I started writing this column in February 2011, the week before Arsenal lost the Carling Cup Final to Birmingham City. The loss of the Carling Cup Final led to a summer that saw Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri leave the club (Gale Clichy also departed the club that summer in far quieter circumstances).
In April 2011, Stan Kroenke took a controlling stake in Arsenal following the death of Danny Fiszman. Eras can never be pinpointed precisely; many would mark Eduardo’s leg break and William Gallas’ subsequent meltdown at Birmingham City in March 2008 as the beginning of Arsenal’s so-called ‘banter era.’
I think there may be some debate about that, by the end of the 2010-11 season and that defeat to Birmingham, I don’t think anyone would really contest that this marked the beginning of a drawn out end of the Arsene Wenger era at Arsenal (it certainly represents the beginning of the ‘KSE era’ if you wanted to call it that).
In short, it was an incredibly fertile time to write a weekly column about the club and I would say that proved to be the case for the next decade. Arsenal had become a high-end soap opera and, within that, the cast was made up of plenty of talented but divisive players. Mesut Ozil, Pierre Emerick Aubameyang, Granit Xhaka, Theo Walcott, Olivier Giroud- each of them a walking discourse worth revisiting week after week.
It was pretty easy to find material for a weekly column. Over the last two and a half years, I would say this column has become more difficult to write because Arsenal have entered an era of high competence. Players like Bukayo Saka, William Saliba, Declan Rice, Jurrien Timber and Martin Odegaard are difficult to eke too column inches out of.
Because you really can only write, ‘this player is consistently great, as you can all see’ once. Whereas someone like Theo Walcott or Olivier Giroud is grist to the columnist’s mill. (I am not complaining about any of this, may the era of ultra competence continue!) Mikel Arteta has painstakingly bleached jeopardy out of Arsenal games as much as possible and that is exactly what I have wanted for many years now.
From the current squad, we briefly had some kerfuffle over David Raya being ushered in to replace Aaron Ramsdale before we realised the sagacity of the decision. We briefly wondered whether Kai Havertz would fit into the team until he started to play regularly as a striker and he became part of the furniture. Martin Odegaard lost his mojo a little last season. Gabriel Martinelli lost his for a little while (and we are not yet at the point to firmly establish that it has returned). Alex Zinchenko was probably the closest we have had to a genuine ‘marmite’ player of the Walcott / Giroud vintage.
Even Granit Xhaka, previously a poster boy for the era of ‘important but very flawed and slightly controversial player’ at Arsenal was rebranded into someone super competent and reliable by Arteta’s coaching. All of which is to say, from a purely prose perspective, Mikel Merino’s arc into emergency striker and cult hero status has been a welcome wrinkle in the Arsenal script.
It’s especially ironic since Merino was bought as a bulwark against jeopardy. He had just turned 28 years old when Arsenal bought him in the summer of 2024, which was seen as a departure from the more youthful signings that set the foundation for the current squad. Upon signing, his most remarked upon quality was his unerring ability to win duels- be they aerial or ground.
His signing was so austere in terms of aesthetics that my Arsenal Vision Podcast colleague Clive repeatedly referred to him as ‘the bank manager.’ In fact, he bears more than a passing resemblance to the Simpsons portrayal of 1950s and 60s NFL quarterback Johnny Unitas. Unitas is revered by Abe Simpson because he had ‘a haircut you can set your watch by.’
Abe likes Unitas because he forms a pleasing contrast to other players who have adopted contemporary counterculture fashions around long hair and sideburns. Merino was supposed to be unremarkable, the sort of player that coaches love but fans struggle to warm to because they do boring, difficult to detect things like press well, win their duels and stand where they are supposed to stand. (Mason Mount has been the byword for this in recent seasons).
The great Arsenal striker crisis of 2025 has thrust Merino into an unfamiliar position of prominence. The striker shortage calls to mind the great left-back shortage of 2006 and that time that Laurent Koscielny had to play right-back away at Norwich in 2011 (see, a great time for a columnist!) or when Nico Yennaris played there against Manchester United a few weeks later.
The confounding thing about playing Merino as a striker is that it simultaneously works and doesn’t work. Arsenal lose fluency and creativity when the Spaniard plays as a 9 but he might also be the best finisher in the Arsenal squad. His uber competence both works and doesn’t work as a striker, he is a very team minded player and he drops to try to connect play but he does so, so faithfully and so unerringly that he doesn’t really have that instinct for disruption that the best strikers possess.
Merino’s three goals this season come from 1.0XG, an impossibly neat number. His XAG is 0.5, this really is a short back and sides player who deals in easy to digest figures. Yet his competence somehow makes him a little beguiling and difficult to understand. In office terms he is like a private secretary that you probably don’t really notice but the busy director’s life would fall apart without.
He is organised, drafts high level messages well and has a diligent but easy to follow digital filing system. When thrust into a more celebrated role like centre-forward, that sense of ultra competence can force the rest of the team into a sort of team of good personal secretaries. But senior management earn the big money because they take decisions and some of those decisions involve risk.
Arsenal’s play undoubtedly lacks risk with Merino upfront, however, he has the skill of a bureaucrat to process risk with the minimum of fuss. Psychology studies refer to the four stages of competence in individuals in professional environments, which workers will often travel through en route to promotion until they reach their true level.
Unconsciously incompetent (you have just taken the job or promotion and have no idea what awaits you), Consciously incompetent (you’re a few weeks into the job and boy, do you now know!), Consciously competent (you’ve got the hang of things now) and Unconsciously competent (you can do this on autopilot and need to consider the next level).
I would pitch Merino at centre-forward as consciously competent, which is probably the most difficult level to evaluate for a line manager. Merino’s trajectory also bears similarities to Kai Havertz, in that he hasn’t seriously impressed in the main role that he was bought for, but as a centre-forward he has been more celebrated.
Merino has a ‘through the looking glass’ quality as a player that is a bit like a tall building. You will happily walk past it every single day without ever wondering why it is there or how it just stands up of its own accord for decades and decades. But when you stop to think about it, or start to look into the mechanics of architecture and engineering, it becomes oddly fascinating.
