When to Expect Arsenal's Next Transfer

Last week’s arrival of the skillful and feisty Swiss midfielder Granit Xhaka seemed perfectly coordinated with the unlikely St. Totteringham’s Day of May 22^nd to tamp down unrest in the Arsenal fanbase.

Yet after the revelations of this spring, you have to wonder how widespread that unrest is.

The situation on the ground and in the ground

In particular, all the hullabaloo and lobbying from three supporter groups resulted in only the most tepid and amateurish of protests during Arsenal’s 1-0 win over Norwich on April 30^th. This led some observers, Arseblog’s Tim Stillman prominent among them, to suggest that social media produce an inaccurate representation of Arsenal support.

That certainly jibed with my experience at the Crystal Palace and West Bromwich Albion matches earlier in April. There was localized grumpiness and limited encouragement during the uninspired display against Palace, but I would describe the environment as disinterested rather than toxic. Two early goals against West Brom and a different fan demographic made that a more festive affair.

The atmosphere at these matches surprised me a little, because with my support restricted by distance to television, blogs, and Twitter, I had feared outright revolt in person. What I got instead was more evidence that the self-regard, outrage, and hyperbole we witness through social media aren’t pervasive among our fellow supporters.

How time rolls

In addition to attitude, social media tends to warp the sense of time. The immediacy of the vehicle, especially Twitter, creates an endless desire for news and feedback. But, in the real time experienced by most people, revelations and faux-revelations are not constant.

It’s worth remembering the different dynamics of virtual and earthbound existence during the close season. The patterns of the league and cup competitions aren’t there to guide us through the summer months, but the appetites and expectations driven by social media don’t abate.

To satisfy these desires, many fans look to the club’s player acquisitions. Intensified by print and broadcast media, supporters’ hunger for transfer news has further distorted reality. Now, we’ve reached the point where some observers expect their own needs for news to drive the club’s decisions. As if solipsism and ceaseless satisfaction of the Arsenal twitterati should somehow guide the business.

When manager Arsène Wenger responded to questions about fan discontent by saying “I’m sorry if I can’t keep [everyone] 100 percent happy,” he was referring to the team’s overall performance and its inability to sustain a challenge for the league title. But he could just as easily have been speaking about the way the club conducts its business activities.

Alternatives to PR priority

It doesn’t, for example, let public relations become the dominant priority during the transfer season. That might be an obvious point, considering the futile clamoring of supporters and observers for the acquisition of a top center forward since 2013. Still, Arsenal officials do very little to manage perceptions of what positions need to be filled, and they certainly don’t measure acquisitions to fit the social media news cycle.

More important are the club’s background work, the clarity of negotiations, and the preferences of incoming players. In the case of Xhaka, Arsenal’s scouts “have been watching him for a long time,” in the words of Wenger; Xhaka confirmed that the manager had made the initial contact in mid-2015: “It was a year ago, I was almost speechless when he called!”

From the outside, we can’t know how straightforward the negotiations with Xhaka’s representatives and former club Borussia Mönchengladbach were. The news cycle and popular appetites encourage misinformation, as when stories emerged that Arsenal had lowballed the German club. All we can assess is the outcome, which suggests very little fuss.

The timing also depended on Xhaka’s interest in concluding the move before the start of the European Championships on June 10.

So if any fans are thinking that their own desires and perceptions had anything to do with these events—the position Arsenal are filling, the player’s identity, the unfolding of negotiations, the arrangement of the announcement--all the evidence indicates other factors drove the business.

At the other end of the transfer period, when moves are about to be cut off for four months, the forces could be different. Even so, Arsenal isn’t likely to act based on fans’ longings. Opportunities might materialize, such as when playmaker Mesut Özil became available in late summer 2014. Now that the club has greater, perhaps unprecedented, financial stability, we can expect it to be a buyer more often than a seller in those situations.

No matter what the scenario, the plan for the business and the sporting strategy will guide decisions. Our own personal or collective preferences of what position, which player, or when won’t.

Although a football club’s business is entertainment, Arsenal’s genre isn’t fantasy.

The Inscrutable Arsène Wenger

The close of the summer transfer period on Tuesday prompted an incredulous response from many Arsenal supporters. How, they asked, could Arsenal state aspirations to compete for the Premier League title and neglect summer transfers?

The disconnect seems all the more pronounced in light of the activity of other title aspirants, particularly Manchester City and Manchester United and, to a lesser extent, Chelsea. They were three of the top four spenders, on a net basis, in the league, while Arsenal ranked 15^th.

To broaden and intensify the contrast: Arsenal were the only club in the top-five European leagues not to recruit a senior outfield player during this transfer period.

This is seen as a clear indication of a character flaw in manager Arsène Wenger.

Reasons for the uproar

I think this misguided response comes down to three factors:

1. Our own ignorance of the arcane environment of football transfers
2. Our lazy equation of one man with the activity of a multifaceted enterprise
3. Wenger’s remarkable ability, despite years in the public eye, to defy assumptions and expectations

I’ve written about the bizarre world of football transfers before, so instead of restating my case here, I’ll just direct you to a piece on my personal blog, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Even Small Crowds.” The main point is that football transfers don’t have the characteristics of any transaction we’re familiar with – and they certainly aren’t as straightforward as popular computer games make them seem.

Even the term “transfer market” creates a false impression, because it suggests a large pool of transparent transactions that can be compared to each other. That’s not the case for the few, murky, discrete exchanges of footballers and money among European clubs.

My article “Arsenal, Arsène Wenger, and the Cult of Personality” examines the second factor, arguing that the equation of individual managers with clubs is lazy, misleading, and convenient, in the sense that it allows me as an individual to criticize a public figure based on the way I would have acted in similar circumstances.

An exceptional figure

It’s the third factor I want to look at here. Accepting that Wenger plays the dominant role in Arsenal’s acquisition of players, the manager has shown instincts that so few of us can understand, let alone summon.

To wit: When the next summer transfer period closes, Wenger will be in the final year of his contract. Yet in this penultimate opportunity for a major expenditure, he held back, or at least endorsed the approach of holding back. How many of us, knowing we could be out the door in the medium term, would have done the same?

Instead, the manager and his colleagues made just one acquisition at the first-team level. Even there, the move went against expectation. Arsenal paid Chelsea £10.9 million for 33-year-old goalkeeper Petr Cech. That’s the highest fee for a goalkeeper in Wenger’s tenure – Richard Wright’s transfer cost the club £6 million in 2001 – and certainly represents the largest proportion of any transfer period’s activity for a goalkeeper. (Transfer figures are from The Arsenal Report's Transfer Centre.)

The remainder of Arsenal’s transfer activity involved younger players, part of the club’s clear effort to enhance the player development structure and personnel. Jeff Reine-Adelaïde, the 17-year-old acquisition from Lens, put in two eye-catching preseason performances with the first team, while his compatriots Yassin Fortune and Ismaël Bennacer have also been highly touted. In all, the club spent £3.3 million on five youngsters, the largest single outlay on youth team players in Wenger’s time at the club.

That suggests that, despite his age, Wenger continues to manage for the long-term, valuing the training and upbringing of talented youth. At the same time, he has eased his prior practice of cutting ties with players older than 30, extending the contracts of Tomás Rosicky and Mikel Arteta this summer and showing a willingness to let 31-year-old Mathieu Flamini's contract run to term next summer.

Adaptation or image management?

This portrayal isn't of a hidebound geriatric or a spendthrift. Wenger is making multiple adjustments, not least deploying a considerable amount of the club's resources in the past two years, to move the club closer to its title rivals. He won't ever match their spending because profligacy doesn't suit his philosophy--if it did, he'd have left for Real Madrid in 2005--and because that's not the club's strategy.

What Wenger will do is see out his current contract and keep us all guessing about his subsequent plans. Whether this coyness is a deliberate ploy to stay in the public eye, to take some of the scrutiny off his players, to solidify his legacy, or to remain true to his nature, that's all conjecture.

We may never fully understand Wenger's motives or decisions, but it's incredibly interesting to try. If those efforts don't figure him out to our satisfaction, that's more on us than it is on him. Might it just be more worthwhile to marvel at this extraordinary steward of an organization that means so much to so many?

Theo Walcott & Arsenal's Best Attack

As Arsenal forward Theo Walcott returned from a 12-month injury layoff in January, he praised his teammates' collective attacking talent. Walcott, typically a measured interviewee, made what was for him a bold statement to the club's Website.

After describing the qualities of newcomers Alexis Sanchez and Danny Welbeck, Walcott identified other members of the Arsenal attack and said, "And the list goes on, that's how good we are going forward. It's a headache for the manager when you have that many great attacking options. When I came, it was Pires and Ljungberg, Bergkamp, Thierry and Reyes - that’s some attacking force as well. I think this squad probably does beat it, but we need to prove it first."

Some observers took this as provocation and rejected the notion that Arsenal's current attack is better than the legendary strikeforce of the early 2000's. The more interesting twist is that Walcott's assessment relegates him to a less vital role in the squad, a position likely to affect his contract negotiations.

Comparing firepower

It's always problematic to compare statistics across sports campaigns; after all, field conditions, managerial decisions, injuries, the quality of opponents, training methods, team chemistry and turnover, and many other factors affect production. Still, this kind of analysis can be interesting and might help us weigh Walcott's statement.

In the current Premier League campaign, Arsenal have scored 56 goals in 29 matches. That's a rate of 1.93 goals per match, on pace for 73 league goals. This production would rank third among Arsenal's past six league seasons and is far off the 2.29 goal-per-match pace set by the 2004-05 team, the most prolific of manager Arsène Wenger's tenure with 87 goals.

Those numbers don't support Walcott's assertion--at least not to date.

Let's also consider how broad the contributions have been, because that might indicate an overall level of talent in line with Walcott's argument. Arsenal currently have the highest number of goalscorers in the league. Fifteen Gunners have scored, led by Alexis with 13 and Olivier Giroud with 11. Manchester City and Chelsea have each seen 13 players score.

In the record-setting 2004-05 league season, only 14 Arsenal players marked their names on the score sheet. Thierry Henry had the largest contribution, 25 goals. It's also worth noting that the 2009-10 team's 83 goals (2.18 per game) came from 18 players, the most broadly productive of Wenger's Arsenal squads.

Walcott wasn't performing a quantitative analysis, to be fair. He was looking at his teammates and their quality and drawing a conclusion about their potential potency. Forwards Alexis, Giroud, Welbeck, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Walcott himself; attacking midfielders Santi Cazorla, Mesut Özil, and Tomas Rosicky; and central midfielders Aaron Ramsey and Jack Wilshere do, on paper, make up an awesome array of offensive talent.

Theo's participation

In this context, the status and future of Walcott have become popular discussion points among Arsenal supporters. Tim Stillman has written some compelling pieces for Arseblog, most recently "Can Theo Walcott Dance to Arsenal's New Tune," examining the issues Walcott faces as he rejoins the team.

What seems clear is that Walcott is no longer an automatic starter, as he was, for example, in 2011-12, when he started 32 league games. His first appearance this season was in the 2-0 loss at Southampton on January 1. Including that match, Arsenal have played 10 league contests for which Walcott was available. He started just three of those matches and made five appearances as a substitute.

No one is suggesting that Walcott should have started all 10 of those matches; he had just returned from a major knee injury. And he did start two of the club's four FA Cup matches, came on as a substitute in one other, and saw time in both Champions League matches against Monaco. This seems like a reasonable number of appearances in 11 weeks. (Appearance stats are from OptaSports via whoscored.com.)

The extent of those appearances has raised questions, though. Walcott has played a total of 514 minutes, while the team has run out for 1440 (16 matches) since his January 1 return.

Wenger has acknowledged his reluctance to use the England man. "I have been holding him back," the manager told the Arsenal Website on March 13, "because he has been out for a long time and for the fact there is intense competition."

Whither Theo?

That squares with Walcott's own assessment of the talent around him, but it glosses over the issue of his fit with his new teammates and their revised style of play. With a mix of coordinated pressing and disciplined defending now expected of all 10 outfield players, Walcott's primary assets of speed and finishing aren't sufficient. (See Stillman's aforementioned article and "We Need to Talk about Theo" and Anam Hassan's "Tactics Column: Walcott on the Periphery, Ramsey, Giroud on Top Form" on Arseblog for deeper analyses.)

Indeed, the manager has hinted at this gap between Walcott's skills and the enhanced expectations. "When you have the ball in the modern game you have to attack, when you don’t have the ball you have to defend," Wenger said. "All the players who can’t do that, cannot play."

In Alexis, Welbeck, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Giroud, and even Cazorla, who has displayed a defensive ability to go along with his eye-catching control and passing skills, Arsenal have a large contingent of players who meet those modern requirements. So as much as the multiple attacking options that Walcott identified have displaced him, the expectations of defensive contributions make him less essential to the team than he's been since his breakthrough.

That makes the renewal of Walcott's contract, which ends in June 2016, a tricky proposition.

The Good, the Bad, the Amazingly Coiffed Olivier Giroud

Arsenal center forward Olivier Giroud received widespread condemnation for his performance in the club's 3-1 home Champions League defeat to Monaco. The criticism wasn't entirely unwarranted: Giroud had misfired on six shots, failed to complete eight of his 18 passes, and went off defeated midway through the second half.

The interesting development wasn't Giroud's failure in that match; it was his response. When manager Arsène Wenger trusted Giroud with a starting spot four days after the Monaco loss, he scored Arsenal's crucial opening goal against Everton. He did the same three days after that against Queen's Park Rangers.

"He's strong mentally," Wenger said of his compatriot after Wednesday's match. "He can take some criticism and respond. He's shown that. I feel it was a bit harsh for him because he missed some chances. That can happen."

This fortitude, which few people outside professional athletic circles can comprehend, may make Giroud the ideal Arsenal striker from a psychological perspective.

How to stand tall in a storm

Center forwards at Arsenal are lightning rods. Fans, pundits, and other observers see the shortcomings of the leader of the team's attacking line and use that criticism to bash Wenger. There are three main reasons for this:

1. Many watch football for the exploits of goal scorers
2. The model of the Arsenal striker was established and perfected by Thierry Henry
3. The "value-oriented" approach to player acquisition has been most obvious in pursuit of strikers

Until the summer of 2014, when the dearth of world-class central defenders drove the price of David Luiz to £50 million, acquiring an elite forward was the transaction most subject to the irrational forces of the player transfer market. (I wrote about this last summer in "Who Is This Mythical Arsenal Striker?") It just wasn't possible to get the services of a proven goalscorer for the prices Arsenal have been able or willing to pay. Arsenal supporters bemoaned this reality and its implications for their club's standing among the elites.

These laments, of course, conveniently overlook the status of Henry when Arsenal bought him from Juventus. Although the club paid a record £11 million to acquire him in 1999, Henry had only scored three goals in one season at Juventus and a total of 28 in five previous seasons with Monaco.

Yet he emerged as the top striker of the Premier League era and the ideal in that position among Arsenal supporters--the thin, fast, cool, smart, and lethal predator. That became the aesthetic expectation.

Giroud, much like the Henry of 1999, does not meet this expectation. However, his mental makeup appears to equip him perfectly for the current football culture. He is confident but not so confident that he doesn't recognize the need to improve, particularly in the face of direct competition from newcomer Danny Welbeck. He acknowledges criticism but does not let it paralyze him. And he risks failure to achieve success. (Without engaging in too much armchair psychoanalysis here, I must note that Giroud's handsomeness might be an asset in all these respects.)

Improvements in skill and instinct

Many have analyzed Giroud's awareness, strength, and touch and have deemed him vital to Arsenal's style of play. Without those attributes, the skillful attacking play of Santi Cazorla, Mesut Özil, Jack Wilshere, Aaron Ramsey, and Tomas Rosicky and the speed of Alexis Sanchez, Theo Walcott, Welbeck, and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain lack a foundation. His three-month absence due to injury in the second Premier League match of the season coincided with the team's most tentative offensive displays.

Since his return in late November, Giroud has shown newly keen instincts in front of goal, finding or creating space in crowded areas and scoring timely goals. His savvy is a major reason that Arsenal's performance on set pieces has improved so dramatically: Through 28 matches, Arsenal have scored 10 goals from free kicks and corners this season, compared with eight all of last season. (From Squawka.com's Team Rankings)

We saw this contribution on his goal against Everton. As his teammate Gabriel ran toward the near post, Giroud pulled back into the space Gabriel and his marker Gareth Barry had vacated, just slipping away from Everton defender John Stones. Giroud then caught Özil's cross on the volley with his weaker right foot and directed it into the far corner of the net.

Against Middlesbrough in the FA Cup, Giroud spotted empty space at the near post, a frequent hunting ground for him, darted toward it and volleyed Alexis's quickly taken corner into the net with his left foot. He was also expertly positioned to prod home a rebound against Crystal Palace and a blocked shot against QPR.

These four recent Giroud goals indicate a varied approach, an important quality that prevents defenders from predicting the location or timing of the danger he poses.

Numbers among the best

As a result, Giroud has emerged as one of the top strikers in the Premier League. He's not the absolute best, as Henry was, but he is competitive with other widely lauded forwards. The stats below from OptaSports via whoscored.com provide evidence of Giroud's growing stature:

He's fractionally behind Manchester City's Sergio Aguero and Chelsea's Diego Costa in goals per 90 minutes and level with Tottenham's Harry Kane, while scoring more from fewer shots than all of them except Costa.

These aren't the numbers of the worthless lug many Arsenal supporters have portrayed Giroud to be. Instead, Giroud appears to be making remarkable progress. His goal production per 90 minutes was 0.4 in his first Arsenal season and improved only slightly to 0.5 in 2013-14. Those came from 4.1 and 3.3 shots per 90 minutes, respectively.

His current 0.8 goals per 90 minutes ratio would, over the course of a full season, amount to something in the neighborhood of 30 goals. Although we should be wary of projecting a full season's performance from one particularly productive period, it's possible that Giroud is becoming the perfect combination of mentality and skill to lead the Arsenal line.

Arsenal's Experienced Youth Movement

Manchester City's visit to the Emirates Stadium on Saturday displayed two contrasting approaches to building and enhancing a professional football squad.

That's no revelation to anyone who's followed the game over the past five years. Man City, propelled by the oil riches of Abu Dhabi, has spent lavishly on experienced world-class players and has been rewarded with two of the last three Premier League titles. Meanwhile, Arsenal has doled out less than it has brought in, selling many of its top performers, acquiring young but unproven talent, and amassing a sizable cash balance in the process.

Many will look at the average ages of the two squads and see confirmation of these long-held perceptions: City has the oldest squad in the Premier League on average; Arsenal, at 25.4 years, the third youngest. (Figures from the September 8 SoccerEx Transfer Review by Prime Time Sport.)

In my view, this conclusion is no longer valid. It ignores significant shifts in Arsenal's methods, which are becoming more apparent with each transfer period, as well as the striking changes instituted by other top clubs.

A core of experienced, valuable youth

Arsenal's youth policy governed the management of the club's playing resources while it paid down the debt and endured the commercial arrangements connected with the Emirates Stadium. Those financial conditions don't exist now. As a result, the type of players the club is acquiring and retaining has changed.

In particular, the youth of today are experienced. The headline signings of the past two off-seasons, Mesut Özil and Alexis Sánchez, are now just 25 years old, but they've earned 62 and 71 international caps, respectively. Overall, despite its relatively low average age, the first-team squad has made 877 international appearances. The latest was by 19-year-old Englishman Calum Chambers, another summer 2014 signing. Among 25 first-team players, only four have no senior international experience. That is hardly a callow squad.

While Arsenal players have built their credentials with national teams, they've also been deepening their familiarity with each other. The squad boasts the third highest stability in the League, having played together on average 2.7 years, according to Prime Time Sport's report. That's vital to the Arsenal style characterized by interchanging positions, quick ball movement, and in-game instinct.

Indeed, manager Arsène Wenger and his colleagues have constructed this squad in a distinctive fashion, but perhaps not in the way most observers assume. Arsenal spent the fourth-highest amount in Premier League transfer fees this summer, while acquiring the lowest number of new players (5). This leads to several conclusions:

1. The £56 million net transfer fee (from the Arsenal Report Transfer Centre) shows that the days of building the team with a severely limited budget have passed
2. The club is no longer fighting inflation of player salaries, refusing to pay what the transfer market demands
3. The club is deploying its increased resources to acquire the players it wants but is not spending indiscriminately
4. The approach focuses on a tight, unified team over potentially problematic star characters (See "Will Wenger's Roster Gambit Pay Off?")
5. The team is composed of highly accomplished, highly compensated, but still relatively young, professionals

The core home-grown

With home-grown players at the foundation.

Arsenal now has a reasonable claim to eight home-grown players on its first team roster, the highest number in the League, including six Englishmen. According to "The Premier League's Home Grown Player Rule, Explained," Martin Tomlinson's (@Heisenbergkamp) skillfully researched and argued piece, this makeup gives Wenger considerable roster flexibility.

That's because any 25-man Premier League roster can contain only 17 players who are not designated home-grown. Arsenal's eight home-grown players represent a full contingent, and all but two of those eight, midfielder Francis Coquelin and third-choice goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez, compete for starting roles.

In other words, Arsenal can be at almost full strength and depth under the regulations, while many competitors have to carry smaller squads or compromise on quality to comply.

The opposition makes other choices

Arsenal's direct competition has for the most part not sought advantage in experienced, young, home-grown players. Last year's winners Man City lists only two home-grown players on its Premier League roster, meaning its full squad can consist of just 19 players. Now, those 19 are top quality, but perhaps this setup doesn't maximize the club's resources. It's also been dancing around UEFA's Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations and sanctions, which appear to have slowed the club's transfer spending and, according to some reports, caused City to move out striker Álvaro Negredo and halt its pursuit of Radamel Falcao. (Read Ian Herbert's "Radamel Falcao: A Symbol of UEFA Shackling Manchester City in the FFP Era").

According to manager Manuel Pelligrini, City also sent Negredo to Valencia because UEFA's sanctions capped its Champions League squad at 21 players for the 2014-15 campaign. Pellegrini said that "it all starts from the restriction about the number of players. We have restrictions about the number of players and the money we can spend." Don't cry too much for Pellegrini, though, because UEFA seems to be cutting City considerable slack, allowing it to field only one non-club-trained home-grown player among the five (disproportionately) required under the settlement.

Meanwhile, Chelsea is essentially outsourcing player development. It has loaned 26 of its players to other clubs, mostly outside England and Wales. That can remove these players' salaries from Chelsea's books for the purposes of FFP but does not work toward either the Premier League's or UEFA's home-grown requirements. Chelsea has also turned to a much more circumspect spender in 2014: Its net transfer spending was just £10 million in summer 2014.

The tacks of two other clubs do seem similar to Arsenal's in some ways. The most alike is Liverpool's, which was the third highest spender on a net basis and now has a squad whose average age (25.2 years) is even younger than Arsenal's. The main difference is that Liverpool brought in 11 players to Arsenal's five. Manchester United, like Arsenal, has a large home-grown contingent and a relatively young average age, but those traits are secondary to United's net expenditure of £122 million on an assortment of attacking talent, which looks like a desperate rush to return to a Champions League position.

That might work over 38 matches--who can predict? But it seems far more risky financially and less designed as a long-term response to the new Premier League and UEFA regulatory regimes than does Arsenal's approach.

Who Is This Mythical Striker?

The injury to Arsenal's first-choice center forward Olivier Giroud has tightened the widely held grip on a prevalent myth about the Arsenal squad. It goes something like this: Arsenal did not score enough goals in 2013-14, and the side needs more to contend for the Premier League title, therefore it must recruit a center forward who scores at least 25 goals a season.

As an explanation, this train of thought does have simplicity on its side, a core feature of myth. It also fails to distinguish between correlation and causation of last year's weaknesses, overlooks the historical record, and denies current realities.

Timing of goals was as important as goal total

The final 2013-14 Premier League table makes the obvious point that Arsenal scored far fewer goals than its title competition. Champions Manchester City racked up 102 goals, while second place Liverpool finished with one fewer. Arsenal's total of 68 paled in comparison.

Even Wenger has focused on this discrepancy. "We scored 66 goals," he said before the 2-0 season finale at Norwich gave the Gunners 68 in total, "compared to 100. We have some room for improvement there.

"We miss goals, and that's what we want to improve."

Although Wenger did not say the shortage of goals caused the title challenge to falter, that's the conclusion many critical supporters have drawn and where the error in the premise lies.

It can just as reasonably be said that the context of the goals not scored mattered just as much as the total number. If the team had scored more goals in games that were already decided in its favor, putting five rather than three past West Ham in April, for example, those goals wouldn't have influenced the final standings. Additional goals would have been just as meaningless in those four infamous road contests against Man City, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Everton; Arsenal could have scored 12 more goals arrayed in a certain way and still lost all those matches.

Maybe, then, the issue is not the need for more goals, but the need for important goals in close matches. Aaron Ramsey's emerging specialty. That's Ramsey, midfielder.

The importance of goals against in particular situations

Another route to success would have been conceding fewer goals. Arsenal could have edged out Man City for the title by allowing four fewer goals, the equalizers by Everton, Southampton, and Swansea and Stoke's penalty. The first three turned Arsenal's second-half leads into draws, and the one at Stoke decided that match as a loss. That's eight points forsaken in a campaign that ended with a seven-point gap between first place and fourth.

Sure, several teams could rewrite their league finishes based on fine differences such as these. And the historical correlation between goal difference (not goals scored) and league finishes might make a more probable argument than this counterfactual account in which Arsenal wins the league with a fourth-best, plus-31 goal difference.

I'm willing to see validity in both those points. I just don't want to accept without question the notion that Arsenal's goalscoring inadequacy, which some see as evidence of the squad's poor quality and the manager's incompetence, was an incontrovertible cause of its failure to win the league.

The great man of history

We should also study the records to identify the prolific goalscorers who brought their teams league titles. That's the second element of the myth, that Arsenal must acquire someone to score at least 25 goals to bring that prize back to North London.

With a swift swing, Tim Bostelle of 7amkickoff has batted away that argument. Earlier this week, he answered the question "Do you need a 30-goal scorer to win the league?" with a definitive no. In the 21 Premier League seasons, just six titles have gone to a team with a 25-plus goal scorer.

Tim's examination is pointed and devastating to the myth.

An academic discussion given the situation

If the premises underlying the 25-goalscorer argument are dubious, the realities of August 2014 lay the myth entirely bare. Meaning, even if a prolific, available striker would vastly improve Arsenal's title chances, that player does not exist.

Using the stats on worldfootball.net, I searched for players who exceeded the 25-goal threshold in the five major European leagues in the past three full seasons. Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Zlatan Ibrahimovic are in a class by themselves, all having registered at least 25 goals in each of those seasons. None would be available to Arsenal anyway.

Nor would be others who had netted that many goals at least once:

• Diego Costa (27 goals for Atletico Madrid in 2013-14), always destined for Chelsea
• Edinson Cavani (29 for Napoli in 2012-13), massive wages and not leaving Paris Saint-Germain while Ibrahimovic is injured
• Radamel Falcao (28 for Atletico Madrid in 2012-13), realistically too expensive for Arsenal on a permanent transfer
• Robin Van Persie and Wayne Rooney of Manchester United, not Arsenal prospects for obvious reasons
• Luis Suarez (31 for Liverpool in 2013-14), a sordid case that doesn't bear repeating

There are two strikers from the Bundesliga whose records make them seem more promising, but their careers have likely peaked. Stefan Kiessling scored 25 goals for Bayer Leverkusen in 2012-13, but he's now 30 years old, and 31-year-old Klaas-Jan Huntelaar scored 29 for Schalke in 2011-12. By the time either adjusts to the Premier League, he would be well past his prime and unlikely to return to that goalscoring form.

Two players come to mind who are comparable to Giroud, Mario Mandzukic, now of Atletico Madrid, and Mario Balotelli, now of Liverpool. Wenger and his colleagues at Arsenal were not acting unreasonably in declining to pursue those two. Intense salivating has also covered Borussia Dortmund's Marco Reus--great player, not a center forward, never scored more than 16 goals in a campaign, one of the last valuable playing assets at the club. In other words, he's not coming to Arsenal to play center forward.

The likely outcome

Debunking the myth of the center forward helps us set expectations for the next five days. The world-class striker arriving to save the day, or Arsenal management's inability to secure the services of said striker, are equally unrealistic. That player isn't out there to be had.

Instead, as Andrew Mangan argues on this week's Arsecast Extra, the club might acquire someone more experienced and durable than Yaya Sanogo but less accomplished than Giroud. The hope will be that the player fills out the squad in the near term and develops into real competition for Giroud in the longer term.

That's not as exciting as a headline acquisition as the transfer deadline nears, but it's better than perpetuating a myth.