Arsenal: Give me Donny van de Beek or give me death… or Ramsey back

Arsenal need to replace Aaron Ramsey with someone prolific, and Donny van de Beek may be one of the few guys who can replicate that.

I’ve been saying all year that you can’t replace Aaron Ramsey with just one person. He meant too much to Arsenal, and even if you find someone with similar abilities, you won’t find someone as deeply ingrained in this club’s culture and history. At least not yet.

So our objective should be getting as close as we can. Joan Jordan looks promising. Franck Kessie would be a solid bet. But Donny van de Beek may be the greatest idea of them all, for a few reasons.

First of all, any Ajax player is a good idea. That’s a fact. They’re just too good, and everyone pulls their weight, and van de Beek has been arguably their best performer this year.

But even aside from that, you may find yourself thinking that the Eridivisie is a soft quantifier of his talents Sure, he’s got eight goals and nine assists, creates consistently, keeps hold of the ball, and does all that fun stuff.

It’s the Eridivie though, not nearly the powerhouse it once was and no longer even considered in Europe’s top five divisions.

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If that’s your mindset, then prepare to be undone like a stiff shoelace. Because while Donny van de Beek is a tremendous Eridivisie talent, he’s done even better in the Champions League, knocking out the likes of Real Madrid, Juventus and almost Tottenham too. He faced Bayern Munich in the group stages too. These are all the clubs (minus Tottenham, who are still below us) that we will want to be matching up against and van de Beek does it already.

Check out the numbers, which either improve, or hardly change when compared between the two competitions. Van de Beek wins the ball back more, creates more chances, completes more dribbles is dispossessed less and wins more aerial duels in the toughest competition in the world, the Champions League.

The only numbers that don’t follow this trend are his goal production numbers, but that’s to be expected. He scores or assists every 133 minutes in the Eridivisie and every 179 in the Champions League, but that shouldn’t lessen his value at all.

And all he would have to do is play behind the best striking pairing in all of the world. Who wouldn’t want that?

He’s only 22-years-old. I don’t think anything else needs to be said. The big question is if we can afford him, because you know that Ajax know what they have.