Last summer was the epitome of Mikel Arteta’s complete rebuild of the Arsenal squad, with a shedload of unwanted players leaving the Emirates, and a mountain of cash spent on bringing in a large contingent of young talented stars of the future to join up with our academy graduates to create the youngest first team in the Premiership.
Arteta himself said last summer that we were only halfway through the rebuild project, so we should expect another raft of players coming in this time around.
One of our arrivals last summer was Aaron Ramsdale, who was probably one of Arteta’s best decisions of the window, and the young goalkeeper seems pretty sure that we will be seeing just as much action as last year. He told David Seamans’s Podcast: “Yeah I think it’s going to be another interesting summer this one.
“We obviously brought in quite a number of players in the last summer window.”
Ramsdale admitted that the Arsenal squad was a bit thin since January, but he is adamant that Arteta and Edu did try to bring in players to add to the squad during the winter window and also thinks he was right to clear out the players that did not fit into the bosses plans. “I know for a fact the club tried hard to bring some players in in January and we just couldn’t get them over the line.
“But it’s one of those things, hindsight is a wonderful, wonderful thing because we could have got fourth without signing anyone and people would have said it’s because [of the decisions in January].”
“But we’ll look to sign some players in the summer which will be good and obviously, when you’re playing in Europe and you’re playing in the Premier League, you do need very good squad depth.
“Although we didn’t have a huge amount of players, whenever the players did step in, I never felt – and we never felt – that we were losing any quality or anything like that.
“So I think something the manager did really well is that the ones who stayed and the ones who played, he knew he could rely on all of them.”
So, I personally can’t wait to see which players arrive and how many of them. We definitely need a much bigger squad to cope with all the extra games, but I also would like to see some of our academy players promoted as well so they can get experience in the Europa League Group stages and the League Cup….
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