Nobody could have foreseen at the start of this season that Mikel Arteta would be attempting to turn Mikel Merino into a modern-day Marouane Fellaini to rescue Arsenal’s title bid by the end of it.
Watching Merino learn on the job up against three established centre-backs during Saturday’s damaging defeat to West Ham made for an odd visual experience.
This is no criticism of Merino, a malleable player doing his best in bizarre circumstances. He made intelligent runs off defenders and held the ball up better than Rasmus Hojlund has lately but never really looked like scoring.
This was supposed to be Arsenal’s season. Instead, they are 11 points behind the leaders and playing a central midfielder up front. How has it come to this?
There are two obvious answers: misfortune and mismanagement. Losing Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz to season-ending injuries in less than a month was brutal. Deciding against buying or loaning in a striker in either of the last two transfer windows was ill-judged.
Another factor, that is potentially a blend of both of the above, is that Arsenal do not possess a young striker of first-team potential in their squad.
That much is evident by Arteta attempting to find creative solutions within his senior group rather than raiding the U21s for a natural centre-forward.
Nathan Butler-Oyedeji was an unused substitute at the weekend, but he is 22 years old and has never scored a senior goal in 26 appearances in Leagues One and Two. He is unlikely to be the saviour they need and is tipped to leave this summer.
Most Premier League clubs use a formation that only requires one striker, which is why many, like Arsenal, have only two established ones to pick from.
However, it is prudent to have a third slot filled by a promising youngster, either promoted from within or sourced from elsewhere.
At the start of the 2014-15 season, Harry Kane was behind Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado in Mauricio Pochettino’s pecking order at Tottenham Hotspur and look how turned that out.
Arsenal may not have a world-class talent waiting to be unleashed as Tottenham did with Kane, but they have offloaded plenty of exciting talent in recent years.
In March 2024, Mika Biereth told The i Paper that he hoped he would “get an opportunity” at the Emirates after making an explosive start on loan at Sturm Graz.
He ended up playing a key role in ending Red Bull Salzburg’s dominance of Austrian football by firing his team to the league title.
Instead of establishing himself at Arsenal, Biereth returned to Graz permanently last summer and a return of 14 goals in 25 games in the first half of this season led to another move to Monaco in January.
The 22-year-old has again made an instant impact, scoring seven goals in eight matches including two Ligue 1 hat-tricks.
A major factor behind Monaco’s decision to buy Biereth – in a deal that earned Arsenal a seven-figure sum via a sell-on clause – is that their first-choice striker Folarin Balogun has been sidelined since October with a shoulder injury.
Balogun fired Arsenal to an U18 league title in 2018-19 with 25 goals in only 19 games and featured 10 times for the first team, scoring twice in the Europa League.
However, he was unable to force his way into Arteta’s Premier League plans and after a 21-goal season on loan at Reims moved to Monaco for a fee worth up to £33m in August 2023.
Last month, Analytics FC – a data-driven football consultancy firm that helps clubs across Europe identify transfer targets – provided The i Paper with a list of forwards who share similar traits with Alexander Isak, a player frequently linked with Arsenal. One of them was Balogun.
“Arsenal could do worse than going back to a former player in Folarin Balogun, who is in the top 1 per cent of all Ligue 1 players for xG per 90 this season despite playing fewer than 500 minutes,” Alex Stewart from Analytics FC said.
Given Balogun’s injury issues, he would have been unable to help Arsenal ride this current storm, but one player who might have been able to is the highly-rated – and still raw – Chido Obi.
Along with Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly, the 17-year-old was seen as one of Arsenal’s brightest prospects after scoring 32 goals in 18 games for the U18s, but unlike his former teammates, he decided his future was better served away from north London and joined Manchester United.
The Red Devils reportedly offered more lucrative terms to Obi than Arsenal did, but another rumoured factor behind his decision to head north is that United presented a speedier pathway into their first-team.
Obi has come on as a substitute in United’s last two Premier League games which indicates he is third in line behind Hojlund and Joshua Zirkzee in Ruben Amorim’s pecking order.
Biereth, Balogun and Obi either featured sparingly for Arsenal or not at all, but the same could not be said of Eddie Nketiah.
The 25-year-old racked up 168 appearances in all competitions, scoring 38 goals, before joining Crystal Palace for £30m in August.
He stuck around longer than most but eventually his Arsenal career followed a similar trajectory. Arteta often spoke glowingly of Nketiah, but a desire to prove himself and play regularly lay behind his departure.
Things haven’t worked out for Nketiah in south London where he has found himself in a familiar position as a backup, but he was an ideal second or third-choice option at Arsenal.
In the absence of any signings, he would have been invaluable this season.
There are a multitude of reasons why young players switch clubs but often it is a matter of circumstance.
Alexander Riget, a technical director at Danish club FC Nordsjaelland, told The i Paper that a reason Patrick Dorgu left them for Lecce was because of “player logistics”. They had three more senior left-backs than him in the squad; three years later Manchester United bought him for £25m.
A similar thing has happened at Arsenal, where such logistics encouraged a host of number nines to continue their careers elsewhere. In a parallel universe, one of them could have been solving Arteta’s current striker crisis.
Arsenal will hope that the next goalscorer off the Hale End rank will fulfil their potential in N7 and not elsewhere.
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