Arsenal kidding themselves if they think static summer takes them ‘to a different level’

Mikel Arteta has sought the same thing in each of the last six summer transfer windows: level-raisers.

Martin Odegaard and Benjamin White were able to “increase the level of the team and the squad” in 2021. “We are ready to go to a different level,” Arteta said after the additions of Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko in 2022. Declan Rice and Kai Havertz “raised not only the level of the team but the level of the rest of the players as well” in 2023.

David Raya, Riccardo Calafiori and Mikel Merino represented an exceptional window by those standards in 2024, while 2025 was about adding “different things” and an element of the “unpredictable”.

After losing the Champions League final on penalties, Arteta was clear. In his post-match press conference he praised “the individual action” of PSG’s players and noted the need for Arsenal “to improve and to reach a different level because it will demand a different level with the quality that is around Europe”.

A couple of months after, he expressed that desire again: “to take this club to a different level” with “a better squad, better individuals”.

Bruno Guimaraes and Ezri Konsa are exceptional, trophy-winning, international quality, Premier League-ready players. Christos Tzolis looks like a potentially brilliant signing. Illan Meslier’s ability to put out the cones is said to be of an elite standard.

But Arsenal are inexplicably arguably weaker coming out of the window than they were going into it. At the very least, they have stood still and allowed others to catch up.

Their No, Not Like That-inducing reaction to being persistently told for the past decade that they need to improve at selling players feels bizarre. In isolation, getting £60m for Gabriel Martinelli, £15m for Leandro Trossard, £9m for Gabriel Jesus and £7m for Fabio Vieira, while farming Ethan Nwaneri out for a Champions League-adjacent loan, are all justifiable if not outright excellent deals.

When all is said and done, Arsenal will have made more money this summer through player sales than in any other transfer window in their history.

Yet if that is the by product of trading becoming a necessary sporting evil for most teams, Arsenal appear to have entirely neglected the other side of that coin: actual signings.

While the defence and midfield is well-stocked and perhaps good enough to simply 1-0 to the Arsenal the way to a Quintuple, theirs does not feel like a deep and varied enough attack; it certainly lacks “the individual action” Arteta craved.

That was the role and the money and the time set aside for Morgan Rogers, then Vinicius Junior, then Julian Alvarez. Arsenal cannot be blamed for Chelsea being Chelsea, being used as a pawn in Real Madrid contract negotiations, and not being Barcelona. Yet those outcomes were foreseeable, and arguably the most predictable in each instance.

The apparent lack of planning thereafter is damning, and has helped close the gap to what seemed until recently a distant pack of challengers.

As Premier League champions and Champions League finalists, Arsenal entered this transfer window in a position of absurd strength. They might take pride at not indulging too much in a summer of preposterous largesse, but it has made them look static rather than sensible.

There are levels to this game; Arteta will have to raise his own if last season’s title is to become a dynasty, because Arsenal haven’t done enough to lift theirs.