Season Preview 2021-22: Center Midfield

Previously: Goalkeeper. Fullback. Centerback.

Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal are full steam ahead with a back four, leaving the makeup of the midfield three the only lingering formation-based question as the team enters 2021-22. With Dani Ceballos already gone (and Granit Xhaka looking likely to follow), the Gunners will have a completely kind of? revamped center midfield this season.

CDM	Age	Box to Box	Age	CAM	Age
Thomas Partey	28	Granit Xhaka	29	Emile Smith Rowe	21
Albert Sambi Lokonga	22	Mohamed Elneny	29	Ask Again Later
Lucas Torreira*	25	Joe Willock*	22

CDM: Thomas Partey

Rating: 7/10

Arsenal will go as far as Thomas Partey takes them in 2021-22. Last year the answer was… Not that far.

Not that it was entirely his fault. The Gunners waited until deadline day to pull the trigger on his release clause, then got only two full-90s out of him until mid-January. His final Premier League output: 18 games started (two of them cut short), and 12 games out injured.

When he did play, he looked like a man making up for lost time—and not in a good way.

Partey ranked 183 of 189 qualifying Premier League players in shot-on-target percentage. Seemingly anything within 30 yards was deemed to be in shooting range. Only six players were worse; hilariously, one of them was Willian.

But when Partey was good, he was REALLY good. His presence in the team gave Arsenal their first bonafide all-caps ATHLETE in midfield since… probably Abou Diaby. That he has the technical ability to match is the reason Arsenal stumped €50 million for him last summer.

Stats show an elite ball carrier who can progress the ball by dribbling or passing. He’s a little old for a €50 million outlay. He’s still Arsenal best midfielder by a mile, and one of the best in the Premier League as a whole.

Unfortunately, he’s injured again, and set to miss the first few weeks of the season. Add in AFCON 2021, and he could miss 15+% of the season. He’ll need to be terrific in the other 85 for Arsenal to have a chance of catching Liverpool, Chelsea, and the rest.

Box to Box: Granit Xhaka

Rating: 5/10

“Box to box” is probably a stretch for Granit Xhaka, who’s not winning many Premier League foot races. About the only running he’s been doing for Arsenal lately is when looking for the exit door. Two of the past three transfer windows have seen credible links away; his most recent dalliance with Roma was so close to completion, members of the press were asking him about his Italian language skills.

But with the Serie A side unwilling to meet Arsenal’s meager evaluation, Xhaka back for more, signing a contract extension to keep him at the club until he’s 33.

If Rob Holding splits opinion, Xhaka tears it in half and stomps on it.

His stats show a player who runs the show:

He’s almost never injured, and famously is up for anything to help the team win. I mean, he played left back for a significant portion of the year.

With the ball, he’s tremendous. Without it…

For all his technical ability, Xhaka can’t run. In the modern Premier League, that’s a problem.

Another problem: He’s easy to rile up.

There were bigger problems at Arsenal in 2020-21. But keeping him—and extending his contract another two seasons for good measure—doesn’t fill me with warmth. Here’s to hoping the house keys get handed to someone else this year. Preferably Partey.

Reserves

Rating: 4/10

Twenty-one-year-old Albert Sambi Lokonga probably won’t start consistently for the Gunners this year. He might next.

After tearing his ACL in December 2018, he recovered to play 4,000+ minutes for Anderlecht over the past two seasons, mostly as a deep-lying midfielder. According to Scouted Football:

He ranks among the best in his position in terms of dribbling and ball-carrying. Attempting 3.1 dribbles and completing 2.1 progressive runs per 90 puts him comfortably in the 90th percentile for both metrics, highlighting Lokonga as a midfielder who carries the ball regularly, quite often pushing possession up the pitch in the process.

The caveat: The Jupiler Pro League isn’t the Premier League, where even the best players from Europe’s top leagues struggle to transition. Alex Lacazette averaged 25 goals a season in France the three years prior to arriving at Arsenal. He’s averaged half that since moving to England.

The other caveat: Lokonga performed poorly in many defensive metrics. YouAreMyArsenal on his biggest deficiencies:

The problem isn’t that Lokonga is in bad positions, its that his recovery runs to get into position are slow, which was surprising given his ability to break away from a defender when he has the ball at his feet. He covers a lot of ground with his long legs but its slow moving to get there and given the pace of the league he could enter in to, that could hurt Arsenal in transition.

But at 21-years-old, Lokonga has time to adjust. He’s no where near a finished product, and with Partey ahead of him, Arsenal don’t need him to be this season. Featuring in 15-20 Premier League games, and getting a handful of starts in cup competitions, is a win.

Early pre-season showings have been promising.With Partey out injured, it’s Lokonga, not Mohamed Elneny, who most fans want to see start against Brentford. Arteta might concur.

If it’s not Lokonga against Brentford, it’ll be Mohamed Elneny.

There’s a tree, native to North America, called the Bristlecone Pine. Some are 5,000 years old. Twenty years ago, two scientists published a study claiming that the tree is capable of living forever:

The hypothesis that aging results from an accumulation of deleterious mutations was addressed by comparing pollen viability, seed weight, seed germinability, seedling biomass accumulation, and frequency of putative mutations, in trees of varying ages. None of these parameters had a statistically significant relationship to tree age. Thus, we found no evidence of mutational aging.

Elneny’s Arsenal career is a bristlecone pine. Signed in 2016 then renewed in 2018, Arsenal have been trying to move him on basically since the ink dried on his contract extension.

He’s still here.

Now 29 and with just one year left on his contract, Elneny looks in line for a role in the Arsenal midfield for the second consecutive season.

He’s in the team for two reasons. First, because he can do this…

…and second, because he never stops running.

But for an Arsenal team who hopes to have the ball, rather than chase it, he adds virtually nothing to the Arsenal attack. His 92.8% passing accuracy is an indictment of why completion percentage as a stat is becoming obsolete; you can’t turn the ball over if you’re only making five yard passes.

And for all his running, doesn’t win the ball back for the Gunners much.

That’s even worse than Xhaka.

Every team in the Premier League (and probably most in the Championship) have a player comparable to Elneny. Here’s his fbref “similar players” table:

A lot of mid-table sides on that list.

He’s little more than a warm body. If he played basketball, he’d be a trillionaire.

Arsenal finished eighth in the league last season because a player of Elneny’s caliber was allowed to make 40 (!) appearances for the club. As things currently stand, the only reason he won’t match that number this year is because of the lack of European football.

Behind Elneny, Arsenal have three players that look set to leave the club. Arsenal have agreed a fee with Newcastle for the sale of Joe Willock. Only personal terms stand between him and a permanent sale.

Arsenal are set to start a career CB at RB to start the season because Ainsley Maitland-Niles wants to be a midfielder. It’s a shame he doesn’t want to play right back. His ability to get up and down the field, defend 1v1, and play in possession make him tailor-made for the inverted RB that Mikel Arteta uses at Arsenal.

But Maitland-Niles made just three Premier League starts after September last season, en route to the aforementioned loan move to West Brom. You don’t have to read too far between Arteta’s lines to figure out why:

“[Maitland-Niles] wanted to start games and he wanted that guarantee and, in my position, it was really different to do that. He was willing to experience something else and I decided to allow him to do that. He can play in different positions and might have the possibility to play in midfield which for him is important.

A place in midfield was indeed on the cards for him at West Brom, where he made 15 appearances (14 starts) in the latter half of the season. He’s operated there exclusively in pre-season despite the hole at RB. A loan or sale seems likely.

Finally, there’s Lucas Torreira, who as of this publishing remains on the Arsenal team. He’s probably not in Arteta’s plans. He’s likely not in Atletico Madrid’s plans either, after Diego Simeone gave him just three La Liga starts (and played him just 518 minutes) in 2020-21. Arsenal are actively shopping him, probably to Italy.

Attacking Midfield: Emile Smith Rowe

Rating: 7/10

The subject of three Aston Villa bids this summer, Emile Smith Rowe‘s introduction to the team last December ended the Gunners’ seven game winless streak and looked, for a time, to rescue Arsenal’s season. His first Premier League start came vs. Chelsea on Boxing Day, and he was ever-present the rest of the way. All told, he saw action in 20 of the final 24 Premier League games, starting 18 of them.

In retrospect, his place in the squad seems obvious. Arsenal immediately started winning when he was introduced to the team, and immediately started scoring goals that, extrapolated over a full season, would have been bested only by Manchester City.

Nice try, Aston Villa.

Smith Rowe has signed a new longterm contract at the club, and with it, taken the iconic number 10 shirt. He can operate as a 10 or in the half-space on the left. This website expects him to start every Premier League game he’s healthy for.

Reserves

Rating: ???

Ask again later…