Arsenal: Unai Emery better be right about Calum Chambers

Calum Chambers is set to join Fulham on a year-long loan deal according to a wide range of reports. Unai Emery had better be right because it leaves Arsenal a little thin at centre-back.

With the transfer window nearing the deadline, Arsenal and Unai Emery are beginning to make decisions about who should stay and who should go. With much of their recruitment work completed by early July, the remaining weeks of the transfer window have centred on evaluating the current players in the squad and whittling down a squad that is a little too big at certain positions.

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One of those positions is centre-half. With Sokratis signed earlier in the summer to partner Shkodran Mustafi as the starter, the young trio of Calum Chambers, Konstantinos Mavropanos and Rob Holding were all seen as burgeoning back-ups, with Laurent Koscielny set to rejoin the group once he recovered from a ruptured Achilles.

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For all those players to continue their development, that is too many. Realistically, four is the perfect number. No more than five is needed, even if one of those five is set to miss the first half of the season. And so, a departure was inevitable. It would almost certainly be one of the young trio. It would almost certainly be on loan. It would almost certainly be to a Premier League club that would play them week-in-week-out.

And so it is likely to be. According to a wide range of reports in the media on Monday morning, Arsenal and Fulham have agreed on a deal that will send Chambers to Craven Cottage for the year. A medical is yet to be completed and the official documents have not yet been signed, but this seems like a deal that will happen in the coming days — I am writing this piece on Monday morning. By the time it publishes, the deal could have been made official.

I’ll be honest, it is a difficult one to understand. Despite my saying that Arsenal have numbers at the position and that one of the young trio is likely to depart this summer and that they have the depth to accommodate that departure, suddenly, without Chambers on the books, the position does look a little thin.

You see, of the three, Chambers, for me, was the most developed. He was the most ready-made for regular football, not Mavropanos or Holding. And neither Mustafi nor Sokratis are especially convincing as a starting pair and Koscielny is far from a guarantee with his ever-increasing age and injury problems. While Arsenal had quantity on their side, without Chambers, they may not have quality, and that is concerning.

This decision, ultimately, comes down to Emery’s evaluation of the players. Either he believes that Mavropanos and Holding are better than Chambers or that Koscielny can be relied upon when he returns or that Chambers is simply not good enough or that this loan deal will so good for his development that it was too good to turn down, even if it comes with a sacrifice for this season.

I am not sure what Emery’s thinking is for this decision. Earlier this summer, after Chambers signed a new long-term contract, he stated that the defender would be a part of his plans for the coming year. So what changed? Well, I don’t know. No one does, really, other than Emery, his coaches and the club. But he better be right because Arsenal could get themselves in trouble with no Chambers to help.