Arsenal: Eddie Nketiah an impossible commodity to gauge

Eddie Nketiah is weighing his future after a failed loan to Leeds, but Arsenal will have trouble gauging his usefulness in the current state.

At the start of the year, everything about Eddie Nketiah made sense. He had just showcased some fantastic talent for Arsenal the previous year, but he needed to do a Calum Chambers and prove himself for an entire year. That’s when Leeds came in and offered a saving grace with a loan.

But Nketiah never started a match for them, despite scoring his fair share of goals, and the loan ended prematurely in a nature not dissimilar from Serge Gnabry‘s ill-fated loan to West Brom way back in the Wenger days.

Now, Nketiah is just kind of hanging around, trying to figure out where to go next. And it’s not an easy situation to gauge for Arsenal. These are his formative years as a striker and something needs to happen.

A loan is the best idea, but we really need that loan to be a guarantee. Even still, he has less than half a season on that loan, which, if he was hoping to get back into the Gunners’ outfit by the start of next season, isn’t a lot of time.

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Ideally, I would love to say that we could count on Nketiah to play a role in selling Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, but unfortunately there just isn’t enough on the table yet to conclusively say that. Sure, he scores goals, and we’ve seen him contribute in other ways. But the sample size has always been small and it’s been hit and miss.

With Gabriel Martinelli already at the club and ready to ascend to a higher level of play, I have reverted my enthusiasm to Martinelli in the quest to find youth replacements for wage-gorged superstars.

Which leaves Nketiah stranded in a limbo that no young player wants to be stranded at. No doubt he wants to break through at Arsenal and the club would love to see that too, but it’s such a risk now, and with very little opportunity for prolonged exposure, that a loan makes more sense. Even if a loan is just about as risky and unreliable.

This is a pivotal time for the young striker, and the way forward is far from clear. I just hope he has some good people giving him good advice, because how he navigates this juncture could define his career.