Have Arsenal unbalanced our squad with too many tall and physical players?

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·10 November 2024

Have Arsenal unbalanced our squad with too many tall and physical players?

Has a focus on being more physical been a reason for our struggles in attack?

In the last few transfer windows there has been a shift in focus to signing players with more height and physicality. Arsenal for a long while have been a club that always targets attributes like good technique and dribbling when looking to sign a player, however in recent seasons a shift was made, due to a couple of reasons and you can’t say we haven’t benefited from it.

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In the last two seasons alone, all of Kai Havertz, Declan Rice, Riccardo Calafiori and Mikel Merino are player’s well over six foot that we’ve brought in to add to our already tall squad. This has been done over the years, understandably given how easy it was for opposing teams to absolutely bully us physically and in the air, having bigger players also helped us become better in attacking and scoring from set pieces which we all know has been a very important asset. However, after a couple of years of targeting such players we may have inadvertently damaged our attacking fluidity in the process.

(Photo by ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images)

Every positive thing pretty much has something negative attached to it, signing mostly physically imposing players is no different. The imbalance in the squad between more technically gifted players and bigger players were brought to light when Ødegaard got injured, barring a very young Ethan Nwaneri, we don’t have a more natural deputy to the Norwegian when he’s absent, and that has led to sometimes field an imbalanced midfield three of Merino, Rice and Partey or Merino, Rice and Havertz/Trossard. In those two combinations, neither of those players aside from Trossad can operate in the pockets efficiently, the rest are players who prefer receiving out of the opponents mid/low block.

There’s a reason why we click when Nwaneri is on the pitch, he operates comfortably in those pockets of space where the opponent can be hurt from. Normally players who are relatively smaller have a lower center of gravity which gives them better balance hence their ability of receiving and turning in one motion when under pressure.

Furthermore, having too much height in the squad will lead to teams resorting only to launching hopeful crosses into the box when lacking confidence or imagination to create centrally. We saw this perfectly unfold against Inter Milan last time out where we resorted to mostly crosses into the box in our search for goals.

Fabio Vieira and Smith Rowe were two solid options to call upon when Ødegaard gets injured but we decided to let them go without bringing in adequate replacements in the summer, this has greatly exacerbated our struggles in attack recently and one can only imagine if things would’ve been different if we did sign a proper backup to Ødegaard.

This is just an observation, what are your thoughts gooners?

BENJAMIN KENNETH.

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Have Arsenal unbalanced our squad with too many tall and physical players? | OneFootball

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