Arsenal: Petr Cech can be the Per Mertesacker captain

Arsenal are in line for not one, not two, but five captains this year, if Unai Emery gets his way, and Petr Cech wants to be one. That could work.

The captaincy has been little more than an honorarium for far too long at Arsenal. The armband has been reserved for older players who were on their way out the door, no doubt for their veteran qualities, rather than reserved for players that could be built around.

Among the mass of things Unai Emery wants to change, that is one of them – the captaincy. More specifically, who is going to captain the club and, even more specifically, how many are going to captain the club. Because apparently that’s a thing.

When Emery first said he wanted five captains within the squad, I was skeptical. Most clubs will have a captain and up to two or three vice captains, but you never see a team that has five co-captains.

Not sure how we will share the one armband, but I digress.

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I highlighted the five players that I thought should get the share of the workload a few weeks back. In no particular order (or is it?), those players are: Laurent Koscielny, Aaron Ramsey, Granit Xhaka, Stephan Lichtsteiner and, the man whom we shall now discuss, Petr Cech.

Cech looked to have almost been a goner while Yann Sommer was being linked to the club. Instead, we have kept hold of Cech and, by his own repeated admission, he is determined to fight off Bernd Leno and maintain his spot in the starting XI.

And he also wants the captaincy.

So why not hand it to him? If we have five captains, we might as well let our most veteran player have one of them. That’s how it worked with Per Mertesacker. Even if Cech loses out to Leno and sits on the bench, he can still be a positive, leading influence in the locker room and in training.

There is a value in that, even if it doesn’t immediately show on the pitch itself.

There’s no reason to deny Cech what he wants. And maybe it can serve as added motivation for him to take the battle to Leno and make this whole concept of internal competition work even better than it already is and will continue to.