Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta on the touchline (Getty Images)
It often never rains but it pours for football fans.
Having witnessed their team lose two-out-of-two since the Premier League’s resumption, Arsenal supporters have now become the laughing stock of their peer groups after it was revealed the Gunners had offered David Luiz a new contract.
The one-year extension will keep the Brazilian at the Emirates Stadium until the end of the 2020/21 campaign, and after a disastrous performance against Manchester City – the latest in a long line of cataclysmic displays from the defender – Arsenal fans were hoping they would be waving goodbye to the 33-year-old in the summer.
But the Premier League’s ‘Marmite man’ has been given a stay of execution by Mikel Arteta, and so the Gunners’ faithful will be hoping their manager makes a raft of new signings in the transfer window to ensure Luiz doesn’t get back into the first-team picture.
It seems almost inevitable that Arsenal will splash out in the summer. They were listed as the sixth favourites in the Premier League winner betting odds at the start of the season, and that ranking won’t have improved after a disastrous 2019/20 campaign. And that’s why the best online sports betting sites, who offer a range of bet types from moneyline and point spreads to parlays and outrights, right now don’t rate Arsenal as a major consideration at all.
But they might if they have a decent summer in the transfer window, and so here’s three areas that they need to target:
At the time of writing, Arsenal had conceded 41 goals in the Premier League 2019/20 – more than any other top-half team bar Everton.
For a club built on defensive solidity – there was a famous chant of ‘one-nil to the Arsenal’ for a number of years – this really is unacceptable, and looking at the personnel available you would have to conclude that Arteta needs to invest heavily in this area.
The likes of Dayot Upamecano, Thomas Partey and Tyrone Mings have all been linked to the club, and that would certainly be a start in taking the Gunners back to basics.
Fans of a certain age will remember Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit dominating the midfield the last time Arsenal were major players in the Premier League title picture.
In truth, the club has auditioned many replacements since but never found anybody that can get close to the French duo.
The current mantle has been handed to Granit Xhaka, a player so lacking in discipline he has already accumulated seven yellow cards in just 23 appearances this term.
Tough tackling was a key theme of the Vieira-Petit reign of terror, but they didn’t need to accumulate bookings to stamp their authority on a game. Xhaka simply doesn’t have what it takes to replicate the stars of yesteryear.
You don’t need to be a genius to work out that if a player who has scored 41% of your league goals gets injured or is unavailable for whatever reason, it will likely have dire consequences for your hopes of progression.
That stat certainly helps to identify the importance of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to this Arsenal team, and it also reveals just how limited their goal threat is without him – no other player has recorded double figures in 2019/20 so far.
Arteta has to lighten the load on his key asset, and that may mean dipping into the transfer market or giving a chance to a number of young stars already at the club who have an eye for goal – Eddie Nketiah and Gabriel Martinelli could be the future of Arsenal if given an opportunity to shine.
Solve these three issues, and Arsenal might just be able to fire themselves back into the Premier League reckoning.
