Arsenal: Loans Manager an intriguing evolution

Senior Football Analyst Ben Knapper is to be promoted into the new role, Arsenal Loans Manager. It is intriguing evolution as the Gunners look to pursue any gain possible in the modern game.

Arsenal are a team on a budget. That may seem odd to say for a club that spent the best part of a £100 million in the summer and is currently playing their star player £350,000-a-week. But in comparison to their direct rivals, both in the Premier League and in Europe, their budget is rather limiting.

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The likes of Manchester City, Liverpool and even Chelsea can far out-spend their north London counterparts. And in the modern footballing world, money, like it or not, talks. That, for the Gunners, is not a good thing.

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This sad fact means that Arsenal must get creative to compete at the highest level. They have no other way of doing so. And one way that they can do that is to invest heavily in young players, nurture them, develop them and then eventually thrust them into the first team. This is a key characteristic of this club and is a process that they have used throughout the Arsene Wenger era to try and rival better teams.

And in this modern game in which squads are as deep and competitive as ever, sending young talent out on loan is an increasingly important process. As Chelsea have exploited to an infamous degree, the loan system is something that big clubs must now use to their advantage if they want to successfully develop young players — admittedly, Chelsea are poor at inserting their young talent into the first team, but plenty of the Premier League is supplied by the Chelsea lineage.

Now it seems as though Arsenal are set to embrace the loan system. This week, it was announced that senior football analyst Ben Knapper, whose name I only heard for the first time on Monday, is set to be hired as a Loans Manager, a position that the club is opening especially for Knapper.

Currently, Arsenal have seven players out on loan: Matt Macey (Plymouth), David Ospina (Napoli), Calum Chambers (Fulham), Krystian Bielik (Charlton), Keleci Nwakali (Porto), Reiss Nelson (Hoffenheim), Takuma Asano (Hannover 96). Typically, the Gunners have struggled to make the most of the loan system. Oftentimes, their loanees are not actually given regular football and just sit on the bench of whatever team they are sent to. That obviously makes little sense.

But now they are seemingly set to take the whole process a lot more seriously, and that is very interesting indeed. How this will change the loan decisions that are made at the club, no one really knows. And whether it will be a successful venture or not, only time will tell, and it will take years at that.

There is, though, an eager sense of evolution, a catching up with the times, an acceptance of the club’s restrictions and an attempt to circumnavigate them with inventive structuring and planning. And that is to be applauded.