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Graeme Souness claims Arsenal 24-year-old won’t become a better player

Giuseppe Labellarte

Sat 23 September 2023 5:45, UK

Arsenal attacker Kai Havertz hasn’t quite hit the ground running at the Emirates Stadium since his summer move.

The Gunners spent a reported £65million to bring the Germany international to the red half of north London from Chelsea in June.

Havertz has made five Premier League outings for the Gunners so far, and also featured in the Community Shield.

However, the 24-year-old struggled to make an impact and didn’t manage a goal or assist in those games.

Admittedly, Havertz did put in arguably his best red-shirt performance so far in Arsenal’s thrashing of PSV Eindhoven in the Champions League.

As per , “his passing was decent enough and looked capable of creating something in the second half.”

‘Draw your own conclusions’

However, Graeme Souness, writing in the , feels Arsenal have wasted their money in signing Havertz.

“Not all of Arsenal’s spending makes sense to me,” he began. “They’ve laid out £65million on Kai Havertz.

“Surely you’re not spending that kind of money on what he’s shown at Chelsea in the past three seasons?

“They’ve shelled out in the hope that Mikel Arteta can get a very, very different tune out of him than Frank Lampard, Thomas Tuchel or Graham Potter ever did.

“Good luck with that one, Mikel.

“We live in a world where stats have become a very popular part of the game for the anoraks.

“But historically only two stats provide a judgment in black and white terms.

“For a goalkeeper: how many games have you played and how many clean sheets did you keep?

“And for a striker: how many games have you played and how many goals did you score?

“Havertz has scored 19 Premier League goals across the entirety of three seasons for Chelsea.

“Please draw your own conclusions.”

Our view

This is just the sort of pundit piece that Arteta will no doubt pin to the dressing room board and use for a team talk.

Everyone has their own opinions, and some like to make theirs public. So many, in fact, that it often gets referred to as ‘noise’.

Back in 1995, Stuart Pearce famously predicted that Dennis Bergkamp was a waste of money. How did that prediction work out?