncertain about him makes this more complicated than we would like.

Final thoughts

I am very glad that Arsenal do not have to make the decision right now and that the club should have the next few months to see a) how Havertz does coming back from injury, b) how Gyokeres continues to adapt, and the wildcard c) how Jesus who was written off plays into this coming back from his own long term injury.

In the summer this would have seemed like something close to a no brainer that Havertz was going to be offered a new deal at Arsenal. He was very important player, one who helped shape the new version of a very good Arsenal, and one that the manager loved. Now it is probably the case that he will still stick around but the possibility of Arsenal exploring other opportunities feels much more real right now than it I would have thought in August.

I don’t have a lot of confidence here but if you asked me now, I think that it is more likely that we see Havertz supplant Gyokeres than the other way around. Hopefully we are able to see him get back on the field in the very near future and can start gathering more crucial information, and more importantly help push Arsenal towards the big silverware that we want to see them lift.