Kai Havertz is the latest Arsenal player to suffer a serious hamstring injury, leaving their attack stretched to its limits. Is this injury a by-product of Arsenal’s squad management?
If Arsenal’s attacking options were already stretched thin, the news that Kai Havertz is set to miss the rest of the season with a torn hamstring sustained during the team’s training camp in Dubai has plunged them into a full-blown crisis.
Havertz joins Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and Gabriel Jesus on the treatment table and the bad news for Arsenal fans is that none of them are expected to return soon.
Saka, who travelled with the squad to Dubai, is not due back until March after undergoing hamstring surgery in December. Martinelli faces around a month on the sidelines after suffering a hamstring injury against Newcastle in early February, while Jesus is set for a lengthy spell out following an ACL injury to his left knee last month.
That leaves Arsenal with just three senior forwards: Leandro Trossard, Ethan Nwaneri, and Raheem Sterling. While Trossard has experience playing centrally, you would not exactly say he is a natural centre-forward. The other two certainly are not.
Arsenal actively sought attacking reinforcements in the winter transfer window but failed to make any signings. That inactivity now looks like it’s coming back to haunt them.
What is concerning about Arsenal’s recent injury woes is that they’ve largely involved hamstring problems. While playing a high volume of games does not necessarily lead directly to injuries – look at someone like Mohamed Salah for example – hamstring issues are commonly associated with athletes being overworked.
The debate around fixture congestion and player welfare has intensified in recent years, and rightly so, but managers do still have some control over player workloads. Squad management and rotation is important in keeping players fit and fresh.
Mikel Arteta has faced criticism for his reluctance to rotate in the past. Whether he doesn’t because he feels like he can’t due to a lack of depth is another debate, but concerns about his unwillingness to rotate a star player like Saka have been around for a while.
For a player so young, Saka has played a significant amount of football. He appeared in every single one of Arsenal’s league matches in 2021-22 and 2022-23 and sat out just three games last season. Across that three-season span, he played 88.5% of all available minutes.
His hamstring injury this season came against Crystal Palace, the sixth game Saka had played across a 17-day spell in December 2024. When you have a player as elite and as important as Saka in a side that is competing in multiple competitions, you can see why Arteta wants to play him at every opportunity. But one of those matches was a comfortable 3-0 win over Monaco in the Champions League in which Saka played the entire game, scoring twice and setting up the third. His excellence is perhaps part of the problem, but surely he could have been spared there.
Havertz, too, has been near ever-present. Since joining Arsenal, he has made more appearances (85) than any other player in all competitions, while only William Saliba, Gabriel Magalhães, David Raya, and Declan Rice have played more than his 6,601 minutes. This season, he’s played 80.4% of all available minutes.
It’s important to note that not all minutes are equal. Havertz is crucial to the way Arsenal press from the front, leading all Arsenal players for final-third pressures per 90 (14.4) and counter-pressures per 90 (9.7) in the Premier League. It’s an active, aggressive role that is physically demanding.
Martinelli, meanwhile, has also played a significant number of games this season, appearing 35 times in all competitions. Admittedly, he is rotated more often than a player like Havertz – primarily due to Arsenal having more wide options and the explosive nature of Martinelli’s play requiring a little more rest – but his game is still high-intensity, with the Brazilian averaging 22 sprints per 90 minutes – the highest of any Arsenal player.
Rotation debates often become self-fulfilling prophecies: teams rely most on their best players, so they play the most, which in turn makes their absences more noticeable.
That said, perhaps it’s slightly surprising Arteta does not turn to his bench options more often. So far in the Premier League this season, Arteta has made just 87 substitutions. At 3.6 per game, that’s the joint third lowest along with Crystal Palace, with only Everton (3.0) and Manchester City making fewer changes per game (3.1).
For comparison, Nottingham Forest’s Nuno Espírito Santo makes close to the full five allocated changes per match (4.8 per game).
Not only that, but Arteta makes those substitutions late as well, with his subs playing just 17 minutes on average. That’s the fourth-lowest rate of any team in the league.
A similar trend is evident in squad usage. Arsenal have used just 24 different players in the Premier League this season; only Nottingham Forest have used fewer than that (23).
Havertz is often criticised for his lack of genuine goalscoring threat, but what he brings to Arsenal’s all-round game is undeniable. His importance to the squad is about to be laid bare.
There are now five games for Arsenal to navigate before the March international break. Just one of those, away at Nottingham Forest, comes in midweek. In that sense, Arsenal have been rewarded by finishing in the top eight in the Champions League group phase. They’ve avoided having to play two extra matches in the midst of an injury crisis.
But with Liverpool set to move nine points clear if they win their game in hand against Everton, Arsenal need to be pretty much flawless in the league to catch up with them. Their squad depth will be pushed to its limits in the coming weeks.
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