Granit Xhaka wins over the doubters...

but maybe there is still some room for questions

I will start this post by eating some humble pie. I did not expect Granit Xhaka to have the ability to change his game to this degree, he has played an important part in Arsenal's start to the season going as well as it has.

My general line on Granit Xhaka has been that he is a good but not spectacular player. He is an excellent passer, probably among the best in the world but the other parts of his game limited his ceiling.

This season I think that is still mostly still true but with some reconsideration for how high that ceiling can be. It is still VERY EARLY and we are dealing with small samples where a few good matches can heavily weigh on stats but Xhaka has been one of the best midfielders on my attacking midfield role template.

With a 400 minute cut off (I would normally like 1,000+ for sample sizes but that is just not possible in a world where only seven league matches have been played), he ranks as the 12th best "Attacking 8" skill set template for midfielder among the top 5 League and 7th among the Premier League.

One of the things that I think this illustrates is that his radar is not impressive and I think that narrowing down things to just 13 stats rather than the 50+ that go into the other rating system helps to tell the story better for how good he has been this year.