Arsenal: Laurent Koscielny necessary to maintain for next season

Arsenal’s defense is likely going to be facing a facelift going into next summer, but Laurent Koscielny needs to be maintained for obvious reasons.

Unai Emery’s logic behind not bringing in defenders in the January window was pretty solid – there are so many bodies already in this Arsenal defense that need to be filtered through that bringing in more would just clog things up.

Rob Holding will get healthy again. Konstantinos Mavropanos will get his chances to prove himself. Sokratis has asserted himself and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Laurent Koscielny has returned and looked stronger than he has ever looked.

Maybe that’s because of the stark contrast of him returning to a defense that was in dire straits and only needing to be good enough to be an improvement. It doesn’t take much to improve on a failing system like Shkodran Mustafi and Sokratis were combining to create.

With Rob Holding factored in for the early parts of the season, there was still hope that, in time, things would get better. Such that the return of Koscielny wasn’t even really something that took up a lot of attention.

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He had been part of the problem the previous year, so why rely on him making a full recovery, not just physically, but also finding his way back into the form of nearly two years ago.

And yet, here we have Koscielny back in full force, playing more of a placeholder role until the defense can get in a better state to handle itself for the long haul, likely with the help of Holding and/or Mavropanos being the main players, and whoever Emery can bring in during the summer.

Thus, it may feel like Koscielny’s usage will die down after this year, and that he could potentially make way in the summer in an effort to clear out some aging weight (I hate to say “dead weight” when speaking of Koscielny).

But that’s a bad idea. Koscielny has shown this year why he is so important, and he will be important for the same reasons next year – he is still reliable. And he is so ingrained into life at the Emirates, that he isn’t the kind of guy who will make a stink if he is unseated from the starting job. He’s the captain, he’s here to guide the team into the next era, so why not let him do that?

He has indicated that he will leave the club in 2020, which should be plenty of time for the club to cope without their Mr. Reliable at the back. Or maybe they can just pass the role off to someone like Sokratis.