Replacing Granit Xhaka's production

The midfielder is set to move to Bayer Leverkusen but the more important question is how much will Arsenal miss him in the team?

Granit Xhaka is in Germany finalizing his move on a five (!!) year deal to move to Bayer Leverkusen. Arsenal seems to have done quite well with a deal that if the bonuses hit could be worth up to €25m.

This also completes the turnaround story line leaving on a high after a rocky patch and a tenure that corresponded with some of the worst Arsenal teams in decades.

That leads to the important question of how much Arsenal will miss him next season and the production that he brought.

Overall he rated as a solidly above-average advanced eight, looking like one of the better-rated players in the Premier League in this role. His ratings across the different categories were pretty balanced with him shining in his shooting rating (90th percentile) and receiving (92nd percentile) and one sore spot in defending (7th percentile) which we will go more into in depth later.

Attack

The shooting and creating is probably the best place to start. This was perhaps the biggest question mark for Xhaka as he transitioned from a player who operated more in the final third to a player in the final third and in the box.

I think he surprised us all quite a bit with this, showing an impressive feel for when to make runs and to find space that was vacated by Arsenal’s fluid front three.

He added just over a shot per 90 and did so primarily from open play, and did so from generally good shooting locations giving him a solid expected goals tally of just shy of 0.2 per 90.

These numbers are good for a midfielder but I think that with the guy coming in to replace him in Kai Havertz this is probably the area where Arsenal can potentially get more production. Havertz has consistently taken 2+ shots per 90 for his career (yes he has played more advanced roles but the shot production is pretty consistent regardless of where he starts) with even better expected goals production of 0.3-0.4 compared to Xhaka’s 0.2.

Xhaka finished the season with 7 goals but that was based on roughly 4 expected goals. It was a great return but it would have been a bit reckless to expect a repeat of that from Xhaka and Havertz is a player in my view more likely to match or exceed that total on a consistent basis over the next few years.

The creativity around the box was another area where I think Xhaka did a solid job at but not so much that Arsenal will likely look back longly for him. Xhaka was often the secondary creator, deferring to Martin Odegaard, Gabriel Martinelli, and Bukayo Saka. I think Havertz can match the production that Xhaka provided here with pretty high confidence.

The next bright spot for Xhaka was that he rated high on receiving from his teammates. This is another spot where Havertz also excels (again from a different starting position but with enough role overlap that I think it’s reasonable to expect it to carry over) and I think was something that I think attacked Arsenal to him to play this role.

Watching Havertz play he does seem to excel at many of the runs that I didn’t know Xhaka had in his locker and perhaps will be an upgrade as a target for transitions compared to what Xhaka was able to do.

Passing

The area that might be the hardest for Havertz to be able to step in and replace the production is in the passing that he added in midfield.

This has long been Xhaka’s strongest attribute and something that I think Arsenal will miss with the tradeoff of a player that is more of an attacker than a passing first midfielder in this role. It is interesting and perhaps relieves some of the anxiety I might have felt to see that Xhaka last season had his lowest-rated passing season and the team didn’t seem to suffer for it.

With the addition of more and better passing behind the midfield, the pressure on the midfielders to shoulder the load is lessened and hopefully makes missing this less of a concern.

Note that Havertz is on the FORWARD comparison here

I do expect that Havertz’s passing numbers will look better with higher volume and playing in different parts of the field but he will probably look a little less comfortable in situations where Xhaka looked at ease.

Defense

The defending and ball-winning side of the game has been brought up as one of the areas that Arsenal will miss most from Xhaka and I also shared a little bit of that concern.

Looking at the raw numbers however, Havertz stacks up pretty well.

Xhaka obviously has a bit more action in the area where you would expect to see a midfielder operate but Havertz had a very good amount of defensive events for a player that started that far forward. It is a little tough because of the difference in time but going back to the 2019/19 season where Havertz played more midfield (from the right primarily) his numbers and action areas again seen to suggest that the delta between him and Xhaka may not be insurmountable.

The big red flag here and this is something that came up in my conversation with the Chelsea analyst on Havertz is that he can be a bit of a training dummy when he engages players looking to bypass him. His overall defensive duel rate is pretty poor, for loose ball duels (via Wyscout) he wins about 30% in his time in the Premier League and he is dribbled past nearly 75% of the time (compared to 58% for Xhaka) and that is fine when you have numbers behind as a forward but could be a concern in midfield.

I think it will be interesting how Arteta adapts for this in the off-ball shape and the players picked behind him. My guess right now is that Havertz might end up with Jesus as the 2 in a 4-4-2 shape when pressing with Odegaard and Rice as the players in central midfield.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed the season for Xhaka and I took it as a very pleasant surprise. I have remained steady in that I think this is one of the clearest spots on the roster that could be upgraded.

I think that potentially Kai Havertz can be that upgrade and at a minimum I think will be more likely to replicate the performance Xhaka had last season compared to what I would have expected from Xhaka.

The upgrade isn’t likely to be perfect even across the board but it should be one where he brings more attacking threat, while being able to do enough within the structure of the team for the other items to on net come out as a positive.

Looking ahead to the season, this is the biggest open question and the one I am most interested in seeing how it develops.