Arsenal's season is easier to judge through a ranking than through a simple summary. The club finished first in the Premier League with 82 points from 37 games, and first in the Champions League with 24 points from 8, but the player-by-player verdicts show a far less even picture. At one end sit the reliable names who drove the campaign. At the other are the expensive or trusted players who never really looked like carrying their weight.
The players at the bottom say as much as the top
Kepa Arrizabalaga's ranking is hard to separate from one night in particular. Matt Verri called it, “Hard to look beyond the Carabao Cup final. Trusted by Arteta and had a nightmare, when he could have been sent off and then near enough threw one into his own net.” Kepa is ranked 24th after that final and the shaky cup moments around it, while his 6.58 League Cup rating fits the criticism neatly. That is not a small dip in form, it is the sort of run that drags a goalkeeper to the wrong end of any internal review.
Christian Nørgaard barely registered in league terms, playing only 101 minutes of Premier League football. Gabriel Jesus, by contrast, at least ended with something concrete, scoring on the final day of the Premier League season in what could well be his last appearance for the club. Ben White also has a sharper case than some others, but 12 Premier League appearances and one assist still leave more questions than answers for a player Arsenal needed more often.
Saliba and the core that carried Arsenal
William Saliba sits at the other end of the scale for a reason. He made 31 Premier League appearances and finished with a 7.02 league rating, numbers that back up the sense that he was one of the most dependable pieces in the side. In a season where Arsenal reached the top of both competitions listed in the brief, that kind of consistency mattered more than occasional flashes from the rotation players.
The attack was harder to pin down. Verri's line on Gabriel Martinelli was blunt: “Ten goals across the Champions League and FA Cup - one in the Premier League all season. That was a big one, though, snatching a point at home to Man City.” That split sums up the season well enough. There were contributions, but too many of them arrived in bursts rather than as sustained league output. Mikel Merino's four goals and three assists in eight matches leading the line when Arsenal were short of strikers offered a useful emergency solution, not a permanent answer.
The broader verdict is clear enough. Arsenal's best performers looked title-level, and the worst cases were not fringe afterthoughts, they were trusted names who left points or control on the table. If Mikel Arteta and Andrea Berta are building from this season, the rankings make the next step obvious: keep the core, fix the drop-off, and stop asking patchwork solutions to do first-choice work.
Written by Jack Mercer with AI-assisted research, cross-checked against 1 outlet. How we work →
