Havertz Copium

This is the nightmare situation but it's not a disaster

The news that we hoped wouldn’t be true, ended up happening. Yesterday we heard news that Kai Havertz had injured his hamstring while the team was in their warm weather training session. Today we found out the extent of the injury and it is not good news.

Havertz is out for several months and will likely miss the rest of the season with his hamstring injury:

Scan results are understood to have confirmed that Havertz is unlikely to play again this season, although it has yet to be decided whether he will require surgery.

This is the absolutely worst case scenario for Arsenal. For the next few weeks at least the team will now be depending on a squad that has recognized forwards/attackers of just Leandro Trossard and Raheem Sterling.

The larger group will include Ehan Nwaneri and others who can do a job but four injuries to the attackers have decimated the group leaving it down to the bare bones.

When we talked about Arsenal’s squad plans, especially in attack, we knew they were taking a risk. There is probably no amount of squad building that can cover for all three of your preferred front three being injured plus a key player to provide depth.

This hurts for sure but unless Arsenal were carrying nine or ten players here it would hurt regardless to be missing that level of first choice players.

The tough pill to swallow is that this unfortunately ends the rational belief that the team can still achieve the big goals of the season. There was a slim chance of Arsenal winning the league but realistically it was very tiny and got tinier.

The Champions League is now the same, Arsenal were third favorites before and that will probably drop off on this news. It is still a knockout competition where randomness of single matchups can happen but it is tougher.

The big thing for me is that both of these things were true on Sunday before we knew that Havertz was injured. I think when Bukayo Saka went down with his injury on the back of the team losing Martin Odegaard for an extended period at the start of the season that was when I realistically wrote things off.

This news just put that last little bit of hope on life support.

It is never a good feeling to face the reality that the expectations for the season won’t happen and I understand people getting angry and frustrated. I am however more resigned having “known” that this was the truth for a while now so I don’t have that same anger anymore.

Some Copium

I promised copium here and I am here to deliver it.

When news like this first hits, it is natural to expect the worst and doom. I have seen people worried about Arsenal still qualifying for the Champions League next season now and while that isn’t the certainty it was a week ago, the extent that it is in jeopardy is probably being overblown.

My simulation does take into account injury information (crudely) and with the Saka and Martinelli (and Jesus) injuries Arsenal were still basically a lock for Top 4 and with it looking like 5th place is a Champions League spot even more certain.

After losing the striker and the injuries compounding it is less certain but to get some ideas of how big the drop off would need to be I did some rough calculations.

The magic number right now for a high probability of a Champions League spot is about 67-68 points, that is just 17 or 18 points from the final 14 matches for Arsenal from their current 50 points.

Here is how the odds of still finishing in the Champions League spots look if Arsenal perform at the same level as each Premier League team for the rest of the season.

It would take a pretty massive fall off from performing like the clear second best team to looking like a bottom half or worse team to be in serious trouble. I expect a drop off in how the team performs but I am not expecting the team to suddenly become a relegation level team off of this injury.

Here is a look what the different points per match and Champions League odds looks like. It takes a significant drop off from Arsenal to have this worry start being realistic.

Friend of the newsletter Peter Leonard did something similar and found that from using the Elo ratings it would need to be playing worse than United to drop below 90% for the Champions League.

So yeah, this is the nightmare scenario for Arsenal but it isn’t a disaster for Arsenal’s season just a very disappointing result that will have turned into a lost season.