A Raya of hope

The news about signing David Raya from Brentford was a huge surprise but it sort of makes sense. Make no mistakes, Aaron Ramsdale is a quality shot stopper that could line up for most teams in the league but at such a young age, he's a bit too young to be undisputed.

At the time of writing, CIES estimates that Ramsdale is the most expensive goalkeeper in the World but that hasn't stopped Arteta and Edu from bringing in able competition. It seems to be a constant theme in the squad and one that I expect to persist as the team progresses.

Despite the impressive performance of Ben White, Edu still opted to add Jurrien Timber to the squad and Tierney's injury issue combined Tavarez' inconsistencies promoted the addition of Zinchenko. We added Declan Rice to a squad that already has Thomas Partey, and Jorginho while Havertz seemingly replaced Xhaka, he will be in serious competition with Emile, Odegard and Trossard for the same spot.

The point is that the general idea behind our signings in this window is to consolidate our position last season but not necessarily signing backups. Instead, we're adding proven quality into the squad that have the ability to easily replace the previous occupants of the position without any noticeable drop in quality.

Rayamsdale

The goalkeeping situation is actually very interesting. In Turner, Ramsdale had an outright deputy that never really looked like challenging for the starting spot.

I'm sure Arteta and Edu looked at the situation with goalkeeping option and thought that either Ramsdale wasn't motivated enough or Turner was simply not good enough to push Ramsdale to be more.

In Raya, we are potentially adding a proven Premier league shot stopper with the requisite ability to oust Ramsdale. In fact, there's a section of fans that think Raya is actually an upgrade to Ramsdale and for good reason too.

There's data that shows that Raya has relatively better distribution stats than Ramsdale. However, it's important to add context to it.

At Arsenal, Aaron is part of a unit that's typically trying to beat teams that press our defenders to prevent us from playing out from the back and also defend deep at the same time. This means that we often find space in midfield, so this requires Aaron to ping riskier passes with lower success rates.

At Brentford, Raya doesn't have to deal with low blocks or compressed midfield, making it easier to find his team mates. For what it's worth, this doesn't take anything away from the fact that Raya is still a very efficient distributor and could actually be better than Ramsdale in this aspect.

The point is that even if the more experienced and older Raya is indeed an upgrade right now, the difference between both is marginal. Meaning that having both of them only works in favour of Arsenal as we'll have two proper goalkeepers representing the badge and pushing each other to be better.

The way I see it, the potential addition of Raya to the Arsenal squad is a reason to be excited. It is not an indictment on Ramsdale, even if he's one of your favourites.

There will be a lot of ruthless decisions to improve the squad and while people may not like it, this is just the way we're going to be operating from now on. Until we meet again.