Arsenal Football Club

[Jay Gooner]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cted7Dgr7Ls/?igshid=ZWRlZmRiZGNlZQ==

[lingudude]

also ich seh den Havertz-Transfer eigentlich sehr positiv - erinnert mich vom Spielstil her etwas an Özil: wirkt sehr lethargisch, aber mit extrem hoher Spielintelligenz und guten Laufwegen im Angriffsdrittel. Denk der könnte in der Position neben Odegaard schon gut funktionieren

[Jay Gooner]

[Jay Gooner]

volles Interview von Arteta mit Marca auf Englisch übersetzt:

 

https://arseblog.news/2023/06/transcript-mikel-arteta-talks-to-marca/

 

Havertz ist demnach fix durch, hatte anscheinend gestern oder heute sein medical

bearbeitet 26. Juni 2023 von Jay Gooner

[Manu_Graz]

Würde mich freuen über Timber. Kenne ihn zu wenig aber er freut sich offenbar sehr auf Arsenal und Arteta hält wohl auch viel von ihm. Sollte man Tierney noch halten können hat man dann hinten eigentlich:
Zinchenko/Tierney - Gabriel/Kiwior - Saliba/Timber - White/Tomiyasu

Wobei Tomiyasu und auch Timber wohl mehrere Position in der 4er Kette spielen können. Timber wohl auch rechts?

Zentral (sollte Partey gehen sowieso) muss man aber noch mind. 1, eher sogar 2, Spieler holen. Ich war bei Mudryk angefressen, dass man den nicht geholt hat obwohl er unbedingt zu Arsenal wollte. Schlussendlich aber auch da froh über Trossard.

Rice wäre etwas anders, der ist Engländer, Homegrown, hat Leaderfähigkeiten und würde auch vom Alter her extrem gut in die Mannschaft passen. 

[Jay Gooner]

@Timber kenn ihn auch wenig aber jetzt einiges gelesen und seine Stärken sind: positioning und tackles, Ball halten auch unter Druck (aka die wichtigste Fähigkeit von Verteidigern bei Arsenal unter Arteta), Passspiel Konzentration, und ja er spielt auch RB. Klingt also wie ein 2. Ben White. 

dass ihn Ten Haag der ihn von Ajax kennt vor 1 Jahr bei Manutd wollte spricht mMn am meisten für ihn 

einzige Schwäche Timbers: er ist nur 1,82m groß und nicht so gut in Luftduellen. Aber Ten Hag hat dann mit Martinez einen anderen kleinen IV gekauft und das hat ja nicht so schlecht funktioniert bei denen 

 

@Rice seh ich genauso. Ich frag mich halt wieviel Geld wir ausgeben können, aber mehr als 100m fände ich vom Gefühl her für Rice dann doch zuviel. Also eben deshalb weil wir noch einen zweiten DMF/ZMF brauchen (bitte Lavia!), va wenn Partey geht. momentan bietet man nur 30m€ für Partey, aber nehme an und hoffe dass man auf 50m für ihn besteht 

[Jay Gooner]

Man City out of Declan Rice transfer race as Arsenal negotiate with West Ham

Spoiler

Man City out of Declan Rice transfer race as Arsenal negotiate with West Ham

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By Sam Lee

1h ago

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Manchester City have pulled out of the race to sign West Ham captain Declan Rice following Arsenal’s improved bid worth up to £105million.

City had matched Arsenal’s £90million proposal, offering an increased sum up front, only for both bids to be rejected.

But Arsenal returned on Tuesday evening with an initial fee of £100m and an extra £5m in add-ons.

Arsenal and West Ham are now negotiating over payment structure but the north London side’s move has prompted City to step aside from a potential deal.

Arsenal upped their bid to try and secure manager Mikel Arteta’s top summer target.

It will be a Premier League record fee for a British player if the move materialises.

Rice’s contract at West Ham expires in 2024, with an option for a one-year extension.

But West Ham chairman David Sullivan said after the club’s Europa Conference League triumph that he expected the England international to have played his last game for the club, adding that he “wanted to go”.

Rice has made 245 appearances for West Ham since making his debut in 2017.

GO DEEPER

How can Arsenal afford possible Rice, Havertz and Timber transfers under FFP?

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Follow the summer transfer window with The Athletic…

• Transfer blog — live updates
• Latest transfer news
• Premier League done deals

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Rice: an elite ball-winner

Analysis by Mark Carey

Rice does not leap into challenges at the first sign of danger. Instead, he patrols the midfield, maintains good positional discipline, then engages in his defensive actions at the opportune moments.

This is reflected in the numbers, where Rice’s figure of 4.2 “true” tackles — denoting tackles plus challenges lost plus fouls committed — per 1,000 opponent touches places him just 62nd among a 69-strong group of defensive and central midfielders with 900-plus Premier League minutes played last season.

Crucially, on the occasions Rice does put a foot in, his technique ensures he will often be the one to come out on top.

Nobody in that same pool of 69 players has a better “true” tackle win rate than his 70 per cent.

 

Dass ich das noch erleb, wir zahlen 105m Pfund für einen Spieler 

[dialsquare]

Woher haben wir soviel Geld? 

Woher hat Liverpool soviel Geld falls das mit Mbappe stimmt? 

Die PL

[themanwhowasntthere]

Havertz, Rice, Timber für mehr als 200mio Pfund... Und 2. DM brauch Ma dann halt trotzdem auch noch 

[lingudude]

themanwhowasntthere schrieb vor einer Stunde:

und 2. DM brauch Ma dann halt trotzdem auch noch 

nur falls Partey verkauft wird und in dem Fall kriegen wir ca 25 Mio für ihn, damit kann man schon mehr als die Hälfte von zB Lavia finanzieren

[eminem23]

Das entsteht großes

[schooontn]

Balogun und/oder Nketiah wird man wohl eher verkaufen wollen, oder? Dazu noch Pepe, Sambi, Xhaka? Bisserl ein Geld wird man schon noch reinholen. 

[Jay Gooner]

lingudude schrieb vor 2 Stunden:

nur falls Partey verkauft wird und in dem Fall kriegen wir ca 25 Mio für ihn, damit kann man schon mehr als die Hälfte von zB Lavia finanzieren

€30mio hamma schon abgelehnt für Partey, also ich erwart mir da schon zumindest 40mio pfund, va wenns die Saudis werden 

aber ja, freilich kommt dann noch ein DMF. let Edu cook

[schooontn]

Mag Kai ja wirklich, seh aber noch immer keine Position für ihn im aktuellen System 

[Jay Gooner]

Jay Gooner schrieb am 22.6.2023 um 10:03 :

Havertz to Arsenal: Reasons Arteta is banking on switch from Chelsea No 9 to ‘left 8’

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Arsenal are convinced they have found their midfield replacement for Granit Xhaka — and it is the man who spent most of last season playing as Chelsea’s No 9.

Kai Havertz is moving from west London to north London in a deal worth around £65million ($83m), approximately the same as the initial price Chelsea paid to acquire him from Bayer Leverkusen three years ago.

The legacy he will leave behind at Stamford Bridge is a strange one: scorer of the winning goals in the 2021 Champions League and 2022 Club World Cup finals, but also the frequently underwhelming focal point of a misfiring attack under Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Frank Lampard that sank to historic depths last season.

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, however, appears to be every bit as beguiled by Havertz’s tantalising talent as Chelsea’s then-owner Roman Abramovich in 2020, and they have moved quickly since formalising their interest in the Germany international as the window officially opened last week.

It’s a deal — agreed in principle — that suits all parties; Chelsea co-owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital made it clear they wanted Havertz either to re-sign on a lower, more incentive-based salary or they would consider offers for him in this window. Agreeing to sell before June 30 also means Havertz’s sale can be included in Chelsea’s accounts for 2022-23, offsetting the vast transfer spending in the new ownership group’s first year.

Real Madrid and Bayern Munich are both long-standing admirers of Havertz, but neither showed any inclination to get close to Chelsea’s valuation. Arsenal did, and they also won over the player with an exciting vision of his fit within Arteta’s dynamic system.

The Spanish manager was a huge personal draw in terms of style and individual coaching, and there is a belief that Havertz will be maximised within a structured possession game. It helps that Arsenal also offer the opportunity to stay in the Champions League next season (Chelsea will have no European football at all after finishing 12th), representing a club keen to build upon a surprise Premier League title challenge in the previous one.

That vision re-casts Havertz as a left-sided No 8 afforded the freedom to link play in the final third and join attacks from midfield, arriving late into the penalty area while Oleksandr Zinchenko or Kieran Tierney shift across from left-back into central midfield behind him.

We are about to enter phase three of Havertz’s positional odyssey, and how well it goes will determine how Arsenal and Chelsea feel about this transfer in the years to come.

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“More or less, I’m a midfield player but I like to go into the box”
– Kai Havertz to The Athletic, August 2021

Virtually from the moment head coach Tuchel lost trust in Timo Werner and Chelsea’s club-record signing Romelu Lukaku in 2022, Havertz was irreversibly miscast as a No 9 at Stamford Bridge.

Battling bigger and more physical Premier League centre-backs every week and most often receiving the ball with his back to goal rather than running onto the play from deeper positions, Havertz only rarely resembled the attacking midfielder who had shone at Leverkusen.

The below graphics underline the fundamental positional shift he has undergone since moving from Germany in September 2020.

First, here is the breakdown of where on the pitch he spent the majority of his league minutes during four seasons with Leverkusen…

… and here is that same information for his three Premier League years so far:

At times, Havertz has looked to be weighed down by the formidable burden of being the primary scoring threat in a deeply dysfunctional Chelsea attack. No player in the Premier League endured a greater under-performance relative to their expected goals (xG) number in 2022-23, though it must be noted that last season was an anomaly in the 24-year-old’s career and he over-performed relative to xG in each of his final two Bundesliga seasons at Leverkusen:

On the rare occasions when he has not been deployed as Chelsea’s most advanced attacker, Havertz flashed many of the qualities that first marked him out as one to watch in Germany.

His best performance of last season came in the Champions League round of 16 second-leg victory at home to Borussia Dortmund in early March, where he operated as a No 10 in a 3-4-3 behind Raheem Sterling.

That is the position and role in which he thrived at Leverkusen at the end of the 2018-19 season under Peter Bosz, scoring seven goals in the final seven games to help secure a top-four finish and Champions League qualification. It is Havertz’s most prolific season so far as he finished as Leverkusen’s top scorer (17, including three penalties), even though he had just three shots and two goals from within the six-yard box during it.

Despite his 6ft 2in (186cm) frame, Havertz is very much at the ‘false’ end of the No 9 spectrum. During his 19-month Chelsea tenure, Tuchel called his countryman a “unique” and “hybrid” player, something between a No 9 and a No 10. “He’s very comfortable in the box; he’s very comfortable in high positions, he’s very good at offensive headers, he has good timing to arrive in the box, good finishing, good composure in the box, around the box,” Tuchel said in February 2021, shortly after he succeeded Lampard.

From deeper positions, Havertz can make his preferred half-space runs but also do most of his work facing the opposition goal.

Only Manchester City’s relentless Erling Haaland (349) made more off-ball runs into the opposition box than Havertz (334) in the Premier League last season. And the German ranked behind only Tottenham’s Son Heung-min (1,093 to 1,070) for “off-ball runs” — defined by Opta as a sustained off-ball movement by a player whose team is in possession, made with intensity, in order to receive a pass or create space — among all wingers or strikers.

These movements frequently added value for his team either in finding space for himself or creating it for others, even if much of this did not ultimately filter through to his own bottom-line production.

The best of these off-ball runs into the box was for his goal at Leicester City in March, timing his run to stay onside — Havertz was the second-most offside player in the Premier League last season (28, one behind Leicester striker Jamie Vardy) — before chipping the ball over Danny Ward:

He scored a similar, match-winning goal from a Jorginho wedge-shot of a pass in-behind against Newcastle United a year earlier, ghosting in on the blind side of Dan Burn, controlling, and then poking the ball past Martin Dubravka:

But it is notable how many of Havertz’s best runs for through balls come from deeper — a theme which would complement Arsenal’s increasing verticality.

The most significant of these runs was, of course, for his 2020-21 Champions League final-winning goal against Manchester City:

While on paper Arsenal lined up in a 4-3-3 last season, their attacking shape more commonly reassembled a 3-2-5 when the left-back, either Zinchenko or Tierney, moved into midfield and the two ‘free No 8s’ pushed forward into the half-spaces. That created a similar midfield box to the one Havertz played in during that win over Dortmund and in his Leverkusen days.

Fundamentally, this allows Havertz to operate deeper, in the half-spaces where he is closer to the ball. His tendency to want the ball played to feet is problematic as a No 9 because that fails to stretch the defence, but it is essential for a No 8 in an Arteta team. There is a creative side to Havertz that is often overlooked: he had the most open-play shot-creating actions of any Chelsea player in the Premier League last season (54).

Havertz could operate for Arsenal in either of the more advanced midfield roles — he is left-footed, like Xhaka and Martin Odegaard — and it is easy to imagine him finishing the type of cutbacks that were the trademark of Arteta’s team last season and which Odegaard scored from twice at home to Chelsea on May 2:

Havertz’s off-ball movement should make him a really good fit, in an attacking sense, for the left-sided No 8 role. Xhaka’s redemption under Arteta in recent years was built in part on the way his off-ball runs into the box either provided a direct attacking threat or created more space for the winger on the Arsenal left (primarily Gabriel Martinelli).

There is also the fact that many of Havertz’s best chances for Chelsea were generated from the right flank, either in the form of crosses, cutbacks or deeper deliveries into the box. It is not difficult to imagine Odegaard and Bukayo Saka combining to supply a steady, high-quality diet of the pass types depicted below for him to convert:

The big question is whether Havertz will be able to replicate Xhaka’s defensive contributions in a midfield role. That is likely to be the most challenging aspect of this positional adjustment, but the 24-year-old’s willingness to work hard without the ball has never been doubted at Chelsea; after shifting him more permanently to the point of attack, Tuchel cited the “huge volume” that he brought to the team’s aggressive pressing.

While the repositioning of a forward into a No 8 role appears difficult, Havertz would follow a current trend of central attackers or wingers becoming advanced midfielders in a 4-3-3.

Joelinton at Newcastle is the poster boy for this particular shift, but other successful examples include Harvey Elliott at Liverpool (following Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain) and Alex Iwobi for Everton. Patrick Vieira tried it with Eberechi Eze and Michael Olise at Crystal Palace, and there have been times when Pep Guardiola has played Phil Foden in this role at Manchester City.

Moreover, there is compelling evidence above to suggest Havertz will actually be moving into the position he should have been playing all along.

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Havertz follows David Luiz, Willian and Jorginho as Chelsea players who have moved directly to Arsenal since 2019. He stands alone, however, in being the first to do so with what most would assume to be the prime years of his career still ahead of him.

This is a factor which gave Boehly and Clearlake pause before sanctioning his departure, and it is also one that will linger in the minds of the Chelsea supporters still enamoured with his talent. There remains a distinct possibility that a different, more individually favourable football environment could unlock new levels in his game, and watching that process play out with him in an Arsenal shirt will be particularly galling for those who lived his struggles at Stamford Bridge.

Ultimately though, business considerations won out; it is hard to credibly argue Chelsea are getting a bad price for the version of Havertz they have seen up close for the past three years. Fitting him into the salary structure that Boehly and Clearlake want to implement always looked unlikely, and offloading his wages affords Chelsea greater flexibility moving forward.

Arsenal are effectively paying that fee for the player Arteta believes Havertz can be in his system. There will be moments next season when his versatile skill set may be utilised as a false nine or across the front line — further enhancing the positional depth provided by January signing Leandro Trossard — but ultimately this sizeable recruitment bet will be won or lost on the German’s ability to thrive as a left-sided No 8.

Is there a superstar within Havertz? This next chapter of his career should provide us with a definitive answer.

(Additional contributors: Mark Carey and John Muller)

 

Auge @schooontn