Arsenal are pushing ahead with their summer spending as they look to successfully defend their Premier League title this season.
The Gunners have already committed more than £100m in this transfer window, signing Bruno Guimaraes from Newcastle for £75m and Club Brugge winger Christos Tzolis for £34m.
Now Arsenal are set to add Aston Villa and England centre-back Ezri Konsa to their squad for a fee of around £51m.
On the surface, bringing in another established defender when seven senior options are already on the books appears puzzling, but Mikel Arteta has clear reasons for pursuing the move.
Arsenal’s title-winning campaign last season was built on an exceptionally well-organised defence, with William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes forming a formidable partnership as the Gunners conceded just 27 Premier League goals.
However, key members of that backline are currently unavailable, with Saliba ruled out for an extended period due to a long-term back issue that had been managed throughout last season and forced him out of France’s World Cup campaign early.
First-choice right-back Jurrien Timber is also sidelined for the opening weeks of the season with a groin problem that caused him to withdraw from the Netherlands’ World Cup squad.
That leaves Ben White, who has suffered his own fitness problems in recent seasons, as the only fit right-back, while 21-year-old Cristhian Mosquera is the sole right-sided centre-back option to partner Gabriel.
Arteta is also reluctant to field two left-footed players at centre-back, a scenario that would arise if White were injured and Mosquera needed to shift to right-back, making the case for Konsa even more compelling.
Riccardo Calafiori and Piero Hincapie, whose loan deal was made permanent this summer, are both left-sided, while highly rated 16-year-old academy defender Marli Salmon is most likely to feature sparingly in cup competitions as he continues to develop.
Konsa arrives in outstanding form, having been ranked as having the best ground duel success rate of 73.1% and the best passing accuracy of 95% among all Premier League defenders last season.
His passing accuracy was also the best of any player in the entire league, and he ranked first among all Premier League outfield players who contested more than 20 ground duels throughout the campaign.
He carried that form into the World Cup, starting seven of England’s eight games and registering an extraordinary 97% pass completion rate across those appearances.
Konsa also lifted the Europa League with Aston Villa last season, demonstrating his ability to perform in high-pressure, high-stakes matches at the highest level.
Questions remain about whether Konsa will hold a regular starting place once Saliba and Gabriel return to fitness, given that Arteta’s preferred backline of Timber, Saliba, Gabriel and Calafiori is difficult to break into on paper.
However, Arsenal played 63 games last season as they won the title, reached the Champions League final, the Carabao Cup final and the FA Cup quarter-final, highlighting the need for genuine squad depth.
Arteta addressed the question of squad numbers directly, saying: “I think there is a lot of factors that count. Twenty two outfield players and three goalkeepers of what is enough, or maybe you know more.”
He continued: “You need to understand what happened in the previous season, the injury record of those players, the versatility of certain players.”
The Arsenal manager added: “But I’m sure we’re going to hit the right number to have a bit of both a lot of competition with the right level of cooperation in the team and everybody feeling important.”
Konsa’s arrival will take Arsenal’s spending this summer to over £150m, following the £250m they invested last summer, as the club pushes to establish itself among the true superpowers of world football.
Chief executive Richard Garlick has stated publicly that joining the world’s superclubs is “the goal – that’s the ambition”, with the club also exploring stadium expansion plans to grow revenue off the pitch.
Arsenal remain active in the market for a forward, maintaining a long-term interest in Julian Alvarez and having monitored Juventus forward Kenan Yildiz, with Garlick acknowledging the “pool of players is smaller now than it was a few years ago if we’re going to improve.”
