Arsenal got over the line last season and ended their 22-year wait for a Premier League title. But the draining campaign pushed the squad to its limits.
63 games across four competitions placed huge demands on the squad with five members of the group racking up more than 4,000 minutes of playing time. Only two players in Europe’s top five leagues managed more minutes for club and country than Declan Rice who was among the walking wounded at the World Cup.
Bukayo Saka returned from injury in April to help finish the job but he too was not at full pelt during the summer. The effects of Jurrien Timber’s groin problem that first emerged in March are still lingering while the biggest blow has come in the form of a back injury for William Saliba with the France international facing a lengthy spell on the sidelines.
Arsenal have added one of the league’s most robust midfielders in Bruno Guimaraes to the squad this summer and have relieved themselves of the sizeable weight of expectation they carried on their backs last season.
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After Sunday’s Community Shield cruise against Manchester City, the visit of newly promoted Coventry City awaits on Friday night. So who is ready for the battle ahead?
When will William Saliba return from his back injury?
Saliba carried a back issue into the World Cup, succumbing to the pain when he was forced off in the semi-final defeat to Spain. There was the immediate question of whether the centre-half would undergo surgery to address the issue with Saliba and Arsenal eventually deciding against it after consulting specialists and opting for their own ‘recovery programme’.
Saliba is currently in ‘rest mode’ according to Arteta with the centre-half unlikely to be involved in any form of training in the coming weeks. While surgery was ultimately not deemed necessary, there is still a long road back.
‘We haven’t been told exactly what the issue is. But back injuries by nature are complex,’ Stephen Smith, CEO and founder of Kitman Labs which specialises in injury welfare and performance analytics told Metro. ‘Surgery always carries its own risks and recovery burden so conservative management is always preferred.
‘Arteta describing his current situation as being in ‘rest mode’ is the right phase for him right now. With any back injury protocol, you need to allow any of the inflammation or tissue stress to settle before any progressive loading can begin. Then it will move from rest, to low load movement, to core and stability work before then beginning the football side of things before going all the way back into full training.
‘With something like that you are talking about a three-or-four-month timeline. That is typically what we see for a significant back injury.’
Jurrien Timber latest
Timber’s absence from the team during the back end of last season was particularly troublesome. The Dutchman picked up a groin injury in the victory over Everton in March, an issue that was initially believed to be relatively minor.
He had no further role to play in the league title-winning campaign, returning off the bench in the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain only to withdraw from Netherlands’ World Cup squad a week later.
‘Typically you can detect the early stages of groin injuries that you can manage and play through which I think is what we saw for a while,’ Smith said. ‘Obviously, he wasn’t responding to that mixture of rest and management that they were providing. It wasn’t working.’
In June, he underwent minor surgery to address the issue and has been back in light training in recent weeks. ‘I think he is on a good trajectory, but there is still a few weeks to go,’ Arteta said of his right-back.
While positive, Arteta was also asked about the possibility of him not returning until after the September international break, something the Gunners boss did not rule out.
Timber would appear to be well ahead of Saliba in terms of returning to action. But the former Ajax star has no pre-season under his belt, not even a training session alongside his teammates in the summer months. While there will be plenty of confidence the issue has been resolved, there will be no rush to get him back at this stage.
‘Surgery during the season may not have been seen as possible so the best thing to do was get it fixed properly in the summer,’ Smith said. ‘It is not unusual and very often surgery like that is something that finally resolves a groin injury like that which has been dragging. They will be looking every day at how he responds in training. Arsenal won’t be rushing him back too quickly at this point.’
Have Saka and Rice got the rest they needed?
Saka was for so many years one of Arsenal’s most robust players, starting 87 consecutive games for the club between 2021 and 2023. But he has had various muscular injuries in more recent years, requiring hamstring surgery at the end of 2024. Another hamstring issue kept him out for four weeks early last season, also missing three matches with a hip problem in January.
An Achilles tendinitis issue ruled him out of five matches in April, returning to help Arsenal get over the line in the title race. But his involvement at the World Cup was impacted as a result of that issue, starting just two of seven matches before scoring a hat-trick in the third-place play-off.
‘Both of those [injuries for Saka and Rice] were chronic issues they carried through that enormous match schedules last season before going straight into a World Cup,’ Smith said. ‘Rest isn’t just the absence of activity, it is proper, structured recovery.
‘For Saka and his Achilles injury that gave him so much trouble, the off season gives it time for the tendon to genuinely recover rather just managing it as they were doing last season and during the World Cup. It would be very rare to look at a tendinopathy like that and decide at that point surgery is needed having spent time managing it. Rest and recovery create a real break in that cycle.’
Rice meanwhile played in ‘terrible pain’ during England’s World Cup campaign, still managing to start seven of eight matches as he battled through a neural hamstring issue he had been carrying since the turn of the year.
Like Saka, rest has been the preferred remedy in north London with the pair returning to training last week after well-deserved summer breaks. Rice came on at half-time at the Principality Stadium on Sunday against City with Saka emerging for the final half-hour with both fit and available for the start of the season.
Rice’s workload last season was particularly intense and his presence in midfield meant he was undroppable. The arrival of Bruno Guimaraes can ease the strain on the former West Ham star but there will also be lessons learned from last season to ensure the neural hamstring issue does not resurface.
‘Rice needed a real reset, not just a reduction in load which they were doing all the way through the season,’ Smith said.
‘There could be lessons to be learned after six months of neural hamstring pain managed through a season. It is about how they now use the data to catch those accumulative warning signs before they become a six-month problem again. They will be looking back at all the information they collected last season before it rears its head again.’