Building the summer list: Wide forwards

Arsenal may be shopping in the winger market again. Who's out there besides Nico?

Arsenal have been looking for a difference-maker out wide for the better part of a year now, and have spent most of that time linked to the guy pictured above.

The only problem is, he’s already reportedly earning about the same wages as Bukayo Saka does for Arsenal (something around £170,000 per week) despite his peak season being about two-thirds as good as Saka’s. Let alone the fact that Saka has done his peak season twice and was on pace to pretty easily set a new high water mark this season before tearing his hamstring in December. Nico, meanwhile, is on pace to do about half as well as last season, which is his peak to date.

Given Williams is only 10 months younger than Saka, this makes the idea of giving him much of a raise should he sign for Arsenal a bit counterintuitive. In fact, a player of similar production and profile coming from any other situation would almost certainly make closer to £100,000 per week, maybe less.

So, if the player won’t take less than has been reported, allegedly upwards of £300,000 per week, depending on whom you’d believe, should Arsenal cough it up or just … move on? If they chose the latter, there are plenty of options out there. Below, I’ll set out some of the options to consider as Arsenal builds its summer shopping list for wide attackers.

As always, some points to keep in mind for the newbies:

• This list is created relying fully on statistics from this season. Players are rated using a whole bunch of data points of varying weights.

• Minimum for inclusion was 5.0 90s, or 450 minutes. Players with more starts were weighted favorably.

• I didn’t follow a hard-and-fast age limit this time, but I did prioritize players on the younger side of the “peak age” spectrum.

• All scores are subject to an adjustment according to league strength, so you shouldn’t have to mentally raise or lower rankings to make it more “fair.”

• Reminder: Opta unfortunately has decided to shut off some of its advanced stats for certain leagues for a bit while they evaluate whether it’s worth their investment, so our ability to provide more detailed looks at guys from the Eredivisie, Primeira Liga, Belgian Pro League and other similarly-ranked leagues is gone. So while I can’t give you radars on every target, I’ll still call some guys out below from those leagues and give you radars where I can. There will be fewer radars but just as many writeups.

• New feature: I’m going to tack on a top-of-mind valuation for players. This isn’t meant to be permanent, nor is it the result of hours of research (I would for instance treat anything you see in a film study as far more authoritative), but hopefully it gives a ballpark idea of what I think a guy is worth at a certain point in time.

• Last but not least: I always encourage a healthy dose of the eye test before forming a final opinion on any player, so please consume this list responsibly.

Alright, let’s get into it.