Extending Thomas Partey would likely be a mistake

There is probably a figure where it makes sense, the player might be unlikely to accept it

Thomas Partey is in the final year of his contract that he signed when he joined the club. The news about potentially extending him at the regular spots have come and gone and now he is looking at being a free agent at the end of the season and the ability to agree to a deal with a team outside of England in a few months.

The news out of Arsenal has been pretty quiet from the normal reporters but there is a report today (from a source that I don’t know if he is particularly reputable about Arsenal) that Arsenal could be open to talks about extending his stay.

So even discounting if this is true or not, I am interested in whether offering a new contract is a good idea or not. So let’s focus on that.

The first thing is looking at his performance.

His time at Atletico Madrid was good but he was never a TOP TOP player, rating out as a solid Champions Legue caliber player. After moving to Arsenal his first season saw him go up a level with a bigger role, his 2021/22 season was hit by injury and he didn’t quite live up the same level but bounced back strong the next year as Arsenal had a title challenge.

Last year was another season where he was effected by injury playing just 9 ninties and not quite looking like his top self, this season in a small sample the downward trend has continued to where he is looking like a player that maybe shouldn’t even be starting for a team with Arsenal’s aspirations.

The sample is too small to make a definitive judgement and his stats are going to be affected by the same game state effects that the team is going through right now but it does appear that if you are worried about age and injury related decline the hints are there for you.

Here is what his last two seasons combined look like:

This isn’t bad but I am not sure it screams out to be a player that is in need of an extension or that cannot be replace, and better yet improved upon. Compared to the Partey at his peak this looks like a shell of his former production. The graph below has his 2019-2023 seasons in red and his last two seasons in blue.

He is no longer close to his previous production. It is a relatively small sample size lately but given what we know about how a player ages and how sometimes a small drop in a players athletic ability can have a drastic effect on their performance if it was allowed them do special things, I think that the club would want to be extra careful if they want to try and keep him going.

The big part of why this is a small sample size if the big red flag and that is his injury history.

He did get surgery to hopefully address the problems but the reoccurring muscles injuries are almost never a good thing to see.

Watching him play after coming back from the latest injuries it is also something that it looks like he has lost the explosiveness. This was a player that I think was dependent on that to help him excel in the tight spots a midfielder operated in, using his agility to create space and to be able to create many of the little moments in buildup that would send Arsenal forward.

It is also more apparent when he has been defending. He doesn’t seem to have the trust in his ability to hold his position to where he can quickly close a player down or recover quickly, now he needs to push up or drop back and that has downstream effects for what the other players on the field need to do.

The overriding view on things is that there are red flags here for extending the player. He has a worrying injury record, and he is on the wrong side of 30. His production has dropped and there would be doubts that it can come back to the level that he showed previously. He is currently a very big earner and while he might be willing to take a pay cut, it is probably not enough to match the actual risk of the deal.

If I was advising Arsenal I would recommend that they really shouldn’t be seriously entertaining a new contract for Thomas Partey.