Arsenal won the Premier League for the first time in 22 years. This is often something that buys the people that helped deliver it good will and credit. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case with many fans and Arsenal’s Sporting Director Andrea Berta right now.
It is transfer season and that always tends to get fans a bit anxious, especially when other clubs are already making moves and Arsenal haven’t. This undercurrent of discontent came to the surface more when the anonymous but seemingly well connected twitter account HandofArsenal posted a long update that was critical of Berta’s process so far this summer:
Important to ensure discussions are not labelled as crash outs. I dont have the privilege of recording a video so Im just going to explain my fair and honest thoughts thus far.
Fans are not angry at Monga going to City its more so the laid back approach of trying to outsmart a market where money talks.
Losing out on a talent who badly wanted Arsenal over £3/4 million is not being “disciplined”its just dithering and stubbornness. He would have gone on loan, a club would have covered his wages and you could have flipped for profit but Andrea took too long and City should have never even had a chance. Its just the truth.
Not paying ungodly amounts to Tonali’s agents is fair and the same can be said about his wages and £100m fee. I find it hard to believe fans would have been angry at signing Fernandes for £85m if that who YOU really want. The market has shifted and we need adapt. Lowballing Newcastle for a midfielder who improves us massively is just a piss take. Make a serious offer and get it done if HE is the ONE. That is what fans are saying.
Villa have told us £130m for Morgan. If YOU believe that is way too much, make a FAIR offer and lets see how they react. Barcola is not any cheaper so just make your mind up.
Rice, Saliba, Timber and Saka are struggling and we need to ensure they are taken care of while having adequate cover to begin our title defence.
Mikel always calls for fair critique and as a fan its fair to express concerns. I personally dont need transfer dopamine but im just asking to move correct and that is based on information I have. Im sure the club will make moves, lets get a move on.
We are Premier League Champions, move like it.
This was the trigger that got the conversation about Berta going. I posed the question to people that weren’t satisfied or sold on him on social media and I think that it boils down into three main questions.
Whether last summer's window was good or just sufficient?
Whether the credit for it belongs to Berta, to Arteta, or to a deal done before Berta walked in the door?
And whether the approach that won a title, depth over stars and discipline over urgency, is the same approach that can defend one?
Let’s go through them in order here.
Was last summer's window good, or just sufficient?
For Berta we only have a single summer window to try and draw conclusions from, and even here it is always tough from the outside to make judgements because we don’t always have the full picture into the plan and process.
Looking at the moves that Arsenal made in their busy summer is something that I wanted to dig deeper into and I still might do that if there is more interest in it, for now we can do a quick fire version.
One of the things that has been a hallmark of Arteta‘s time with Arsenal is that there seems to always be a plan for the summer that directly addresses one of the major issues from the season prior. The 2024-25 season was marred by injury and the depth of the team was lacking to ensure that the level didn’t fall too far. This seems like exactly what the window was designed to address, with Arsenal adding eight players and only having one departure from the first XI in Thomas Partey.
One of the first steps on seeing if a player was able to make an impact on a team was looking at their usage over the course of the season. Here is Arsenal’s minutes distribution from last season with the minutes from the Premier League and Champions League, with the new signings highlighted.
Of the eight players signed, six played at least 1,000 league minutes and eclipsed a third of the available minutes in the Premier League and Champions League, with only the true “backup” (Christian Nørgaard and Kepa Arrizabalaga) type players not getting over that threshold.
Arsenal in 2025-26 had another injury hit season. Here is the injury burden for the Premier League last season with Arsenal above average for total injuries and matches lost.
According to the data from Transfermarkt.com, Arsenal had the second most total injuries in the Premier League and lost the 6th most matches to injury last season. It wasn’t quite as bad as the 2024-25 season where Arsenal lost 365 matches to injury and 2,140 days but these are still the type of injury total’s that can derail a season.
Arsenal being able to have the depth available from the big transfer window made it so that the level of the team, even when the first choice players weren’t available remained high. Here is the xG Difference by match last season in the Premier League and Champions League that really illustrates this well.
One of the hallmarks of the team was the consistently good play without major prolonged dips. This was what ultimately separated the team from the challengers, who had extended periods of poor play where they couldn’t keep pace with Arsenal.
Bringing this back to the Berta conversation, I think that there is a valid point that the level of the team was already high, and capable of winning the Premier League. The team had come within a few bounces going their way of winning the League in 2022/23 and 2023/24, with a still strong but injury hit 2024/25 where they advanced to the Champions League semi-final.
So while this was the season that Arsenal got over the line, it’s not quite as easy as pointing to that as the final answer for this conversation. The team had already been built into one of the best teams in the world previously, with players that were brought in before he arrived. The players that were signed made major contributions to winning the title and reaching the Champions League final but I think that it was fair to say in season one, most were not massive needle moving players.
Let’s go through the players that made significant contributions to the team here quickly.
Martín Zubimendi was probably the closest player that Arsenal had as a needle mover addition in the summer. He was the one that came in with the clearest path into the first XI and played the third most minutes for this team behind David Raya and Declan Rice.
His production wasn’t perfect and there are still parts of his game in midfield that I think need to be compensated for, primarily ball progression from the defensive and middle third, but he was still in the conversation for one of the most important signings any team made in the Premier League this season.
I’d give this a solid 7.5/10 signing. The end of season dip dropped this down from rating higher but this was a good signing.
The story and the vibes of signing Eberechi Eze can’t be topped but his overall impact did leave something to be desired, even if he did deliver on the promise that he was a moments player.
I think the biggest frustration that I had with Eze was that he could disappear from games a bit too easily, maybe this because he often replace Martin Ødegaard in the team and when he plays Ødegaard is often the player that things flow through, that is just not Eze. His production overall looks solidly above average but it was pretty heavily concentrated in a few matches.
Eze has obvious talents but it did seem like last season, he wasn’t able to show them off consistently enough for Arsenal. There is still potentially a question of where the best place to play him and what role he should have in the team as the planning for next season gets underway here.
I’d give this a slightly disappointing 6/10 signing. Eze was available all summer and Arsenal seemed reluctant to pull the trigger early when they had the option, only going back when Kai Havertz got injured. I think the season confirmed that the reluctance might have been warranted here, and even though the story was perfect, the fit with the current team might not have been.
Without Viktor Gyökeres, Arsenal would have been in a similar striker depth crisis again (assuming Arsenal held out for perfect, it’s hard to totally play out a different scenario). He’s a player that still divides opinion, but I would give him a passing grade for his first season’s performance.
This was good, but not great performance. He had lots of frustrating moments but I think to be fair you could see that he grew and adapted to the Premier League as the season went along. I would still think that he isn’t the answer for the position long term but he can continue to contribute to the team in meaningful ways.
This is a 5/10 signing from me. He met my expectations but I think I set them at a fairly low bar.
Noni Madueke is the type of player that I like and rate highly but I totally understand that he will frustrate a majority of fans with his play. He’s an undeniable talented player and shows that over 90% of the pitch but when it comes time to deliver the final action he goes from phenomenal to “what the hell is happening here?” quickly and too often.
The most concerning stat here was that his shot numbers cratered at Arsenal, he went 3.06 open play shots per 90 at Chelsea last season to just 1.32 with Arsenal with a corresponding drop in his expected goals and without a bump up in the average quality. His shot volume was one of the things that made me so excited about him and where I thought his end product could still take a step forward and that just didn’t happen.
That being said, looking at the stats that try and measure how a player changes the team’s overall chances of scoring and the threat created his ability to do most things at a high level shine through. Here is the Goal Probability Added and xThreat rankings for Arsenal from last season in the Premier League and Champions League.
I’d give Noni the same slightly disappointing 6/10 signing, that I gave Eze. I had higher expectations for him and I thought that there was a chance he could offer something more on the left side, but we never really got to see that last season. This was also a situation where having a player of this caliber covered for Bukayo Saka still struggling with injury, he’s not Saka but the drop off in the team with him on the right made a big difference and unfortunately that might be a problem going into next season as well.
Piero Hincapié was a bit of a surprise signing last season and it was made permanent at the beginning of the month. Hincapié provided important cover at both left back and center back and while he wouldn’t be the first choice at any of the positions, the best compliment you can give him is that if his name was on the team sheet, you didn’t feel worried that he’d be a weakness.
I think that there is still potentially more in the player that can be unlocked playing a full back, especially one that is comfortable playing as the player on the touchline in the final third. That gives a great change of pace option and needed backup to Riccardo Calafiori.
I’d give this a solid 7/10 signing.
Cristhian Mosquera was the cheapest of the primary signings and the one that surprised us most in a good way. He ended up playing much more than I expected this season and was often thrown into some very tough situations that can eat up a young player but he handled himself well.
He’s a center back by trade but did an admirable job filling in at right back for the annual injury crisis that the club experienced there. It’s a bit of a bummer that one of his last actions was giving away a penalty in the Champions League final because that is not a fair reflection of his contribution to the team over the season or even in that match.
I’d give this a solid 9/10 signing. For a €15.0m it is hard to imagine getting more than this, and even if Arsenal only wanted to flip him, I could imagine a team coming and doubling up Arsenal’s money easily here. I think that he will stick with the team into next season and he will continue to get opportunities at center back.
Looking back now at my ratings for the moves, I think that there is some merit to the critique that this was more of a sufficient window than a good one. The window overall did accomplish what the team set out to do, but it raised the floor of the team rather than pushing up the ceiling, at least in season one for the players that were added.
Whose window was it anyway?
The Athletic in their deep dive into the story behind the move for Zubimendi had this very interesting nugget that is directly relevant to our Berta analysis here:
In the early part of 2025, Real Sociedad officials travelled to London to conclude the agreement. By the time Andrea Berta arrived in April, the deal was all but done. Berta may have pursued a different profile if given more time — during his time at Atletico Madrid, Zubimendi was not a player Berta coveted.
This deal was completed with Berta as the Sporting Director, but the reporting suggests that this was not his move and it may not have been a move that the team had made if the timing of when he joined were different.
The Zubimendi deal, especially for the first 80% of the season, was seen as one of the better moves that Arsenal made in the summer. Berta didn’t force a pivot away from the deal but the reporting suggests that he wasn’t pivotal or potentially even his preferred player.
This carries over into the other high profile transfer that happened last summer with the striker situation. A move for Benjamin Sesko had serious groundwork done previously under Edu and Ayto like there was for Zubiminedi, but there was time for Berta to make his stamp on this deal preferring the Swedish striker.
Again, from The Athletic and their reporting on the background of the Gyökeres signing.
The preferred target at that stage was RB Leipzig’s Sesko — a deal Arsenal had explored in the summer of 2024, and planned to return to this year.
In March, Edu’s interim successor Jason Ayto was planning a visit to Germany to try to make advances in that direction. It appeared Arsenal were set for the summer of Sesko.
Then, at the end of that month, Berta was appointed, and the dynamic changed.
Ayto’s Germany trip was shelved, and Gyokeres’ name came firmly into contention. Berta was a longstanding admirer of the player, and felt he could be the forward Arsenal need to help them end their current five-year wait for silverware.
This post isn’t an attempt to re-litigate the transfer, this is just pointing out the fact that Berta did believe strongly enough to have Arsenal deviate from the path that they were on for the striker target. We can’t go back and replay the season in that other scenario, and we can’t know for sure how Benjamin Sesko would have played for Arsenal, the reporting suggests that Gyökeres was his man.
That won’t stop us from wondering what if and it will be something that almost certainly will come up for years to come. At the end of the last season, here is how both of the strikers compared to each other in the Premier League.
For better or worse, that is going to be his signature call from transfer window number one with Arsenal.
The Sporting Director isn’t personally scouting, doing the data analysis and building the short lists on their own. They are the head of the apparatus that is responsible for that and they take into account the input from the coaching staff preferences and the constraints that the club must work under from ownership.
The cleanest reading of this is that, Berta executed the architecture of a squad building plan that was largely finalized before he took charge. Ultimately, the buck still stops with him and he has in his year plus in charge revamped and rebuilt the recruitment team that built the foundation of this Championship. This will say less about last summer and much more about what is coming up in the next windows.
Can the approach that won the title defend it?
This question is much harder to try and address than the others. We almost need to wait and see and time will tell, but that isn’t satisfying right now.
The approach last summer was depth and quantity favored over targeting select stars and quality. The Berta m.o. was to monitor a number of different situations, use media reports more than the previous Arsenal recruitment and to be willing to be disciplined and patient for the opportunity to present itself. This is a major deviation and contrast to Edu’s time at Arsenal where it seemed that Arsenal had a few clearer targets that they dialed into and had a long term courting process to bring them into the team.
There were times, where Arsenal were so assured in their evaluations and fit that they would go beyond what was seen as a prudent valuation, paying over the odds to get their man. We don’t have the perfect information on the decision making here but that might be changing here now with recent examples:
Feeling that Sesko was too expensive for the current level of the player.
The Jeremy Monga saga where Arsenal had the inside track and looked to save £3-4m, instead of meeting the ask from Leicester.
Walking away from Sandro Tonali and Mateus Fernandes at the asking/final price
Low balling Newcastle in the pursuit of Bruno Guimarães
Balking at the price tags for Morgan Rogers and Bradley Barcola
I am sympathetic to this style of negotiation. If you are never able to walk away or to credibly say that this is our number, that is a reputation that a team will develop and a team will continue to get exploited to have every last pound extracted. It’s not our money, but we all understand that Arsenal operate under an actual budget constraint and that money spent has an opportunity cost and could have gone to something else to potentially improve the club.
Last summer also saw a comfort in targeting fully peak age, big money signings, that we hadn’t seen to this extent previously at Arsenal. Eze and Gyökeres were both 27 when they signed, coming in on hefty fees and wages, these are the types of moves that are made for the short term to exploit the current window and not exactly to extend it and keep it open longer.
This nearly worked to absolute perfection last season with Arsenal getting over the hump winning the title and reaching the finals of the League Cup and the Champions League, but this does shorten the refreshment of talent timeline and demands continual churn in the team and an improvement on the ability to sell these players on the backside of their contracts.
The question is whether that's his philosophy or just what year one required, as the summer goes on we will be able to answer this more clearly.
Final thoughts
Coming back to the three questions that started this.
Was the window good or just sufficient? My ratings on the transfer’s from last season average out to roughly a 6.8, and I think that’s the honest answer: a bit better than sufficient, and sufficient was enough. The window was designed to raise the floor of the team and the extra depth and the consistently high floor is what won Arsenal the Premier League. What it didn’t do was produce a needle mover, and that is the itch that fans are feeling now. Liverpool and Chelsea have “won” the last couple of transfer windows and that didn’t translate on the field, Spurs are going big now with the early moves and big spending. This same pattern played out last summer and Arsenal ended the window in a strong position and that could be what plays out again here.
Whose window was it? The reporting on the big transfer postmortems makes it fairly clear that Berta executed a plan that was largely in place before he arrived, with one signature call in Gyökeres and one clear personal win in Mosquera. It’s hard to make a final judgement on a player after a single season, so we will continue to see how the last transfers perform this coming season. That’s not nothing, but it also means his actual body of work at Arsenal is thinner than one title suggests. The rebuilt recruitment operation is his now, fully, and this is the first window where the process and the results belong to him alone.
Can this approach defend a title? This is the one we genuinely can’t answer in July, so instead of pretending, I’ll make it a short list of things I’d like to see from Arsenal this window, and I’ll come back to this list in September:
A big bet on a needle moving talent, a real first XI upgrade and not just more depth signings. We can’t lose the depth, but making a big swing is where he will earn his money.
A real sale that doesn’t feel like a major discount to be rid of deadwood, because moving players out is the skill we haven’t seen at all yet. This is probably the hardest of the tasks at Arsenal because you can’t just throw money at the problem.
Building not just for next season, but for 3-5 years from now as well, after missing out on Monga, it is important to keep the pipeline stocked with talent beyond the first team. A coach can and probably should be focused on the short term, the Sporting Director needs to have the long term view in mind as well.
The title buys Berta the right to be judged patiently. It doesn’t buy him the right not to be judged. It’s far too early in my view to make a final judgement on his job performance but the early results have been mostly fine with me, I don’t think he’s been perfect nor has he been a disaster. Let’s see how things look when September rolls around.
Great article Scott. My hope for next season is Arteta has the confidence in the squad to rotate consistently so our best players are fit through the season and peaking for the run in. We smashed Bayern at home in the champs league initial phases but I would not have been expecting a similar game in the champions league semi-final or final.
I don't think that you can grade him after one season. As you alluded to, many of the deals that were done were already in the works when he started. The Gyokeres situation is a tough call. Let's see where Sesko and Gyokeres are statistically next June.
It seems to me that there are other positions in the Arsenal hierarchy that need more scrutiny. Why the injuries? Physio, Doctor or day to day training (or bad luck)?
Is there a process for a clear pathway to the first team? Whether rightly or wrong, the club are squandering not only money, but political capital, on the youth process.
If the players aren't good enough, get better coaching.
If the players are leaving because of contracts offered, that only works to a point. After a while young players will not want to come to Arsenal. It's a cut throat, results business, but you have to have a pipeline. Our team leaders should be organically developed, not purchased.