Arsenal: Should we be worried about Bernd Leno?

Bernd Leno has not started a game since he signed for Arsenal and has again not been included in the German national squad. Should we be worried that he isn’t quite the goalkeeper that the club initially believed?

Arsenal have moved to a new transfer system. In previous years, it was Arsene Wenger who had to sign off on every single move. He was in charge of the scouting, the acquisition, the negotiations and the overall team-building process. But in his departure, chief executive Ivan Gazidis has been keen to shift to a more continental, broadened approach in which a team of individuals come together, only one of which is the manager, or head coach, of the team.

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So Unai Emery, Wenger’s successor, while still having an element of control on what transfers are made, is no longer the final decision maker. Inevitably, that can lead to some players being bought that he has not evaluated in the same manner as the scouting department. That, in turn, leads to concerns about the player. One such example is Bernd Leno.

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Leno was signed for approximately £20 million in the summer. He was signed most probably by the new head of recruitment, Sven Mislintat, who has extensive knowledge of the Bundesliga and German football. He was not signed to be a back-up — before this summer, only three goalkeepers had ever cost more than Leno. He was Arsenal’s sixth most expensive signing in history at the time. And yet, four games into the new season, he has had to sit behind Petr Cech, who he was signed to replace, struggle with aspects of the game that he was acquired to execute.

As Martin Keown states in the Daily Mail, we don’t actually know how good Leno is:

"“If you look at the statistics for goalkeepers in Europe, Leno excels in his distribution but is not the best when it comes to the shots he is expected to stop. The German was not in their World Cup squad and hasn’t been called up for this international break. How good is he? We’re not too sure yet.”"

It’s fair to say that Leno is not good enough for Joachim Low and might not be good enough for Emery either. So is it possible to conclude that Arsenal made a mistake signing him in the first place? There certainly were many voices proclaiming caution at the time. Maybe they were right.

One possibility is that Emery is aware of how good Leno is, and how he can fit into his system nicely, but is not so confident about Cech’s abilities and comfort level with playing out from the back. Could Emery simply be testing Cech in these early matches to see whether he can adapt or not?

That is plausible. But there is an issue with that line of thinking. Firstly, Leno was signed to simply be better than Cech, so he should just be good enough to start right away. And secondly, seeing what Cech is capable of suggests that Emery isn’t sure that Leno is good enough. Cech is 36. He is not the long-term solution at the position. Leno, apparently, is. So surely you should be seeing how good Leno is, not how good Cech is.

All this leads me to suggest that Emery believes that Leno isn’t as good as Arsenal, or Mislintat, thought when they signed him. I’m not worried just yet. It’s still early days. But there is a very fair question to ask of why Leno isn’t starting. The answer might not be the one that everyone wants.