The last thing Arsenal need is a new goal scoring centre forward

 

 

 

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By Tony Attwood, carefully aided by a soap box.

Last season after 24 games Arsenal had scored 53 goals and sat third in the league (all figures from 11v11). This season it is 49 goals in 24 games.  A slip (although hardly a significant one) of four goals. 

The defence has performed the same as last season, conceding just 22 goals after 24 games.   Last season that made it the best defence in the league, this season Liverpool have conceded one goal fewer.

So Arsenal are pretty much where they were last season and indeed just as last season there is today mega-moaning that Arsenal have failed to sign another striker, and so seemingly all is lost.

But really, is bringing in a new striker the solution to Arsenal’s needs?  

What has to be considered here is what sort of striker Arsenal wants to bring in.  Is it a complete replacement for Havertz?   If so that is going to be a risk; for even proven strikers can fail to live up to their reputation after moving clubs.  Indeed Quora has a list of those who failed at one club and then succeeded at another.

And then there are players who have succeeded at one club and failed at the next.  Some prominent examples of such players range from Shevchenko to Torres, from van Persie (who slumped at ManU after leaving Arsenal) to Berbatov (who also failed at Man U), the list goes on and on.  And in fact, if you want to find a single reason for years of big club failures, the signing of big fee centre forwards is a fair place to start.

Plus there is another danger – a high-profile player who comes in, and displaces the incumbent who may well have been doing ok, but now feels resentful.   And then again, having spent a lot of money on an incoming player, the manager invariably feels the need to play the new man, even when he is not doing well.  When finally he is dropped, the media go berserk, unsettling everyone even more.

So bringing in a high-profile player in January (which means he is bound to go straight into the team) can be a disaster not just for the player but for the team whose goal-scoring capacity fails.  This is quite different from an early summer transfer where the player has a chance to get to know the rest of the team and its manager.

Change and progress need to be balanced, as Arsenal’s extraordinary progress as a goal-scoring team in recent years shows.

In 2021/22 Arsenal were the fifth highest scoring team with 61 goals – which was in fact 61% of the goals scored by the league winners.  The highest scorer for Arsenal  was Saka with 11.  In 2023 the club total shot up to 88 league goalsl and Arsenal’s highest scorer were Martinelli and Odegaard each with 15.  And then in 2024 with 91 league goals scored, the highest scorer in the League was Saka with 16.

So why drop that approach of multi-player scoring, in order to bring in a goal-scoring number 9, which would disrupt the entire approach of the club?

No, it is clear that the Arsenal approach in recent years has been NOT to have goals coming from a dominant centre forward – whose mode of playing means the ball has to be pushed forward to him at every opportunity.   What has made Arsenal successful has been having goals coming from a variety of places.

In 2022/23 the top scorer was not one player way ahead of everyone else in terms of goals, but Martinelli and Odegaard on 15, Saka on 14.  Not one obvious centre forward but three other players all scoring decent numbers.    But this season all three of those players have had injuries.  And yet so strong is the squad, we are still only four goals short of where we were last season at this time.

Yet this is being portrayed in the media as a failure – a failure because we “obviously” need a striker – exactly as was said last season and the season before.

But there is a huge benefit of having a multiplicity of scorers, as Arsenal have been developing, for if one gets injured or loses form, then the whole approach doesn’t fall apart.

This season Arsenal have been incredibly unlikely with injuries as we all know, and surely I don’t have to list them here.   And yet despite this run of injuries, Arsenal are still the second-highest-scoring team in the league!

What the pundits want us to believe is that we should throw this model away just because this season we have had a lot of injuries.  But in fact, what that would mean would be having one man who in particular would be relied on to knock in maybe a third of the club’s goals.   Which is ok except that if he loses form, if he gets injured playing for Arsenal, or most annoying of all gets injured playing for his country when he most clearly needed a break – we are screwed.

This season Arsenal has had the worst array of injuries to potential goal scorers in many a long year – but that doesn’t mean the thing to do is to put all our faith in one player.  In fact, that would be the worst thing to do.  Yes the model of multiple-scoring players can be defeated by a massive array of injuries, but even so the danger is far less than having one big time scorer who gets hurt of loses his knack.  

The great worry is that despite having a model that has delivered near-record numbers of goals for Arsenal in the modern era, the media and their camp followers want to throw that whole model out because in this season several of the top scorers have had long-term injuries at once.  And despite having a model in which even in those injuries, Arsenal are still the second-highest-scoring team in the league.

That is bonkers and sad.  And the only sadder thing is that some people believe they are right..