In preparation for the 2020/2021 English Premier League season, Arsenal football club has gone ahead to bolster their squad with two key defensive signings in William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes, both of whom are among the best center backs in Ligue1 over the past two or three seasons.
The Gunners although signed Saliba last summer under Unai Emery but sent him back on loan to his former club Saint Etienne for the whole of the season. The 19 year old center back has now returned to the Emirates Stadium and is expected to slot into the first team anytime soon.
Arsenal have also beaten off competition from Napoli and fellow premier league side Everton as well as Manchester United in snapping up Gabriel Magalhaes for a fee in the region of £22-25m, the 22 year old defender will officially put pen to paper in the coming days.
While there are still areas to be improved in the Arsenal team, there’s one particular area that draws the most attention and that’s the two centre-back positions. In the just concluded season, Arsenal conceded a whopping 48 goals. The only time they’ve conceded more in a single campaign in the last 25 years was the season before that when they conceded 51.
These alarming figures makes it very crucial to address the defensive issues before going into the new season and that’s exactly what they’ve done by bringing in the two highly rated youthful defenders. Both players are expected to form a young, athletic, exciting partnership that could be the key in solving the club’s biggest issue in recent seasons.
First off even before lining up in the same team, both of them already looks the best fit for each other in central defence if player’s stronger foot is anything to go by as Gabriel is left footed and hence well suited to the left side of the defence and Saliba is right footed, making the right side his own. This is a key defensive partnership that not so many clubs can boast of.
One big advantage that this form of partnership will bring to Arsenal is that it’ll give Kieran Tierney and Hector Bellerin an extra licence to join the attack further up the pitch as both center backs can cover for them with little or no difficulty. In Lille majority of Gabriel’s defensive actions were made down the left flank and in the penalty box.
With Arteta showing glimpses of playing a high defensive line, he’ll definitely need an excellent center back pairing that is confident, physical, strong, not easily dribbled past, not error prone and are good tacklers of the ball. None of the defenders in Arsenal currently fits these criterias better than Gabriel and Saliba.
Throughout last season in the french Ligue1, Saliba didn’t commit a single foul while attempting a tackle, he has the most pure tackle success rate in the Ligue 1 last season at 79.2%. He attempted 24, won 19 and was only dribbled past five times. Gabriel on the other hand has a pure tackle success rate of 74.6%, just 5% lower than Saliba. He attempted 55 tackles, 41 successful, seven times dribbled past, and seven fouls committed.
As per Skysports, Gabriel completed the most passes into the opposition half in Ligue 1 last season – ranking second for forward passes and 16th for winning aerial duels
Ligue1 expert Jonathan Johnson has also backed William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes to form a very good center back partnership having watched both of them closely over the course of the season. He said “It would be a pairing of two very good, very promising central defensive talents and potentially a partnership which could serve Arsenal for the best part of the next 10 years,”
With these two, Arsenal could be looking at a very different and decent centre-half pairing that will only get more and more better as they continue to develop and based on these statistics, it might just be Arteta’s key to seal up a leaky defence.
