Arsenal: Eddie Nketiah doing the Reiss Nelson… and that’s a good thing

Arsenal look set to loan out Eddie Nketiah as he has little chance of breaking into the first team, and this is a good decision on replicating Reiss Nelson’s results.

Eddie Nketiah has been a sensation this preseason, but as we have learned in the past, preseason spectacles don’t necessarily translate to season successes. In fact, they rarely do. And with Arsenal beyond stacked at striker, it makes little sense for Nketiah to wallow away on the bench when he could be getting first team experience elsewhere.

Going on loan had a bad stigma under Arsene Wenger, seeing as how it amounted to literally nothing from the likes of Serge Gnabry, Chuba Akpom, Yaya Sanogo, so on and so forth. But with the new brain trust, loans have been working wonders.

Krystian Bielik‘s loan earned him a £10m transfer. Calum Chambers‘ loan earned him Fulham’s play of the season. And Reiss Nelson‘s loan took him that extra step into maturity that he really needed to make it at the Premier League level. Now we just sit back and watch him acclimate.

Sending Eddie Nketiah on loan has been talked about for over a year. It looked likely that he would be loaned out last year, but it fell through at the last minute.

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In the process of staying at the Emirates, he made an impact, particularly later on in the season, and we’ve seen that progression continuing on into the preseason. But the big issue is that this progression is not likely to continue if this season goes the way it’s shaping up—that of very little opportunity for the young striker.

He’s already played the game of going up and down from U23 to senior squad, but his next step is continual first team exposure, which he just isn’t going to find at Arsenal. It’s the exact same situation that Nelson was in, and finding his footing at Hoffenheim, even when it was tough going and he had to adjust, was a maturing process for him, something that he brought attention to time and time again.

Now he’s primed and ready for first team action. He’s ready to compete.

Nketiah is a goal machine and we saw in the preseason how he was developing beyond just scoring goals as well. But until he goes through what Reiss Nelson went through, playing in a first team set up where he can actually earn minutes, we won’t know how ready he is to be a bigger part of this club.