The Arsenal Rebuild, Part 1

There was a time, not so many years ago, where any Arsenal previews I wrote would be heavily redacted. Part of that was due to what appeared to be… “shenanigans” happening behind the scenes. Those “shenanigans” were fairly clear to knowledgeable observers around the sizes of transfer fees, fees paid to agents, and just general horrible choices made by those in charge of Arsenal at the time.

Not that you would know it listening to the fans, but Arsenal finished comfortably 2nd last season even after a ton of injuries.

Reminder: Arsenal finished 8th in 19-20 AND 20-21. They finished 5th in 21-22.

Man United finished 15th this past season. Spurs finished 17th.

Life (and bad management) comes at you fast.

So unlike the not-so-recent past, Arsenal qualify as fairly well-run these days. The leadership is slightly in flux with Edu Gaspar leaving and Andrea Berta arriving, but ownership seems significantly involved, and stable, sensible decision-making abounds.

In Mikel Arteta, they have a highly competent head coach who largely seems to get along with upper management, and continues to learn and get better. He has some critical weaknesses (squad rotation and risk-reward in tactics among them), but he’s considerably better than your average coach, and a fuckton better than most outsiders Arsenal could bring in from the job market.

The question now becomes: can they progress from a string of 2nd-place finishes and one near-title into a juggernaut that contends across competitions every single season?

I know what they did last summer

Our analysis of Arsenal’s transfer business last summer was lukewarm. They brought in some new players, none of whom seemed like particularly great buys or value, but they had a functioning squad. It’s not in the transfer grades, but throughout the summer we mentioned one worry about Riccardo Calafiori was the potential for injuries that had been flagged in past potential moves in Italy. After a season in the Premier League, injury concerns around Calafiori seem justified.

It turns out our broader lack of excitement on Arsenal’s new signings was spot on too, as was the note that some magical academy finds might help them fill depth at a couple of positions.

Ethan Nwaneri (currently in a contract disagreement over future guaranteed playing time) looks like an excellent ball-striker and did far better than expected deputising for Bukayo Saka. On the other side of the pitch, Myles Lewis-Skelly (MLS) racked up minutes as a quality left back, but his skill set looks world class as a future left-sided box-to-box midfielder charged with zone-moving, creating for teammates, and general destruction and mayhem.

The Hale End might now be the best academy in English football.

Current status

Injuries (and red card games) severely hampered Arsenal’s attack last season. Saka, their attacking talisman, was out for a couple of months with hamstring issues, and then Arsenal spent the last couple of months of the season without a recognised CF due to Jesus and Havertz on long-term layoffs.

The defensive blips (the purple line above) are probably due to [redacted issues with refereeing] and almost nothing else. However… it’s worth pointing out that for Arsenal to wrest a title away from Liverpool and a rejuvenated Manchester City, the attack is going to need to look a lot more like the peaks in 23-24 and much less like at any point last season. The 74 points Arsenal limped home with last year would typically see them finish third/fourth in most recent Premier League runs.

Who should they keep?

For those interested in knowing which writer to yell at and/or praise, this section and the next one are by Kim, the rest of this newsletter was written by Ted.

Arsenal are, for the most part, running it back next season with their key players. Some older and injury-prone players have been allowed to leave at the correct time, but pretty much everyone who got big minutes last year is sticking around, and just getting reinforced with new talent around them. Obviously we’ll get to that part tomorrow.

The Gunners’ three big stars are worthy of building around, and of the hype they get. Saka’s injury last season was very unfortunate and was arguably the biggest factor in taking them out of the title race. He was in competition with Mohamed Salah for player of the season when he was fit. With a deeper team and more tactical options around him, these numbers could get even better.

And I’ll say the same for Martin Ødegaard, who perhaps did not perform as well last season as he did in the previous campaign, and struggled a bit when Saka wasn’t in the lineup. Despite that, he was still one of the most effective playmaking midfielders in the world.

And William Saliba is one of the top center backs in the world, with as complete of a game as you’re ever going to see. He might not be the unquestioned best at anything, but you can count on one hand the number of guys who possess his combination of skills.

But Arsenal have a bit of a problem — all of these guys are running down their contracts. There’s no indication that any are itching to leave, but they can command huge salaries elsewhere, so they’re not going to be easy negotiators. If I was an Arsenal fan, I’d be very concerned about none of these players announcing long-term extensions yet. Getting this done would be more important than any signing.

Who’s for sale and what is their budget?

First off, their budget appears to be: Very high. If all of the reported signings that we’re going to discuss tomorrow go through, Arsenal could very easily spend in excess of £200m on new players this transfer window.

They seem unlikely to offset them with huge sales. The Gunners can afford this after keeping things reasonable last summer, but it will likely severely limit their ability to make big moves next year.

Arsenal would probably love to move on from Oleksandr Zinchenko, who has been disappointing since joining from Manchester City. Now that he’s run through 3 years of his contract, the Gunners can move him on to anyone who will take him without worrying about eating a PSR hit.

Arsenal might need to eat some wages to get Reiss Nelson off their books, though I’d be willing to gamble on the injury-prone winger if I was a bottom-half team. He posted some very good performances for Fulham before he got hurt.

And finally, if Arsenal are going to sign all of Viktor Gyökeres, Eberechi Eze and Noni Madueke as is currently rumoured, they’re probably going to sell one of their current attackers. The most obvious one to move on from is Leandro Trossard given his age, but that’s also the reason he might not collect much of a fee.

Arsenal fans seem torn about whether to trust the process or sell while the market is still good on Gabriel Martinelli… and so am I. He’s a solid performer, but his development has stalled, and his market value will sink after he’s relegated to backup status this season. It might be time to cash in.

The Thomas Partey Section

Partey’s deteriorating performances and the team’s inability to move the player along (mostly for financial reasons) hard-capped Arsenal in the last two seasons when they desperately needed someone with more legs and dynamism in the middle of the pitch. The opportunity cost of that signing was LARGE, and though there were lots of sliding doors moments from the Bad Era of Arsenal management (anyone remember Nicolas Pepe?), this was a big one.

Just so I don’t get endless BUTWHATABOUT replies to this section: The other reasons to hate the fact that Partey played for the club with all of the allegations surrounding him are enormous and disgusting. They also have nothing to do with the footballing analysis of the signing or me personally. People living in the UK — including major media — have not been able to discuss a hint of this online until now because it was literally illegal, and would have gotten us sued.

I republished my original Thomas Partey take from the 20-21 Arsenal season preview over on Twitter today. The reason I did this is because the company that acquired StatsBomb seems to have nuked/moved the entire archive. Which is bad for me personally, as a lot of my recent life’s work lived there, and also bad for football analytics in general because A LOT of the best historic pieces in the discipline ALSO lived there.

Thankfully, the WayBack Machine exists and most things should be recoverable.

ANYWAY… I didn’t want to clutter this rebuild up with the past stuff, but the reasons I hated the Partey signing at the time (for which I received YEARS of abuse) are pretty fucking clean now that the contract ended. 💪 

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