What kind of winger/wide forward do Arsenal want?

Attacker month continues looking at what sort of profile of wide attacker Arsenal fans favor and coming up with a shortlist of players to look deeper at

If you ask Arsenal fans what they want to improve the team, you will almost certainly hear two things. A player for the left wing, and a striker.

Today, I am focusing more on the left-wing option and trying to get a better feel for what type of profile in that position people like the most and would like to see the team pursue in this window and the summer.

To kick off the thinking about this topic, I picked four different wingers that I think had pretty distinct styles of play and go straight to the source of Arsenal’s online fans to get an idea of what sort of player they were interested in.

I thought this was interesting exercise that generated some very good comments, and by removing the player names, forcing people to think about what metrics people care about and value vs being stuck with the reputation of the player to color the opinion it I hope opened some eyes on where they put di.

The results of the poll showed a strong preference to player number 3 (lower left) with 68% of the 676 votes going to him. The second choice was player number 4 (lower right) with 22%, followed by top right at 7% and top left at 3%.

For these I chose the following players because they have been linked with Arsenal or provide an interesting profile that I think Arsenal would be interested in targeting.

Player one is Pedro Neto, he is a player that many fans were frustrated that Arsenal didn’t do and sign but few people showed a preference for his creative lean on the production at the expense of shooting.

Player two is Nico Williams, another player high on the list for fans after his breakout at the Euros. He also didn’t get a lot of love but I think he represents a very classic winger profile, volume shooting, volume creating, and dribbling all in a single package.

Player three is Kaoru Mitoma, I included him because he is a player that I have long admired and while it would be hard/expensive, it might be possible to pry him out of Brighton. He represents a more shot/goal heavy type player that I think many people (shown perhaps to be correct) want from this position.

Player four is Jeremy Doku, he is a pure chaos force dribbly boy from the wing. He doesn’t have great shot numbers and he creates less than you would like but he does beat a man.

From this, I am pulling the similar players list of each of the guys (from their performances over the last two seasons) that represent the different profiles to get an idea of who might make a short list.

Please let us know in the comments your short list of 3-5 players that you are interested in for left-wing and we can look to profile some of the top names.

Run and Gun guys

This is the Mitoma category and the one that the majority of the people that took the poll favored.

There are several players on this list that are young and exciting (Fofana, Ben Seghir). A few that we can cross off because they play for rivals that are very unlikely to sell to Arsenal in January if at all (Diaz, Madueke, Gakpo, Gordon). Plus, some players that are on people’s lists already (Leao, Rodrygo, Kvaratskellia).

I haven’t followed these guys too closely but the stats profile does intrigue me.