In other forums, I saw a post posted in August 2025. Its general content is as follows. The data charts presented in the post have been omitted. Those who are interested in the details can leave a message:
Yesterday I just wrote about the Gunners' championship prospects.
At that time, he said this casually:
The key problems for the Gunners are, first, that the weak side on the left shoulder is too heavy in defensive responsibilities, and second, there is a lack of effective scorers, and the signing of Yockers can only be said to treat the symptoms rather than the root cause. The signings that can really improve the Gunners' offensive strength should be Eze from Crystal Palace and replace Arteta.
Then, as soon as I woke up… Aize came.
From the past situations in the Premier League, we should be able to see something about Aize's personal ability. From the past player transactions, Crystal Palace's ability to read people must also be able to find some signs.
Prior to this, Crystal Palace sold Olise, who was key to its offense, to Bayern of the Bundesliga for 53 million. Since then, Olise has become an extremely important player for Bayern, even as important as Musiala.
And now, the same goes for Aize from the Crystal Palace.
The overall changes that the Crystal Palace has shown have only undergone major changes since Glassner moved in. However, Aize was already the core strength of the Crystal Palace before that.
During the 23rd and 24th seasons, the tactics implemented by Crystal Palace were a two-wing strategy, and the gap in opportunities between the two sides was not significant. Aize's performance has already reached the thigh level. As for the 2024-25 season, especially in the second half after Glass took over, Crystal Palace began to focus on the use of strong and weak side play. Aize has strong personal ball-holding ability, outstanding confrontation ability, sufficient explosive ability, and good final pass or shooting ability. Because Glasner was placed on the weak side, Matt was in the front, fighting for the first landing point, turning his back to the ball to attract the defense, and creating a huge deep space on the weak side for Eze, who was on the weak side. As a result, when Eze received the ball on the weak side, he was able to fully demonstrate his one-on-one advantage.
Under the two coaches, Aize's tactical adaptability is extremely strong. In terms of functional positions, he can attack on the side with the ball and attack on the weak side without the ball. In fact, Aize's core competitiveness is his ground confrontation, which is really not ordinary.
In the Premier League, among all forward players who have played more than 20 games, Aize has the highest success rate in ground confrontations, and the number of ground confrontations Eze has faced among these players is second only to Cunha, who just went to Manchester United from Wolves. When placed in the weak side space, Aize will not directly suffer defensive double-teams from 2-3 people or more.
The wide and deep area allows him to quickly pass one or two defenders to pass the key pass that directly achieves the shooting effect, and he can also directly shoot himself. This allowed Aize, once again and again, to rank first among the Premier League forwards in the forward rankings with 67 dribbles and a nearly 52% dribble success rate (it is really scary that such a huge base can still be so high).
This is just the team as a whole, which only achieved the results of playing well for half a season. This is the data handed over without much resource support. Teams in the middle and lower reaches of the Premier League are particularly prone to such weird players with explosive physical characteristics. This is the case for Cunha and the same for Mbemo. They are really good at using their physical advantages.
So from a reasonable point of view, after showing such stable performance in many seasons, if Aize goes to a wealthy team, there is a high probability that he can continue to be a key player. Then, Tottenham and the Gunners smelled this situation and came over one after another.
I have talked about the Gunners' tactics many times, and you can check out the past issues here.
Generally speaking, this kind of situation on the weaker side of the field does not take on defensive tasks. Instead, it acts as a winger or a second forward, standing in the front position and serving as the pointing point of the ball arrow when the situation changes, or it becomes the ball release point when the team changes the direction of attack and switches from defense to offense. Therefore, in terms of conventional situations, Dzhekeresh is not the player that Arsenal needs to introduce most urgently. On the contrary, Crystal Palace's Eze is – compared to the center position, they need a second forward who can score goals on the weak side.
Yes, just like Salah at the time of the Red Army's old trident, he is now playing for Barcelona's Rafinha. However! Since Arteta is particularly obsessed with moving the left back in, one person was added to the midfield, but this means that one person is missing from the left wing. Especially in a transition situation, the full back must not be positioned in time enough!
Under such circumstances, whether it is Martinelli or Trossard, in addition to their offensive tasks, they must be highly motivated on the defensive level. Martinelli cannot press too far forward, because then there is no way to make up for the defense in time. However, in this case, Martinelli cannot get close to the penalty area to complete the responsibility of the second forward on the weak side: the final pass/shoot.
Because the distance is too far, at the moment when Martinelli can effectively intervene, the opponent's position on the weak side has been fully deployed, and there is no space at all on the weak side. The number of defensive players he faces is large and extremely dense. As the game progresses, Martin's condition becomes worse and worse, and he becomes less and less agile. Similarly, Trossard's situation is also the same. When he just joined the Arsenal team, he always maintained the regular playing habit of the second forward manner, always rushing forward resolutely and decisively taking shots without hesitation. However, now The situation is really hard to describe. A huge amount of physical energy is consumed in the defensive process. At the end of the offensive end, when there is no enough physical energy to show the action, the action will be deformed to a certain extent. This is indeed very common sense.
Does Aize have the ability to solve such a problem? From a theoretical level, it is possible, because Aize has outstanding confrontation ability and strong impact, and his ability to create opportunities in front of the goal is also relatively good. However, under Arteta's coaching system, what Eze can solve may only be limited to problems related to one season, and is not a long-term problem that can be effective for a long time. If Arteta has been persistent in the tactic of moving the left back inward, it will be an unchanging attitude.
Even if it's as powerful as Eze, situations like Martinelli's transformation and Trossard's transformation will occur during the game. Therefore, I made this judgment: The signings that can really improve the Gunners' offensive strength should first be Eze from Crystal Palace, and then replace Arteta. The key point of this sentence is not only the arrival of Eze, but more importantly the "and" at the end. This also shows that if the Gunners seek to compete for the championship, they need to meet the two conditions of Eze's arrival and Arteta's departure at the same time.