Arsenal: January window made the summer window so much easier

Arsenal didn’t do a lot in the January window, but what they did do was make the summer window so much easier to approach.

In isolation, you may be thinking that the January window was a failure. Not every need was addressed by Arsenal, and as such, they will have to go through the rest of the season a bit short-handed, given the injury crisis.

But the window accomplished what I think was its primary goal – to make the summer window easier.

This club has a lot of areas that needed addressing. The defense in particular stands out, but not having wingers is also a major concern. Even if we had money, and even if Emery had gone into the January window guns blazing, anybody we’d have purchased at either position would have done a number on the youth options that I think/hope we’d all prefer – Mavropanos, Holding, Reiss Nelson.

That the January window did was allow Emery to insert a creative midfielder where there are so many already (dead weight) and thus he will be able to suss out how much more help he will need in the chance creation department.

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But that is helped on by Emile Smith Rowe’s loan to RB Leipzig as well. Now we have two players – Denis Suarez and Smith Rowe – essentially on trial to see what their readiness will be to take on the responsibilities of the position come next season.

And you want to talk about wingers? Nelson is still on trial at Hoffenheim and Bukayo Saka has been making serious headway this year alone.

Defensively, we can probably expect to see some movement this summer, but by not approaching it in January, he is allowing his available resources to weed themselves out, or assert where they are on the readiness scale. Mavropanos has yet to even feature this year, Rob Holding will be out for awhile, Calum Chambers will be back (supposedly) and in case you forgot, we actually had a lot of success using Laurent Koscielny/Sokratis Papastathopoulos in a partnership.

January would have been a panic-buy spree has Emery tried to attack all these needs in the here and now, when instead the useful ally of having time on his hands allowed him to exhibit patience and see what can be fixed by internal solution, which is the end goal.

We are in this for the long haul, ladies and gentlemen, take care that you don’t forget about that.