This summer, Arsenal have shown an appetite to wreck their club transfer record with the pursuits of first Wilfried Zaha from Crystal Palace and then Nicolas Pepe from Lille. The Gunners have already brought Real Madrid’s creative midfielder Dani Ceballos to the club on loan. This has led many to ask an obvious question- why aren’t Arsenal buying any central defenders?
Well, the first thing to acknowledge is that the team very obviously needs an injection of security at centre-half, even without the added complication of Laurent Koscielny’s exit. Rob Holding is still short of fitness and while Calum Chambers’ return from a loan spell at Fulham provides welcome cover, his is not the transformative presence Arsenal need to sure up a back line that has shifted 102 goals its last 76 Premier League matches.
Yet just because Arsenal need a quality centre-half, it doesn’t mean they didn’t need quality in central midfield and out wide too – for reasons that I laid out last week. I think Arsenal know that they require a quality centre-back, Unai Emery has spelled it out enough times in recent weeks. The truth is, however, the market for good central defenders is depressed.
There you have it… Harry Maguire: better in the air than Virgil Van Dijk. pic.twitter.com/3gT3UEx910
— Unibet (@unibet) July 25, 2019
Manchester United are going to pay £85m for Harry Maguire. They baulked at his valuation last summer and earlier this, but did not find a better option available. Defenders cost as much as attackers in the modern market and that’s largely a supply and demand issue. Liverpool’s £70m splurge on Virgil van Dijk was both a symptom of an inflated market and has subsequently inflated fees for defenders further.
In recent seasons, the top six have expensively acquired any number of centre-halves with underwhelming results. Lindelof, Bailly, Mangala and Mustafi have been unmitigated failures. Otamendi, Stones and Davinson Sanchez have provided more debatable value for their large fees. Chelsea’s search for a centre-half in 2016 became so protracted that they simply bought David Luiz back from Paris Saint-Germain.
There are few guarantees in the current market, even if you spend big on a centre back. William Saliba cost the Gunners nearly £30m after a total of 16 Ligue 1 starts and even he requires a loan spell back to St. Etienne before he is remotely ready for the Premier League. I imagine Arsenal’s plan for the season was to use Laurent Koscielny until Rob Holding was nursed back to health, before placing Koscielny on lighter duties. Next summer, Saliba would then act as Koscielny’s replacement.
The captain’s current fit of pique has put paid to that strategy, which was far from ideal in any case. It is no secret that Unai Emery’s team requires a transformational defensive signing in the mould of Sol Campbell, or Rio Ferdinand at Manchester United or Virgil van Dijk at Liverpool. The issue is that that player just doesn’t seem to exist on the current market and if he did, he would almost certainly be beyond Arsenal’s reach in any case.
One could reasonably argue that the options at the centre of the defence are of such low quality, that it wouldn’t be difficult to improve them with even a mid-level signing. I am sympathetic to this argument and would be happy if the club could broach a solid loan deal for an experienced head. However, it is worth pointing out that last summer the club bought Bernd Leno, Lucas Torreira, Stephan Lichtsteiner and Sokratis Papastathopoulos and went on to concede the exact same number of goals they had in the 2017-18 season (51).
The respective returns of Rob Holding and Hector Bellerin, the potential addition of Kieran Tierney (and the possible exit of Shkodran Mustafi!) can, hopefully, push the needle a little on the Arsenal defence. They only missed the top four by a single point last season after all, a little improvement might add up to a lot until they can find a more suitable solution with their cheque book.
