Christian Nørgaard emerges as the DM backup

Zubimendi looks set to replace Partey as the starter and now it is the Brentford man who might take the backup spot instead

It feels like it is becoming a rare occurrence that news of a transfer bid comes out with no leaks that the club was interested in the player or monitoring them or any of the other number of different turns of phrases that the people that report on transfers use to say the same things but just slightly different to have something new to update about.

Well this morning for me we got a throw back, with David Ornstein at the Athletic reporting that Arsenal had made a £9.3m bid for Brentford’s Christian Nørgaard.

This is a pretty big divergence in the overall plan for how I imagined this going for Arsenal. I think the plan was to bring in Martin Zubimendi and have Thomas Partey move down the pecking order from starter to the rotation/backup spot that was previously taken by the departed Jorginho.

Until this last week, it seemed that a new deal for Partey was all but a formality but there has been a pretty hard pivot away and Arsenal have responded quickly. First was the interest in Lucien Agoumé from Sevilla and now a concrete bid for Norgaard.

My initial view on this is that this is fine. Arsenal will have a hole and he will fill it and I think would do so quite capably. This isn’t a move that excites me and is also a bit underwhelming to me. There is almost certainly some familiarity breeds contempt with that given that I see him play more often in the Premier League compared to other players outside of the League that I don’t watch as regularly and they are more blank slates thar are easier to project on to.

His performance last year for Brentford was pretty good and it is in a role that would be quite different to one that he would have with Arsenal. On the deep lying playmaker role (which I’d say is the role that the DM is mostly asked to play at Arsenal) he just doesn’t fill out the right side of the radar enough to get my blood pumping.

He does a ton of ball winning work and that really makes him pop, he has high volume combined with high success rate.

Last season he was one of the best ball winning midfielders in the top 5 leagues. He added a ton of value with the disruption he added breaking up play with his very active style. It’s a newer thing that I am looking at but his on field play wasn’t overly associated with suppressing shots however, with teams shooting more while he was on the field compared to their normal production but it was for lower xG than normal.

This points to at least right now if you stuck him in the midfield and wanted to make sure that the team had cover he could do that job and would probably do it at a high level.

Where things are a bit tougher is the things that he does in possession.