Arsenal: What does life after Laurent Koscielny look like?

Arsenal still have on year from Laurent Koscielny, but without much to expect, the question we have to answer is what life after the Boss looks like?

Arsenal‘s defense should be their primary concern this summer. No doubt about that. Give us someone who can bring it all together so that we can rest easy in knowing that the future of the defense is in good hands.

It’s not like there haven’t been opportunities for players to take the reigns. Plenty of young players have been pushed into the mix at all ages, and you have to think that it was meant to be Shkodran Mustafi who took the role of Mr. Reliable, previously owned by Laurent Koscielny.

It’s funny now, but back in the day, it wasn’t such a bad idea.

With Calum Chambers returning from loan, Rob Holding coming back from injury, Konstantinos Mavropanos hanging around, Krystian Bielik coming back from loan and back into relevance, there are so, so many options.

But none of them are Koscielny replacement ready, not by a long shot. They could grow into it, but we don’t want the transition to be as rough as it is looking like it might be.

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The hard part is navigating this decision, because it’s pretty obvious that the youth options are there that, if you wanted to trust them to do the heavy lifting, the reward could be massive. But the risk far outweighs it and it’s more than likely not going to pay off right away.

We have Sokratis now, and that’s an excellent help in moving on past Koscielny, but even he didn’t look his best unless he was with Koscielny in the back line. Indicating that explicitly trusting him to be the rock may be a failing endeavor.

There’s no way getting around the investment factor, and we’ve talked a lot about Matthijs de Ligt and Harry Maguire, but we also have to accept that they may be out of our league if we don’t take home that Europa League final.

Koscielny has been so immensely important to this club on and off the pitch that it is hard to think about what happens after. It feels like we’ve always been able to count on him.

But we have to be aware of that. We have to know that something big has to happen to compensate for such a pending loss. And hopefully it will be well on the way long before he leaves us.