Arsenal: Calum Chambers transfer reaction a delicate situation

Arsenal didn’t want to have to do too much shopping in the January window, but with Calum Chambers out for the year, things change. Be careful, though.

It’s officially been confirmed that Calum Chambers will miss 6-9 months with a ruptured ACL. This is a huge blow, not just to Arsenal as a whole, but also to Chambers, who was finally settling into a serious first time role with the Gunners.

Aside from the emotional implications, which weigh heavily enough, the team now has to reassess where they stand defensively. Chambers wouldn’t be back until well into the summer, and that’s just to training. As we learned from Rob Holding‘s injury, he’ll probably miss a chunk of next year too.

With Holding’s own inability to get healthy, that gives us two promising centerbacks, both of whom could probably be starting, neither of whom we can say for certain, since they can’t stay healthy.

Which leaves us with David Luiz, Sokratis and Shkodran Mustafi. Better known as three guys that you can’t build the future of this defense around.

And William Saliba. Who is still a wild card at this point.

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Approaching the transfer window is a delicate situation. We already probably needed a solid centerback coming into the club, but now we certainly do, with Chambers out of the picture for some time. But it also leaves us in a situation of having to plan, eventually, for Chambers return. You don’t want to block his return off, but you also can’t intentionally not fill the role.

There are some safe bets. You could trust that either Holding or Chambers will be healthy at any given time (other than now) and you leave that one spot to the two of them and deal with the rest when the time comes.

This would mean going into the window as if Chambers was still here, counting Holding as part of the Chambers spot. Then maybe we can land someone like Dayot Upamecano (dare to dream) and plan to lose Sokratis and/or Luiz and/or Mustafi in the summer and rebuild then.

But the key here is prolonging defensive stability for the rest of the season. And I don’t think it’s going to be has hard as we might think.

After all, Sokratis and David Luiz are here til then. And if they play like they did against United, then what have we got to fear?