How Bukayo Saka’s absence has cost Arsenal in the title race | OneFootball

Arsenal slipped further from Liverpool in the Premier League title race after their 1-0 defeat to West Ham United on the weekend.

The Gunners are now 11 points behind the league leaders, and there’s no denying they’ve been affected by Bukayo Saka’s absence with his hamstring injury.

Saka was forced off against Crystal Palace just after Christmas, and is not expected to be back until late March at the earliest.

Two months on, Saka has still managed more assists in the league than any other Arsenal player (10); the next closest players are Declan Rice and Leandro Trossard who have given five each. As well as this, Saka has logged more goal contributions in the league (15) than any of his teammates, with Kai Havertz behind him (12).

The Englishman also remains second on the Premier League assist chart, behind only Mohamed Salah (16), despite missing over a third of Arsenal’s games in the competition this season.

With Saka on the pitch, Arsenal had scored 30 goals in 1,275 Premier League minutes, helping them to third in the league, seven points behind table-toppers Liverpool. They’re now second, but the gap between them and the Reds has widened to 11 points.

And Arsenal’s fortunes without Saka on the pitch have got worse. In the 1,065 minutes he hasn’t featured in the league, Arsenal have scored 21 goals at an average of 1.77 per 90 minutes. Their record with Saka on the pitch is 2.12 goals per 90.

They are getting better results on the face of it, collecting 33 points from the 16 games Saka featured in (1.94 per game) compared to 20 from the 10 he missed completed (2 per game). It’s obviously close, but further context must be taken into account.

Six of Arsenal’s 10 Premier League games without Saka have been against teams in the bottom half of the table, including three games against teams in the relegation zone. Arteta’s men have managed just five points from four games (1.25 per game) against top-half sides — including the defeat to Bournemouth earlier in the season which he missed due to injury.

In the time since his long-term injury, Arsenal have also lost both legs of their Carabao Cup semi-final to Newcastle United and were knocked out of the FA Cup by Manchester United.

But with Saka, Arsenal won 14 points from eight games against the Premier League’s top 10 teams (1.75 points per game), as well as convincing wins over Paris Saint-Germain and Sporting CP in the Champions League.

How Arsenal’s other attackers have performed

While they are hardly a better side without him, Arsenal have somewhat managed to stay afloat without Saka, so who has stepped up in the 23-year-old’s absence.

Before Saka went down injured against Palace, Havertz had only scored five goals in 16 Premier League appearances (0.31 goals per game).

But without Saka on the pitch, the German more than doubled his output and went on to score four in six (0.66 goals per game), before being ruled out for the rest of the season with a hamstring issue earlier this month.

Trossard has earned more minutes since Saka was sidelined and has also played a hand in the goals for Arsenal. In his first 17 Premier League games this term, the Belgian logged just four goal contributions (0.23 G/A per game), compared to five in the nine games since Saka’s injury (0.55 G/A per game).

Aside from these two, Arsenal’s goalscoring sources have been fairly arbitrary, coming from scrappy set-pieces, moments of brilliance and sheer will to put the ball in the goal – none of which are a sustainable means of breaking down defences.

It is why, on so many occasions since Saka’s injury, the Gunners have looked helpless going forward, even if they have managed to get over the line with three points.

Brighton and Hove Albion away, Man Utd at home, both Carabao Cup ties against Newcastle, Leicester City away and, most recently, West Ham at home are all proof of why Jason Ayto must get to work in the transfer window.

The bottom line is that Arsenal’s issues lie deeper than the absence of Saka or the plethora of other attacking injuries they are dealing with. Business must be done in the summer to add depth to their front three; Arteta simply needs a reliable goal-scoring outlet up top.