With Arsenal on something of an island in 2nd place and with both of Arsenal’s recognised centre-forwards ruled out for the season by the first week in February, thoughts have been trained on the summer for a little while now. The league games feel a little anti-climactic (which is preferable to sweating on a place in the top five, clearly).
Not doing anything of note in the January market means immediately places a high level of focus on the summer. The imminent arrival of Andrea Berta also places a high level of focus and discussion on transfers. I think we are at a stage of the season, and certainly in a mindset, where we can foreshadow trends we can expect to see next season. Here are three I have my eye on.
Four full-backs
The emergence of Myles Lewis-Skelly and the prolonged run in the team Ben White’s injury has afforded Jurrien Timber has put Arsenal in a position where they have four starting quality full-backs. Kieran Tierney will leave in the summer and would have likely left earlier were it not for an injury sustained in the Euros.
Arsenal tried pretty hard to shift Zinchenko last summer and will presumably redouble those efforts this summer. Takehiro Tomiyasu, sadly, is unlikely to play serious minutes for the club again. In one respect, it looks as though Arsenal’s full-back options are being trimmed but I view this season as very much a positive inflation.
While Arsenal have had a lot of left-backs, they have also had a lot of left-back injuries. Centre-half Jakub Kiwior started 10 consecutive games in the position last season due to injuries. While it is true that Arsenal have some injury prone players in the role, I suspect there is also something about the ‘all over the map’ nature of being an Arsenal left-back that makes injury more likely.
In short, it makes sense that the left-back role is shared by two highly capable and interchangeable options. Calafiori and Lewis-Skelly bring different qualities to the role that ought to enable a ‘horses for courses’ approach to left-back. Meanwhile, at right-back, bad knee injuries to Timber and White at different times have hitherto denied Arteta the opportunity to have two Ferraris in the garage on the right of his defence.
White had to play with that knee injury for quite a while due to a lack of trusted options there (my kingdom for a fit Tomiyasu). Arsenal probably haven’t been able to be as attentive to Timber’s own recovery from a knee injury due to White and Tomiyasu having knee problems. It might be a coincidence, but that’s three right-backs and three different knee injuries too.
Timber and White are also relatively interchangeable in terms of their qualities but playing one over the other doesn’t drastically alter how Arsenal play. It ought to be a manager’s dream, especially with the consistent and aggressive expansion of the fixture schedule and with White now open to playing for England again. I am looking forward to having four excellent full-backs to choose from and rotate next season (until they all get knee injuries and Mikel Merino plays at left-back).
The big man up top
In following a manager’s thinking in recruitment, look not only at what a club executes but what they try and fail to execute. I think when Arsenal targeted Benjamin Sesko and Mikel Merino last summer (with a 50% success rate) Arteta was telling us that having a focal point / big lad upfront had become crucial to his vision for the team.
Targeting Merino told us that Havertz was largely seen as a centre-forward (I still think we might have seen him in midfield from time to time had Arsenal’s health in attack been better). Targeting Sesko told us that Arteta wanted two focal point / big lad types to lead the line. Well sourced reporting told us that Arsenal would have been open to the sale of Gabriel Jesus last summer.
In the great striker drought of 2025, it is Mikel Merino who has been preferred as a makeshift striker and I fully expect that to be the case for the remainder of the season. Arteta opted for Trossard as a false 9 for the Leicester match, the first after Havertz’s injury. That experiment survived for 68 minutes and has not been revisited since.
In an interview with the Guardian this week, Merino describes his new role in very Havertz like terms. ‘If they defend higher, stepping out and leaving space behind, then I receive in more more midfield areas; if they close deeper, I’m more in the area, fixing the centre-backs.”
I shouldn’t forget that it is also true that Arsenal tried to sign Ollie Watkins in January, who doesn’t quite fit the target man prototype. He does offer a lot of qualities running the channels and hitting shots from those areas not matched by Arsenal’s other forward options.
I believe that Sesko also offers some of these qualities but I think targeting Watkins was also something of a Hail Mary solution and probably not totally indicative of how Arteta sees his attack. But I think the focal point / big lad upfront is here to stay.
Rice to continue as master of all trades
I think it is understandable that, as a fan base, we have a desire to see Declan Rice settle into one full-time position. With Jorginho and Thomas Partey set to depart the club too, it’s natural that we have considered the deeper role in midfield as one that is earmarked for him. I am less convinced.
Firstly, I think Rice is essentially a six and an eight all rolled into one and that he operates best in big spaces. While I think he can operate very effectively as a six, it represents a clipping of his wings. I don’t think neatly and tidily cataloguing a player for our own neurological satisfaction is a good enough reason to do it.
He offers good offensive output and, as I wrote last week, he has become one of Arsenal’s most threatening attacking players while Merino has executed his duty as a makeshift striker. The interest in Martin Zubimendi suggests that Arteta still wants a more controlling, technical presence at the base of his midfield regularly.
I think the intention for this season was that Arteta would select one of Merino or Partey / Jorginho with Rice in midfield, depending on the opposition. So sometimes Rice might be the deepest player with Merino ahead of him and sometimes Rice would have a more box-to-box role with Jorginho / Partey behind.
We haven’t really seen that this season due to Merino’s injuries, followed by his redeployment to centre-forward. But I just don’t think Arteta is fixated on pinning down one particular role for Rice and playing him there every week. One of the player’s biggest strengths is that he is a true all-rounder and I think Arteta will continue to confound our desire for certainty by leaning into his versatility on a permanent basis.
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