Gabriel Martinelli's Future - Out Wide Or At Centre-Forward?

Gabriel Martinelli. The young assassin who has the fight, the killer instinct, the enthusiasm and above all, love for the club he plays for.

It’s a rare combination, however with a player who exudes the aforementioned characteristics, it can be quite tricky to hone down exactly where they belong within the starting XI.

Should he be deployed out wide due to his age? Should he get a berth through the middle due to his relentless energy? Maybe it’s somewhere in between, and the side that is being built at the moment points to that.

I think it might be slightly reflective of both the way that Manchester City and Liverpool play, however if I were to pick the more like-for-like comparison, I would say it’s closer to Liverpool. The striker is slightly withdrawn allowing the wide forwards to tuck in. It’s what allows the space for the full backs to bomb on at Liverpool and is of course the reason that both Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andrew Robertson are so high on the chance creation stats list.

Now Arsenal don’t necessarily have the same setup in terms of swashbuckling full backs, however they are again something that falls in between.

It strikes me that Mikel Arteta is trying to build a side that is mostly geared around patterns of play, but allowing for a certain amount of chaos in the final third.

The chaos will likely come from the three forwards rotating their positions based on the reading of the game, however this does beg the question, where exactly does Martinelli fit in this debate?

Arsenal of course have Gabriel Jesus, Bukayo Saka, Emile Smith Rowe, Eddie Nketiah, and Nicolas Pepe (although likely to depart) to choose from in those three positions.

In terms of true goal threat it is a very young frontline as was prevalent last season, however there is room enough for Martinelli to make a case for a starting spot within the team.

What Martinelli does so brilliantly is hunt the ball down with real intelligence. He doesn’t just go hounding the ball until he pulls a hamstring in an incoherent manner out of sync with the team. He looks to methodically do this from an apparent uninterest in the game to then shock the defenders with his bursting press.

What then does this mean for where he should operate from?

It feels like his best work is done the closer to the opposition goal he is, even though he does love to do the leg work in terms of tracking back. And to that end, if Jesus drops into the hole, it will allow both Saka and Martinelli to tuck into more threatening positions.

Saka had a tremendous output for goals especially last season, and I imagine this will be the target set out to Martinelli this term.

However the wonderful thing about Martinelli is purely that he can play in any of the three positions. We’ve seen him score from both the right and left when drifting in from those wide areas.

If you think back to the game vs Newcastle at home, he scored after drifting in from the right, versus Watford away, which may have finished centrally, but he'd drifted in from the left hand side.

Both of those situations are very similar positions to those taken up by the likes of Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane for Liverpool. The key is to have these situations occur more regularly, and I do believe that this is what Arsenal are trying to do.

There have been plenty of occasions in the past in which Martinelli has been filling in to unnatural positions simply to help the team out. Now that some of those areas are being looked into seriously and slowly but surely being fixed, it should allow him the freedom of a consistent run of games in his most effective positions.

Nketiah spoke to this last term, stating that playing a consistent run of games was the only truly fair way to know if there is a successful fit or not.

With other positions addressed, this could be the breakthrough season for Martinelli to start delivering some serious numbers this coming season.

I don’t think he will have the same pressure as maybe the likes of Saka and Jesus, but maybe that’s the perfect concoction of ingredients he needs to thrive as a part of Arsenal’s new look attack for 2022/23.