Stats Scouting: Noni Madueke

Arsenal are going back to the Chelsea well, and this time have come away with a promising winger. Let's dive deep into the data and the video to learn more about him.

Arsenal are closing in on their first official attacking signing of the 2025 summer window.

Arsenal will sign Noni Madueke from Chelsea to a five-year contract paying the rival London club a transfer fee of £48.5m with an additional £4m in potential add-ons.

This has been a deeply unpopular move with a large portion of Arsenal’s fanbase, generating some very strong negative reactions. A minority of people have gone too far in the aftermath of the news of this potential move, including sending hateful messages to the player over social media and vandalizing murals outside of the Emirates Stadium. It does seem that to a certain extent that as the realization that the signing is going to happen people have become more open minded about understanding what the player can bring and hopefully this can help to fill that need.

This post will be a very deep dive on the player going through his stats and including some video as well to get a full picture of the performances and style of Madueke and how that can translate to Arsenal.

I look at the above and wonder why exactly Chelsea think it is a smart decision to be selling the player, especially for the price that they have agreed with Arsenal. This looks like very good business to take advantage of Chelsea’s situation that they have put themselves into with their addiction to player trading and churn in the squad.

Before we go too far, this is usually the kind of article I’d place behind a paywall. It takes several hours to watch the video, create the graphics, and conduct the analysis, and I believe that effort is worth asking people to pay for. In this case with the fan consensus so strongly against the player, I am seeing it as a bit of a public service to make this as widely available as possible (one of the tough tradeoffs with this paid newsletter business model). If you want to support more work like this, consider subscribing or if you wanted to do a one-off contribution to buy me a beer that is possible here, it is a tremendous help to be able to continue to do this.

Enough of that now, let’s get into the player and what it means for Arsenal.

Team Comparisions: Arsenal vs Chelsea

This is normally the section where we have to make a lot of caveats about why the data we are about to look at needs to have certain things taken into account. This time I don’t have to say that to nearly the same degree.

Chelsea obviously play in the same League as Arsenal so that is one complication that we get to ignore entirely here.

They are also a team that is fairly strong, they had weaknesses that limited their ceiling last season, but they finished in 4th place 5 points behind Arsenal. This is a situation where the quality of teammates and opposition will not be so far off of Arsenal of last season.

They had an attacking team that was probably better than Arsenal (with some grace given to Arsenal that is where injuries hurt the most).

The defensive numbers for Chelsea were not as good but we are talking about an attacking signing so that is less of a concern and the overall defensive system is not so drastically different that the transition would be a worry.

Style wise, Chelsea also were at least close to Arsenal, with both Enzo Maresca and Mikel Arteta, sharing the Pep Guardiola influence. Both Maresca’s Chelsea and Arteta’s Arsenal prioritize ball retention, using short, precise passing to control games. They build from the back, often with a single pivot and inverted full backs who step into midfield to form a double pivot, enabling a 3-2-5 structure in possession.

Chelsea was a bit more transitional at their best (Madueke helps in that regard and that is something that I would like to see Arsenal improve upon) but generally played a style that was characterized by the in vogue five attackers/five defenders.

The wing play isn’t that different between the teams, with Maresca giving players like Madueke the freedom to receive wide by the touchline and take advantage if they had the 1 on 1 situation. He also looked to play in the half spaces around the box and look to attack the area between the center back and full back with diagonal runs from the wide players to penetrate into the box.

Arsenal doesn’t always have the same number of 1 on 1 situations to attack but the same types of movements and runs would be valuable in Arsenal’s attacking structure, especially against the low and medium blocks.

Shooting

Let’s start off with one of the big strengths of Madueke. This guy loves to shoot and does so from excellent positions for a player taking this volume of shots.

For his career he has consistently shown the ability to find his shot, in the Premier League with Chelsea he has taken 2.44 open play shots per 90 (91st percentile) and 2.62 open play shots per 90 (94th percentile) with PSV in the Eredivisie.

This season was a new high for him (and maybe this will go into some of the conversations about him being selfish) pushing nearly 3 open play shots per 90.

The big positive here and in general for Madueke is that his shooting is not long shot spamming but rather shots in the box. Some of the angles that he chooses to take shots from could be a bit more central but overall, this is not the typical shot location map that you see from a player that is taking that volume of shots.

That’s a nice area of the chart to be in, he has the Martinelli average quality (very good) mixed with the Saka shot volume (very good). This is just two attributes but being near Mohamed Salah, Serge Gnabry, Raphinha, and Leroy Sane is never a bad thing.

In the Chelsea attack, that was probably the third best in the Premier League, Madueke shows up as a major reason for that. He led the team in open play shots and trailed just the main striker Nicolas Jackson for expected goals, beating out a player in Cole Palmer that got a bunch of the hype.

My rating system agrees here putting him in the top 10% of winger seasons for the overall shooting production for his shooting last season.

For his Premier League career his shooting numbers are a bit less elite but still very good, with the positive that they are trending upwards (going against that narrative that he hasn’t developed).

The big things we care about with shooting continue to look good here in the larger sample size, lots of shots from good locations. One of the red flags in the last season data was the big negative in post shot xG added but for the larger sample is closer to neutral. Post Shot xG Added is a way to measure finishing performance comparing the quality of the chance (xG) from where the shot was taken, to the quality of the finishing, using the estimated chance that it would be saved based on where the ball is placed within the frame of the goal (post shot xG). We will cover this deeper below in the finishing section.

I know this is a “stats scouting” but I will intersperse it with some video as well, because even though I am the stats guy, I watch way too much to not mention it.

There is some really good stuff in this video making a great blind side run to the back post but just can’t keep the shot down.

Here some might be frustrated with the “Big Chance Missed” but anyone who has followed my work long enough knows I would not, especially in regards to doing analysis here.

Here is another one against Manchester United, he positions himself in the channel between the full back and the center back and makes a good run behind into the space. He just misses this one hitting the cross bar.

This is a good example of where he shows some nice combination play, again playing off the left. The shot isn’t super well struck but again I really like this movement and combination, he also takes this first time. I know he has a bit of the reputation for the decision making but here is an example of his instinctive play really working in his favor.

I like this example here against Everton where he shows the willingness to use that weaker foot. It’s another example of his downhill running power giving defense problems.

More from Everton, this is bad defending but he takes advantage to cut through their lines and take a nice shot. It’s a shot where he gets solid power and it doesn’t take a massive back lift either.

Here he scores against Manchester City and this one is good anticipation to see the play develop and be in the right spot for this tap in off the error.

Here is an example where a certain interpretation could be that he was selfish but I see it more positive, he receives the ball in an area that doesn’t have a ton of chance of turning into a goal and through individual play crafts a solid opening and a look at goal.

Looking at a few more clips/screen shots where things aren’t quite as positive now.

He can get on the one-track mind where “I am taking a shot no matter what” rakes over, here is an example (there are plenty of these watching) shooting into a crowd where he has such a low probability of it slipping through.

Here is another one from a match against Liverpool, I have a bit more sympathy for this one because the other options aren’t amazingly better but a pass out to the right is probably the better choice but he tries the shot as he is getting closed down.

Here is a bit more of the type of play that is mixed and will be frustrating to fans. He does a great job to make a run in behind but his first touch isn’t clean and takes him out of line. He can make up for it with his speed and strength and gets goal side of his marker but then he does all that good work to have a very weak off-balance shot.

This next one is just a screenshot but the context here in this one is after a cross against a set deep defense falls to him. The angle is tough and there is a player coming to close him down. This shot isn’t exactly the best choice (nor does it really hurt after it is blocked and Chelsea retain possession).

Overall, I am very positive on the shooting. He can be a bit selfish with some of the selections, but he is also very good at creating his own shot overall and was not dependent on his teammates to set him up. Looking at the key passes that he received last season there are a number of spots where he picked the ball up outside of a shooting position and was able to generate a quality shot.

If he is going to be more of a rotation and situational player that can be very valuable to have that skill set to be able to turn to. So often Arsenal have depended on a bit of magic from the creative players to carve out an opening and that is not something that Madueke will depend on.

This is very positive, and it makes me excited about the possibilities he can add to the attacking group and with so many green flags in the data it is hard not to be. It’s a bit weird but here we are pretty far along in the analytics revolution and a player that had a finishing slump off of big xG numbers is getting discounted. I am so glad that Arsenal are here to pick this up.

This feels like such a Liverpool transfer and I say that in a good way because they have made this bet several times and it has paid off for them more often than not.

Finishing

Last season Madueke had 7 goals from 10.4 expected goals. He scored 3 of those goals in his first match of the season and had just 4 goals from 9.4 xG the rest of the way.

It’s never fun to see a player miss so many shots, especially when the chances are so good and the commentators give you a “he has to score from there” call.

This almost certainly goes into some of the narrative that he is wasteful as a player and the frustration that a subset of Chelsea fans had with him. It’s not exactly comforting to say, well you see the actual important things for scoring in the future is that he is getting into those spots and taking the shots, after a player misses goals that would be important for winning.

Thankfully for us as Arsenal fans we can say that and not have that residual pain from the missed shots hanging over us on this player.

Last season he had took 80 shots in the Premier League and that is just not a sample size that is large enough to say with any confidence if what he did there was his true talent or if it was just noise.

If we add in his time in the Eredivisie we can increase the sample size but it does come at the expense of complicating the translation issues with a weaker League but that is probably a tradeoff that we should be willing to make here.

With this (including the limited minutes in the Europa League but not including the Conference League because I don’t have that data) we can up the sample size to 178 shots from 80 shots.

Here the takeaway about finishing compared to xG is flipped. For most of his career he has been a player that had scored more than you would have expected from the chances he took.

This is also not so much above that you would think that he’s a plus finisher and the sample size is still smaller than you’d like (ideally we would be looking at 200-300 shots here) but this does suggest that this last season could be an outlier.

This is again one of those insights that analytics has taught us, single seasons are noisy, and you can pick up players undervalued betting on players that don’t have long term finishing issues after a down year.

Another graphical representation of player performance that I like to look at is the long-term trend of the post shot xG compared to xG. This is where again over longer samples, the data should start to be a potential signal on if a player is a good or bad finisher or if you should lean more towards describing things as flukey or luck.

This backs the view again that Madueke is not a bad finisher. He is slightly positive for his career here but it’s not so positive that I would venture out to say that he is a plus finisher. He is very likely like most players in the normal range where he will have some positive years and some negative years but generally track towards average here.

Looking at things with a bit more granularity I think that there are probably a few things that with coaching that could improve some of the things that Madueke is doing here.

When you look at the shots that he is taking there is a lot of like. Here is the shop map for his career and it is heavily concentrated in the scoring zones.

Looking at his finishing map for these shots it really hammers home taking those shots cental is where the value is for him (and most players).

He does finish better in the inside the penalty area corner than average and that is a reflection that he does have good ball striking to cut in on that left foot and curl it so I don’t think he should worry about those shots at all.

It is the ones after he has beaten the man driving in from wide or receives the ball on one of the slip passes between the full back and center back, and he gets deeper. The angle here makes these shots so tough to score from and this is almost certainly an area where he should focus on the cut back/low cross over the shot.

This is something that does show up pretty extensively in the video and these really are some of the more valuable passes that a wide player can make. There will be more on this in a bit when we dig into the creative numbers.

It is interesting focusing on that spot when we break this down between feet.

The one big blue spot with his stronger left foot becomes the only red spot on his right foot, that makes sense because the physical dynamics required and the angle are tougher trying to shape that shot with the left compared to using the outside foot shot.

The last thing to point out here in the finishing section is breaking down the shots into buckets by the chance quality rating.

The things that I am looking for in this graphic are major outliers to go searching for potential issues or things that we might want to understand better (for example if they are finishing like crazy in the low-quality chances is that ball striking or luck or something else).

With Madueke I don’t really see too much here that jumps out at me as abnormal and I think that is generally a good thing. He does do well on some of the lower quality shots and that is pretty exclusively driven by that left foot curler from the corner of the box zone. His long shooting doesn’t look bad but he is a bit below expectations on that.

The long shooting does at least have average shots on target (34%) and value added on the post shot xG there.

He does about as good as expected on the medium quality shots with some of the bigger misses in those zones we talked about above.

Lastly in the biggest chances, he converts at a slightly above average rate for his career so even though he ranked tied for 12th in the “big chances missed” stat last season in the Premier League (with 14) and this is something that will get him criticism it is not something that should be a major worry coming to Arsenal.

The bull case on Madueke doesn’t depend on him being an amazing finisher, not that anyone would ever be mad if that is how things turn out but being a plus finisher is not something that will make or break the value that he can bring to Arsenal.

Carrying and dribbling

Continuing on Madueke’s strengths let’s look at his carrying and dribbling attributes and stats.

Last season only Jeremy Doku had more raw progressive carries than him in the Premier League on the FBRef definition (this varies ever so slightly from mine, I use center of the goal and they use the touchline) coming in tied for second with Mohamed Salah at 154.

On a per 90 basis, he drops down to third but between the total volume and rate he is very strong on this category.

Compared to other wingers this is an area that he very clearly pops out. I think that this is something that Arsenal see as a major positive for him, the Premier League over the last few years seems to be moving more and more to adding this sort of running power and this is an area where Arsenal are a bit short compared to rivals.

The classic move here from Madueke is that he gets the ball in wide spots and can drive forward pushing back his fullback. This gives him elite value added with the ball progression that he does on the ball. He backs this up with good dribble volume (18th in the Premier League on a per 90 basis) and an okay enough success rate (he ranks 25th among players that have played 40% of minutes and attempt 3+ dribbles per 90 out of 52 players).

My model would put him 1.5 standard deviation’s better than the average winger as a ball carrier and dribbler and in the 97th percentile for all winger seasons.

This is something that is durable for his career as well where he has consistently ranked very highly. There is a slight downward trend here and that’s not atypical for a player entering their mid 20’s (dribbles are a young player skill) it is also potentially something where we are seeing some the sub effects cancelling out, he has gone from 58% of appearances started in 22/23 to 56% in 23/24 season to 84% this last season.

This has been one of the major green flags for his time at Chelsea.

Chelsea as a team are strong carrying the ball but even within the team Madueke was the class of the bunch of the attackers that they have added over the last few seasons.

This is a fun stat, Chelsea had 317 carries into the penalty area last season (third most in the League) and Madueke was just under 30% of that total for them with 93. That was just behind Salah on the share of total going to one player (he had a ridiculous 39%).

Looking at the map a bit larger the volume becomes very apparent. He tries things often with the ball at his feet and this comes out watching him as well.

He is going to lose the ball a lot because he trusts his ability so highly and that’s going to be frustrating to a lot of people. There will be times that he does it in his own half as well and it doesn’t come off that will drive people mad. I can already picture the reactions, and I just want to pre-register my response, those will suck and they hurt but overall, he is going to put so much on the table with this skill that we will have to accept some of those and trust that the net benefit is positive.

This season among players that had 75 or more dribble attempts he was dispossessed just 25 times and that ranks as tied for 47th most of 55 players (that means he lost the ball less and it is a good thing), and he was tackled attempting a dribble 46 times and that was 29th out of 55 players.

As we switch into looking at some clips here to get a few more visual examples of what he is capable of.

This first clip illustrates his ability to receive in a good position and with his carrying ability progress the ball into a dangerous situation.

The other big positive in this example is that unlike the situation at Arsenal where a player will go on a run like that and then stop he continued looking to get into a potential shooting position.

Here is an example of him playing off of the left and being able to use his speed to beat his man and get into the box delivering a decent cross.

In this clip we get to see him use his body effectively to hold off the challenge, in addition this shows that he has that supreme self-confidence to not be afraid of engaging in a duel in his own half.

We will end this section highlighting a stat that I think helps give some important context about his ability to create his own shot that we called out in the shooting section. Here are wide attackers from last season and it looks at total events/touches in the box per 90 and the percentage of the touches that were the result of the player entering the box themselves carrying the ball.

Madueke again finds himself in very good company. He is a high touch in the box player and can create a ton of those looks all by himself.

Here is a clip showing him doing a trademark receive the ball wide drive into the box and find the opportunity for his left footed shot.

Creativity

The sections so far have been the major positives for Madueke now we will start getting into some areas that have room for improvement.

For all of the time that he gets and finds himself in the dangerous location he doesn’t turn that into moves that set up teammates at a rate that you would like. Some of that is because he favors setting himself up (not a horrible thing in itself) and more of that is that his efficiency in those areas can be improved.

What I do want to stress here is that even with this being an area where I think it is absolutely fair to want to see improvement and more from him he still comes out looking decent compared to his peers. On my rating system he is slightly above average here and ranks in the 69th percentile.

This holds for his career where he has been right in that range of average to a bit better.

For a player that has so many touches in good locations in the final third being just average to a bit better is underwhelming.

He doesn’t have set play duties at Chelsea so he’s not going to rack up numbers there and focusing just on the open play numbers does make things look a bit better for him. He’s 66th percentile at creating shots for his teammates and 71st percentile for the xG that he is able to assist off of those key passes. His ability to complete passes into the box is not nearly as strong as his carrying into the box coming out to just 69th percentile.

Chelsea did have other players that took on the bigger burden here for them creatively and perhaps that context would help understand him more as a player that got on the end of moves than created them for teammates.

He often played with two of Cole Palmer, Pedro Neto and Jadon Sancho and all three of these guys would be viewed as typically more the creative hubs (although I would say that Madueke should be closer or better than Sancho). I think that having watched quite a bit he can still do more from the opportunities that he had but this is still context to be aware of looking at the player.

This is from the 23/24 season but shows that he has the capability to make the passes it just doesn’t show up in the tape quite enough for him.

Looking at the passes that he attempts into areas 25 yards from the center of goal he is underperforming expectations, completing just 9 passes for every 10 that would be expected to be completed (this accounts for that these are hard passes to complete using an expected passing model). He also generated just 24 key passes from these 174 attempts last season.

Where things look a bit worse for the player is when he is the one getting deep into the box. He attempted 112 passes from within 25 yards of goal from regular play and completed just 48 of them and connected with just 19 key passes and 1.9 xG assisted from those shots.

These are often tough passes to complete but you can see that he often as a bit of the hit and hope approach or that he has trouble getting the weighting on the passes just right.

It can’t say for certain but my hypothesis is that because his first instinct is to hunt his own shot when that doesn’t materialize he hasn’t had the time to position himself right to pick out a teammate.

To use an Arsenal player that also generates frustration for similar reasons in Gabriel Martinelli.

You can see in the graphic above that he generates more from his time inside of these dangerous areas even though he too is a bit wasteful with the chances that he can get from these locations.

Looking now at his crossing and it is a similar story.

Too often when he is crossing they are a bit aimless and the weighting doesn’t really work to become dangerous. Here he does a good job creating space to get the cross off but he totally mishits it and it is easy to clear.

Here is another example where he cuts in similar to how Saka does but instead of hunting the shot he tries a back post cross that is severely overhit.

In the limited time off of the left this season he did seem to have better looking crosses. He was able to use his strong foot without needing to check back and his ability to beat his man to the endline is quite effective.

Chelsea were not a team that used crosses as a weapon to generate a large portion of their attack last season (they attempts 17.4 crosses per match and generated 2.1 shots per match off of them) so that probably contributes to this but overall, this was a weak part of his game.

To get a sense of how this could translate and fit at Arsenal, let’s look at Madueke’s crossing compared to the Arsenal’s attacking players last season:

• Madueke - 0.5 completed cross per 90 (22%)

• Bukayo Saka - 1.9 completed cross per 90 (46%)

• Ethan Nwaneri - 1.4 completed cross per 90 (35%)

• Martinelli - 0.9 completed cross per 90 (33%)

• Martin Odegaard - 0.7 completed cross per 90 (27%)

• Leandro Trossard - 0.6 completed cross per 90 (25%)

With Madueke you can see the tools here, and one of the things that got Arsenal thinking was that when he did play off of the left some of the shot hunting was tempered and he had better angles to set up some teammates in those limited minutes.

The creative numbers last season and overall, for his career are decent for a wide attacking player.

He was hurt that some of his key passes and crosses that were good, were not finished by the Chelsea forwards but this is an area where I think there is room for growth in the player. He should be a player that can and should provide more than just decent production with his skill set.

Passing

There are some interesting nuggets here in the passing data even if this isn’t the key attribute for a wide attacking player.

Starting with the passing dashboard he has a view that looks pretty typical of a player off of the right.

His most common pass is a ball that goes backwards towards midfield but that isn’t too worrying, I would say that it is just a thing that will happen in a team that views keeping possession as a positive and it will be similar playing at Arsenal.

The other things that pop out here is that he is pretty uniquely two footed here, especially for a player that has a stronger left foot. That would be a major plus if he is viewed as a player that is capable of playing on both flanks by the Arsenal brain trust.

He’s not a massive volume passer for a winger and especially not within the Chelsea team but he does show up fairly well at creating value at an above average rate for his volume and is a player that will complete more passes than the average player (as long as they aren’t passes really close to goal it seems).

The next graphic again won’t be shocking news when you know where he plays but his most valuable zones that he passes from are on the wide right.

He is better when he can get deeper but not so close to goal that he thinks he can take a shot. He doesn’t quite have the same value in the Saka zone passing in the half space just outside the box, but he also is a player more likely to want to create his own shot from that location vs pick out a pass.

Last season he rated out as a bit above average on the passing metrics and came in at the 60th percentile for wingers.

We already saw he is not a strong crossing player but that is really one of the only major weaknesses here besides just not having the volume of passes that other wingers would get both overall and inside of the final third.

Last season was a bit of an outlier for him going from rated as a good passer about one standard deviation above average to right at the average level.

This has never been his major strength and maybe last season was a just a bit of a fluke here compared to what he has done previously but I would again say that if he is only average here as a passer the value proposition of the player is not changed drastically enough to be concerned about the transfer.

At Chelsea he is not tasked with a ton of buildup responsibility (he is the outlet that buildup goes towards on the team) and that shows in that the majority of his passes in the final third.

This next subsection straddles passing and creativity, especially for Madueke but I have traditionally kept progressive passes in the passing category. As a progressive passer his favored passes start from out wide right. He did spend fair amount of time out on the left to end the season for Chelsea and in those matches he didn’t have the same overall impact moving the ball from there, it is too small of sample to be concerned about but it was worth noting.

His favored pass is the one down the line wide and what is probably his most effective cross, the ball from the wide areas close to the edge of the box.

For his volume of passing he does do quite a bit of progressive passing. Here is how wide attackers looked for last season in the top five Leagues.

He is not out with the elite players but with similar volume he does beat out both Martinelli and Trossard.

Receiving

This is a section that I think should be really interesting about the player.

Chelsea in a similar way to Arsenal keep their wingers quite wide while attacking. In the attacking half, especially around the edge of the final third, most of his receptions come in the widest lane by the touch line.

With Arsenal I would expect that he would have similar areas where he gets the ball.

He can and will receive the ball making runs in behind stretching the defense with his speed but in the normal set defense against the low and medium blocks he is going to get the ball wide. From there this is where he adds so much value to his team.

For players who played at least 60% of a team’s minutes no one created more value progressing the ball with it as their feet than Madueke last season.

This is incredibly valuable, he can receive passes in good locations, but locations that a defense will generally cede to you when they are set and then turn that into progressing the ball into excellent locations.

On the receiving ratings (which should probably better thought of as receiving + valuable touches) he looks quite good. As we have seen previously, he isn’t the highest volume player, but he does make his touches and passes received count with the value he can add from his off and on ball movement.

This has held steady throughout his career where he has consistently been in the very good range among wingers.

Ball Winning

Madueke can be a quite capable and good defender when he puts in the effort. That hasn’t always been the case at Chelsea but that can look like a team issue with them as well where there will be many players that hope someone else will do those hard yards.

Watching the tape on him there are several examples of his ability to press effectively, using his size and speed to cause problems not just staying with his marker but also being able to transition if or when he does win the ball back.

The public data for pressing isn’t out there anymore but thankfully my friends at the Transfer Flow have been all over this link as well and posted his radar with the statsbomb data that does include his pressure numbers from last season.

It’s not fantastic but a player in the 66th percentile for pressures isn’t going to be a major red flag for me and compares favorably to Arsenal’s current forwards:

• Madueke - 17.9, 66th percentile

• Bukayo Saka - 16.8, 58th percentile

• Gabriel Martinelli - 17.2, 61st percentile

• Martin Odegaard - 23.0, 88th percentile

• Leandro Trossard - 23.1, 89th percentile

Overall, in ball winning he seems to do an acceptable amount and with Arsenal that will probably be asked to be increased with the move. Given that Madueke and Arteta have met and the player is onboard and bought in, I will take that as a positive sign that he understands and is ready for what is required at Arsenal.

The Comparison Section

When I first wrote about Madueke I made the assertion that if he was coming from a different team other than Chelsea that the reception for him would likely be very different. I still strongly believe this and I think that this is a major reason that he isn’t or hasn’t been rated nearly as highly by our fans.

I think it is helpful to stack him up against those players that would have been more positively received just to really see that this is really a player that matches or surpasses his peers.

Let’s start just comparing him to a Premier League average wide attacking player from last season:

The comments that he is just a bang average player look silly in the light of the above.

Now let’s get into some of the other wide players that have moved (or look close to moving) this summer:

Anthony Elanga is moving to Newcastle for £55m (£52m+ £3m in add-ons).

Mohammed Kudus is moving to Tottenham for £55m.

Jamie Gittens is moving to Chelsea for £52m.

Bryan Mbeumo is rumored to be moving to Manchester United and they have had a bid of £62.5m rejected.

Anthony Gordon has been repeatedly linked to Arsenal by David Ornstein and would be valued at a substantial amount (likely well above £60-£70m.

I could keep going and basically outside of the truly elite forwards out there, Madueke’s production can be judged to be similar and more likely just flat out better than what those players have done.

With Arsenal getting this deal done at £48m guaranteed plus up to £4m in add-ons with a contract that would pay him a very reasonable rate on par with a rotation player with a continuation of the same terms for what he agreed originally at Chelsea, this deal looks to be well below the market for similar players.

Final Thoughts

Going through everything above and watching the film I think that this is a player that can perform at the level that Arsenal need from a rotation player with a very high probability. He is coming from another Premier League team where he was the regular (and important) starter on a team that qualified for the Champions League last season.

This is also a player that is still potentially just scratching the surface of what could be possible for him. He is 23 years old and that is generally the start of the prime years for a wide attacker. He is also rawer than players of a similar age would typically be, he broke through into senior football at 17 but has played under 6,000 top flight minutes in his career so far.

Part of the reason that he hasn’t had nearly as many minutes as you would like is one of the potential issues that I haven’t mentioned yet and that is that he has a pretty extensive injury history. In 7 season’s he has missed 78 total matches and by season it has been 2, 0, 10, 33, 20, 5, and 8 matches missed for Club and Country according to Transfer Market.

The one positive here is that it has trended better in recent seasons with Chelsea where he has missed just 13 matches in two and half seasons with them. Last season he played his largest minutes load and was available for 33 of 38 league matches missing about 6 weeks with a hamstring injury.

Ideally you would sign players that are just never injured but that’s an unrealistic dream. Even players that have strong track records can pick those up but it is also true that past injuries do generally correlate to future injuries. That does make this situation less than ideal for Arsenal. From the outside our information on the players medical outlook is not very good, and that makes trying to do a definitive statement here tough. It is a situation where we almost have to take it on faith that the club will have done the due diligence that they have covered as much as they can with the medical tests.

Arsenal’s summer business is coming into focus but the final product for how the team will look isn’t quite finished and that will have a large baring on the starting point for how this deal is viewed and the expectations that will come with the player.

My initial expectation still for this player is that he will primarily be rotation for the right-hand side. Saka is the main man at Arsenal, but he is coming off a nasty hamstring injury himself and it would be prudent to have additional cover to not ask him to start and finish all of Arsenal’s matches next season, especially considering that total could very well push into the high 50’s or more.

Madueke statistically isn’t on Saka’s level, but this is potentially the best two player group that a team will have as options on the right-hand side.

Arsenal have come into last few seasons with a plan that Saka will just play all of the minutes and put a player on the depth chart where the drop off from Saka is too large to seriously consider rotation and far too often even taking him off in game outside of blow out game states.

There is also the intriguing option to play Madueke on the left-hand side in addition to the left. I do not want to come in planning that he will be the mythical left-wing upgrade that the team is searching for this summer, but I can’t deny that this would be very cool idea to try out in pre-season if possible.

At the end of last season with Chelsea, he finished things off playing of the left in 4 of the final 5 league matches and started there in the Conference League final.

For his career the sample size is still small to see him off of the left but there is some promise to this idea and there is quite a bit of value for wingers that can play on their strong side and still generate good shooting opportunities for themselves.

One of the classic examples of this was Leroy Sane playing at Manchester City (while Arteta was the assistant). Here is how Madueke playing just as left wing (small sample size) stacks up against Sane at the same age as many of requested:

I don’t know if it will work but I would be curious to see it tried potentially.

I know that there is still lots of skepticism about this transfer and maybe my writing can help ease some of the fears and explain the upside here. Like any transfer, it is impossible to say if this will work out perfectly but from my outside view this looks like a smart and savvy move from Arsenal. Arsenal have at a minimum added needed depth to the attacking line, that will not only include his production but make so that Saka can play more of the high impact games at his best physical level.

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Correction: This article originally stated that he had 78 matches missed over 8 seasons, this was incorrect and has been corrected to show that he has played seven seasons between 2018-19 and 2024-25.

The graphic on passes received originally used the starting location for the pass to calculate the percentages for each lane instead of the end location where he received the ball. This has been updated and corrected.