Arsenal and Lucas Torreira: Breaking down the midfield conundrum

Arsenal are closing in on the £26.2 million signing of Lucas Torreira. The Uruguayan, though, poses a problem in the midfield. Let’s break it down a little.

Arsenal are nearing the signing of Lucas Torreira, a defensive midfielder from Sampdoria who has attracted wide-range interest from across Europe, most pressingly from Napoli who the Gunners outbid to beat, even though there was a lesser release clause so the added €5m was unnecessary.

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Torreira’s impending addition, assuming that it is completed as most seem to expect will be the case, provides a conundrum, however, in the midfield area that Unai Emery will have to solve. Let me present it this way.

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It is clear that Emery wants to build his team around Aaron Ramsey. But is that Ramsey in a box-to-box role or in an attacking midfield role? Well, that perhaps depends on the use of Mesut Ozil: should he be considered a centralised attacking midfielder or an in-drifting winger with the freedom to roam throughout the pitch? And then there’s the wildcard of the Alexandre Lacazette-Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang partnership. Should the latter be shunted out wide again to accommodate the former?

As you can see, there are a great many moving parts, all of which impact the other depending on the overall philosophy that Emery wants to implement. And then, just to throw another spanner into the works, there is the peculiar presence of Granit Xhaka, who is not good enough as a central midfielder but is not well-suited to being a defensive midfielder. Where does he fit into this amalgamated midfield mess?

These questions, for me, all rest on Ozil and Ramsey. Emery may want to build around Ramsey, but it is Ozil who is the rare quality that needs to be positioned correctly for this team to truly flourish. And to do that, he needs to be playing centrally, free of all the defensive responsibility that comes from being featured in a wide or deeper role.

If Ozil is shifted inside, then that resigns Ramsey to a deeper-lying, more traditional central midfield position, one that I believe is his best if he is willing to play it with discipline that he sometimes tends to overlook. That leaves just one more midfield position: Torreira or Xhaka as the holding midfielder.

But there is a problem with this set-up: Balance. Does playing Ramsey in a box-to-box role with just one holding player alongside him upset the balance of the team and expose a defence that has already proven itself to struggle greatly when defending space against swift, sweeping counter-attacks? The answer, especially against the better teams, is, probably, ‘yes’.

Next: Arsenal: 3 players impacted by Lucas Torreira signing

And so the conundrum circles back to the beginning: Should Ramsey be used in a box-to-box or central attacking midfield role and where should Ozil play as a result of that decision? It is a question that I do not know the answer to. I’m not sure whether Emery knows the answer to it either, but I will be following it closely next season indeed.