Arsenal: English Players Who Could Replace Theo Walcott

Theo Walcott’s Arsenal career has been stagnating for more than a year. If he were to be sold this summer, who could some of his potential replacements be?

There’s no denying it – Theo Walcott has not been a top-level footballer who can consistently play first team football in three years.

It was Walcott’s 2012/2013 season that put him on the map in terms of English and Premier League footballers. He scored 14 goals and made 10 assists over 32 appearances in the Premier League.

Such a statistic has been far from replication by Walcott recently – in all major competitions (UCL/BPL), he was only involved in ten goals across thirty-three appearances.

This might sound overly critical, but the overwhelming majority of Arsenal fans think that Theo Walcott has been a lazy substitute and a terrible finisher in 2015/16. Aside from a laser from the edge of the box against Manchester City, he has scored a few tap-ins and a couple goals one-on-one with the keeper.

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He is now 27 years old, and has been at Arsenal for ten years. His career has never taken off after that one season three years ago, and from being the brightest young winger in Europe he is now a rarity in the Arsenal starting eleven.

The problem that has overcome Walcott’s mental calmness is that he doesn’t have the will to fight his way back into the team. After his long injury layoff in 2014, he has failed to make more than 15 starts in a season over the course of the last three seasons.

This campaign he made far more total appearances than he has in recent seasons past, but all of his substitute appearances were useless. He never changed the game when coming on, he acted disinterested and didn’t work hard at all.

This seems to be a pattern among Arsenal players who have been at the club under Wenger for a while. And there’s no doubt about it anymore, the combination of Wenger and that group of players has grown extremely stale.

As this summer dawns and the transfer window opens, there appear to be some great reasons for a summer clear-out. Walcott, Giroud, and Oxlade-Chamberlain are three players who have looked dejected in the second half of 2015/16, and they could – they probably should – be leaving alongside Mathieu Flamini and Mathieu Debuchy.