How Long Will Our Rebuild Take?
From a previous article, I noted that we needed quite a number of new major signings to be truly competitive.
— New central defender.
— New rightback.
— New attacking midfielder. (Odegaard?)
— New striker.
Knowing that Leno is not it, and that Granit Xhaka might still be sold even after a new contract. We will also need their replacements within the next two seasons as well.
That’s 6 major signings. How long will it take Arsenal to sign these 6 major players?
Using historical evidence from our transfer activity in previous windows, I estimate 2 major signings per season. So far in this season, we have only made 1. We can expect one more signing. So that leaves 4 signings for the team to be complete. Ordinarily, this will make it 2 seasons before Arsenal’s rebuild is complete.
These remaining 4 signings can be done all in one swoop or a player might develop well enough internally to make the need redundant. So, I estimate only one more season beyond the current one for Arsenal to approach complete rebuild. By this time as well, many of the current crop of players (Tierney, Gabriel, White, Saka, Martinelli, Balogun, Lokonga) would be near prime performance ages. As a result, Arsenal must target players in the 21-25 age range. This will make sure that everyone is near or in their prime ages and ready to compete with rivals by the time the rebuild is complete. If any of the links are true, then Arsenal are indeed following this approach.
Be excited, indeed. Short term results right now are not the best but Arsenal fans have much to be excited about in the coming years.
Agboola Israel