Don't you forget about M(artinell)i
The Brazilian was back to his best late in the season and the numbers prove it — the transfer market might not offer better
“Take risks. Go. Why do you want to take that away from a player who can dribble?
“Have a go.
“All I need is one. All you need (as a forward) is one. You need to believe you’re going to make it happen and you will fail and fail and fail again.”
— Thierry Henry on Stick To Football
With the season over, full focus has turned to the transfer market. Arsenal need a striker. Arsenal need a winger. Arsenal need a holding midfielder, a backup goalkeeper, maybe a bit more creativity and they might as well chuck a left-back in the trolley too; you never know when you might need another.
The shiny new thing is shiny and, even more importantly, it’s new.
A new signing is like a new relationship. The possibilities are endless, this person hasn’t let you down yet, not even once, and there is so much potential for things to flourish.
As you spend a bit more time with them, you become aware of (or stop overlooking) the flaws that were always there.
Any given weekend you can open your social media of choice and you will see Arsenal fans lustfully watching basically any other team in the Premier League, hoping the club can find a way to snatch away one of their players because they would surely add something different, something better, than the players we currently have in that position.
It’s something we’re all guilty of. I, like many of you, fell in love with watching Nico Williams during last summer’s Euros and I would still be excited if Arsenal were to sign him, but his return of five LaLiga goals in 2024/25 (the same number he managed in 2023/24 as well) would not go down well if repeated in North London after a big-money move.
Watch them more closely or more regularly, and of course the flaws will start to become more present in your mind. Familiarity breeds contempt, after all.
But, a few exists and a few incomings aside, the vast majority of Arsenal’s 2025/26 campaign will be played out by players who already played for the club in 2024/25 and a big part of the job will be extracting more from them. New signings could unlock a bit more from certain players, sure, but there are others who will have to dig deep and find a way to offer more for Arsenal to be more successful.
Which brings me to Gabriel Martinelli.
Arsenal need a winger and have needed (and, in fairness, been interested in signing) a winger for a number of years. But that shouldn’t be in place of Martinelli. Arsenal need ANOTHER winger.
So I was surprised by a comment made in passing in The Athletic (£) recently that, though Arsenal do not plan to sell the Brazilian, things could change if a big offer came in and the club value him at “above £50million”.
Sounds cheap. Especially when, to my eye, Martinelli had a superb end to the season. I thought the winger was disappointing up until his injury in February, but looked much sharper, more direct, more dangerous and more aggressive from his return in March onwards.
So I wanted to see if the numbers backed up that impression and oh boy, do they. And they compare very favourably to other wingers across Europe too.
Martinelli saw a lot less of the ball this season than in previous years and pre-injury he was struggling to get shots off, struggling to create shots for himself and others, and seeing far too much of the ball far too far away from goal. Post-injury, he was as threatening as he’s ever been in an Arsenal shirt, seeing a higher proportion of the ball in the final third than ever, getting more shots off than he ever has and back to his best in terms of driving into the box.
That form was only for a few months but it came in an Arsenal team performing relatively poorly and, perhaps not by accident, it came when Martinelli finally had a stable base behind him. After constant chopping and changing at both left-back and left central midfield since the loss of confidence in Oleksandr Zinchenko and the departure of Granit Xhaka, those roles have consistently been filled by just two players in Myles Lewis-Skelly and Declan Rice lately.
So if we take this end of season Martinelli form and look around Europe at potential wingers for Arsenal this summer, is it really that easy to upgrade on him, and is he really worth just a little over £50m?
Looking at league games across Europe’s top five leagues, here’s a complete, exhaustive list of players with 3+ carries into the box and 3+ shots per 90 minutes over the course of the whole season:
(Minimum 900 minutes played)
Ademola Lookman (Atalanta)
Alfon (Celta Vigo)
Lamine Yamal (Barcelona)
Noni Madueke (Chelsea)
Mohamed Salah (Liverpool)
Bradley Barcola (PSG)
Ousmane Dembélé (PSG) (played mostly up front)
Vinícius Júnior (Real Madrid)
If you add Martinelli’s xG/90 as a benchmark, you can remove Alfon and Lamine Yamal from that list. It goes without saying that Arsenal stand no chance of signing Salah, Vini Jr., and almost certainly either PSG player. Which would leave you with Lookman and Madueke (also likely a no-go) who, across the whole season, drove into the box and took shots at a rate at least on par with Martinelli over the last third of the campaign.
Forwards who don’t make the cut include Kylian Mbappé (just), Nico Williams, Rodrygo, Raphinha, Rafael Leao, everyone in the Bundesliga, everyone in France not playing for PSG, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia even though he does play for PSG, and — including Bukayo Saka — every single Premier League player not named Mohamed Salah or Noni Madueke.
A lot of those players miss out through not completing as many carries into the box, a really valuable skill for a winger to have. Plenty of those who do have that — including Jamie Gittens (Borussia Dortmund), Savinho, Jeremy Doku (both Manchester City) — don’t manage to also get as many shots off as Martinelli has during the last few months.
There are some caveats, naturally. The big one being that Martinelli was poor more often than he wasn’t in 2024/25. My point is not that seeing this version of the Brazilian for a few months is enough, but that it should be enough to keep putting faith in him and give him the opportunity to reproduce it over a longer period of time.
The end product then needs to improve too. Over the spell post-injury, Martinelli managed just two goals (coming against Ipswich and Liverpool) from 3.4 xG and just one assist (for Bukayo Saka against Fulham) from 2.1 xAG (expected assisted goals). But he was consistently threatening in the final third and that will translate into more end product as long as he keeps performing at the same level.
Arsenal absolutely should sign a winger this summer. But, like the situation with a new striker and Kai Havertz, it shouldn’t mean Martinelli is replaced, just that he faces a battle for minutes and the carrot of making that place in the team his own.
There are good players at the club already and getting more out of them will be as important next season as adding new signings to take their place. The mystery box is always enticing, but don’t turn your nose up at the washer and dryer where the lovely Smithers is standing.
