Arsenal: Nicolas Pepe will be worth it… even if he isn’t yet

Carrying a £72m price tag was never going to be easy for Nicolas Pepe to navigate at Arsenal, but even if he isn’t worth it yet, he is so obviously going to be.

Nicolas Pepe now has 334 Premier League minutes under his belt in his debut season at Arsenal, and in those 334 minutes, he’s accumulated one assist, several glaring missed chances, a lot of dribbling, and one really weak right foot.

It’s been a learning experience for all parties—for Pepe, the club and us fans—in understanding what he brings and what he can be counted on both now, and going forward. And this hasn’t been helped on by the vulture media lurking, croaking about how he was ridiculously overpriced.

Everyone is overpriced these days, so seeing someone like Pepe go for £72m was hardly shocking. Nor has his acclimation to the Premier League been any more or less shocking.

Watford was a really good microcosm of his early going. He had a lot of bursting runs, tight dribbling, and energy, but it was accompanied by a weak right foot, an overuse of the cutback, and a left foot that was easy to guard against.

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The bad news is he hasn’t been able to really influence a match the way we’d like. He was at his best against Liverpool, but even that was mired by his inability to finish and a loss that just about anyone could see coming.

The good news is that all those things he’s struggling with are easy to fix. He has to work on the right foot. He has to work on his finishing. He has to add to his repertoire of offensive moves, but that will all come in time.

It’s not like he lacks passion, or has a bad attitude, or lacks speed or decision making. He has all those things. Those are the things that are often hard to teach, the kinds of things that will haunt a guy throughout his career, but Pepe doesn’t have to worry about any of it. He just has some technical proficiencies that need to be a bit more… proficient. Which means more practice, more fine-tuning, and he will be absolutely worth every bit of what we paid for him.

Not to mention that Unai Emery is still experimenting with how best to utilize the guy, either as a winger or as a forward, so there is a lot of learning going on and, on the bright side, it’s not like there’s a pressing time limit on any of this.