Just Arsenal News
·22 September 2021
Just Arsenal News
·22 September 2021
Who are Arsenal’s most valuable players?
Arsenal is without a doubt a team with many loyal fans, and these fans have a bit of everything to say about Arsenal and their players. Especially now that we have received new signings, it is exciting to look at the fans’ assessments of the players at Arsenal. In fact, there were many who chose to play odds about who should get a contract with Arsenal, it is a pretty fun way to play odds compared to regular odds which is about the result of a match.
We give Arsenal fans the following instruction: “Give the player a score from 1 to 5, where 5 is the most valuable, and 1 is not so valuable”. The numbers were very interesting. Hundreds of self-proclaimed Arsenal fans responded to the survey, so these results should largely give us an idea of what Arsenal fans thought of the various players.
Let’s start with the new signings as it’s been one of the most exciting windows of recent times. As you will remember, there was a lot! After the Burnley match, the average rating for the 6 new signings was 3.81 out of 5. It is very high considering the average value for the whole team which was only 3.10. If we take out Nuno Tavares, who has not started a match yet, the average grade for the new signings will go up to 3.97.
This is what the results looked like:
White 3.95
Ramsdale 3.98
Tomiyasu 3.89
Lokonga 3.85
Tavares 3.03
Ødegaard 4.17
So what can we extract from this data? An important point is that it seems that the fans like the players very much after winning, but in general, as we know many Arsenal fans and hear many opinions, we can think the fans actually like this new group of players.
There will be ups and downs, there will be mistakes, but they all have talent and they will all get better as the season goes on. We also like that the character shines through. Tomiyasu is clearly a great personality in the locker room, and we love watching Aaron Ramsdale making videos for children who have suffered losses. There are little things like this that you think are standard with football players, but we can tell you that there are players who have been to Arsenal where that has not been the case.
Ødegaard, who made a beautiful free kick for Arsenal, has also apparently received a warm welcome from Arsenal fans, which warmed up to the Norwegian’ after the game.
The 5 players fans love the most at the moment are about as expected; this is what the top list looks like when we include all the players in the team :
Saka 4,88
ESR 4.70
Tierney 4.67
Partey 4.66
Ødegaard 4.17
There is nothing confusing here, although we were a little surprised to see midfielder Gabriel just outside the top 5, clearly his performance against Norwich struck. To go into a little more detail, the average age of the five best players was 23 years, although Thomas Partey draws this up quite a bit with his age of 28 years. If you expand the group to the 10 most valued Arsenal players, the age goes down to 22.7.
What does this tell us? It tells us first and foremost that the fans are on board with the summer strategy, that they like the idea of a youthful team, and hopefully they are willing to tackle the ups and downs that will come as part of the learning process this season.
We wanted a Dortmund ++ and we have it in the first place. ++ comes from the fact that we buy expensive players as a supplement to “our youngsters” like Auba and Partey. It also differs from the German side because we buy young elite players with bundles of Premier League experience. But this is definitely a similar model. We do it this way because it is the only way to compete. We can not buy a Premier League winning team, we have to cultivate it ourselves.
This comes with some consequences. Fans must lower their expectations for a league race this season. They must also accept that young players have ups and downs. But in the long run, this was the only way to do things, and I think it’s a very sympathetic plan that 95% of fans will agree with.
Overall, the feedback is positive. The fans like the new team, they like the players, and the direction on paper seems to be a direction that the fans like.