Ask anyone: an Arsenal fan, an Arsenal executive, an Arsenal coach, an Arsenal hater, an Arsenal skeptic, an Arsenal believer, an Arsenal bus driver, an Arsenal mascot, an Arsenal cook, an Arsenal chairman, an Arsenal hairstylist, an Arsenal historian, an Arsenal spewer of opprobrium.

Ask them what Arsenal need to do if they want to win the Premier League, and almost all of them will say: Sign a striker.

At ESPN, we just published a fantastic, detailed breakdown from Mohamed Mohamed on the potential strikers Arsenal could sign this summer. And you don’t need any fancy stats or models to explain why a star center forward could put Arsenal over the top.

Over the past three seasons, no Arsenal player has scored more than 17 non-penalty goals in a season. And over those three campaigns combined, only two players have even broken the 30-goal mark: Bukayo Saka (37) and Gabriel Martinelli (30).

Arsenal are likely going to finish second in the Premier League for the third season in a row, despite their highest goal scorers averaging between 10 to 15 goals per season. Also, those top two goal scorers are not strikers! So, if you just plug in a real goal-scoring center forward between Saka and Martinelli, Arsenal will score more goals. And if Arsenal score more goals, they will win more points. And if they win more points, they will finish in first place instead of second.

Pretty simple, right?

Not quite. Arsenal need to find a way to score more goals, but if we look at the current state of European soccer — and back over the past decade — then it becomes pretty clear that scoring more goals and signing a star striker don’t always go together.

From Arsenal to Liverpool to Manchester City, and from PSG to Real Madrid, the evidence continues to mount that maybe signing strikers isn’t as important as everyone seems to think when it comes to winning soccer games.

Why Arsenal need to improve their attack

Over the past two seasons, Arsenal have been the best defensive team in the Premier League, and it’s not particularly close. Along with the 16 other ever-present teams, here’s how they rank since the start of last season, by their adjusted goals allowed per game (30% goals, 70% expected goals):

They’ve been more than 20% better than the next team. If I had to pick one specific thing to predict for any team for next season, it would be this: Arsenal will be an elite defensive team. I’m more confident in that one fact than in anything else about Liverpool, Manchester City or anyone else in the league.

By being so good defensively, Arsenal simply don’t have to be as good as their closest competitors in attack. If they’re 0.2 goals better than Liverpool defensively but 0.18 goals worse than Liverpool on the offensive end, then they’d still be the slightly better team overall.

Now, here’s where the Gunners rank since last season by their adjusted goals scored:

That’s in the range of third- to fifth-best in the league. But a large chunk of that comes from Arsenal’s league-best set piece program. If we look at just open-play shots, the Gunners drop to sixth. And their overall rating is closer to last-place Wolves than it is to first-place Liverpool:

While I’m not saying Arsenal won’t continue to be good at set pieces, it is a much smaller sample of shots than open-play attempts, and it’s also the kind of thing that’s easier for other teams to adjust against. Everyone knows that Arsenal are the best set piece team in the league now, so even teams that don’t really care about set plays might spend more time on them ahead of their games against the Gunners.

The merely above-average open-play performance isn’t down to just this season’s injuries to Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz, Martin Odegaard and others. Arsenal were better last season from open play in possession, but they still ranked fifth in the league by the adjusted goals metric.

How strikers score goals without improving their teams — or, the Man City problem

Erling Haaland is the best goal scorer in Premier League history. We’ll see if he ever gets to Alan Shearer’s all-time record of 260, but in terms of producing goals while he’s on the field, no one else comes close to the 24-year-old Norwegian.

Thus far in his Manchester City career, Haaland has scored 0.8 non-penalty goals per 90 minutes. Among all players to feature in at least 7,000 Premier League minutes, Sergio Aguero is the only other one to even get to 0.7. Everyone else — Thierry Henry, Luis Suárez, Harry Kane, Cristiano Ronaldo — is at 0.6 or below.

And remember, City added Haaland to a team that had just won 93 points and scored 99 goals the season prior. Two seasons before that: 105 goals. The season before that: 95 goals and 98 points. The season before that: 106 goals and 100 points.

But despite adding objectively the best goal scorer the Premier League has ever seen, City haven’t scored more than 96 goals or won more than 91 points since Haaland joined the team. It’s not just that they were better before Haaland arrived. No, it’s that they scored more goals before they signed the league’s best goal scorer.

Shouldn’t this make us rethink how goal scoring actually works?

In his book, “How to Win the Premier League,” Liverpool’s former head of research, Ian Graham, wrote about basketball’s idea of usage — i.e. which players end a team’s possession and how often do they do it — and how it can help us better understand how great attacking teams are created in soccer:

“When players end a possession, they effectively end their team’s current chances of scoring. Ending a possession is typically bad news. But if a player has ended a possession by taking a shot, the Expected Goals value he creates often outweighs the cost of losing possession, even if a goal is not scored. There is another price to pay when taking a shot: shots are taken at the expense of your teammates — your usage of the possession stops other players from using it.”

There are two strands to pull at here. The first: a player can easily boost his own goal scoring and make his team worse at the same time. We’ll call this the Post-Madrid Cristiano Ronaldo Theorem. If a striker is constantly using his team’s possessions to take his own shots, he’s going to score more goals than he would otherwise.

But, if you attempt, say, a shot worth 0.09 expected goals, you’re eliminating the possibility that your team creates an even better chance later on in the possession by working the ball into a more dangerous position. Over the course of the season, that decision is going to increase your goals scored, but it will lower the number of goals your team would otherwise score.

The second idea is the push-and-pull between generating capacity and capitalizing on it. The players who attempt shots do deserve credit for finding space from which to attempt a shot, but they don’t deserve all the credit. Movement and passing from their other teammates also created the space and got the ball there, so every shot a player takes is essentially a combination of his own skill, his team’s skill and, simply, his decision to attempt the shot.

Why Liverpool didn’t need to sign a striker, and Arsenal don’t either

Traditional center forwards tend to contribute to shot output in only two ways: their own skill in finding space, and their decisions to attempt a shot. So while Manchester City did not previously have a player who did those two things as well as Haaland, they had other players who still did those things capably and also were world-class at the things that created chances for their teammates.

The same was true for the only team to beat City before Haaland arrived: Graham’s Liverpool. Neither Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané nor Mohamed Salah was a traditional striker who just scored goals and took shots, but they still combined to create one of the greatest attacking trios of the 21st century.

“For forwards, we had this idea of a triple threat,” Graham told me. “If you can pass, shoot and dribble, you’re a triple threat. And we had three triple threats in our front three.” And he expanded on the idea in his book: “These players are difficult to defend against — they can choose to pass, dribble, or shoot. And they use up fewer possessions than players whose only skill is shooting.”

Liverpool, too, are going to beat City again by playing most of this season without a traditional center forward. Salah is going to win the Golden Boot, but he’s doing it from a right-wing position. He has attempted a shot in 10.74% of the possessions he has been involved in this season. That’s just the 35th-highest mark in the league among players involved in at least 100 possessions. The leader? Haaland’s 22.37%. No one else has even reached 17%.

There are plenty of other examples of teams flourishing without a high-usage player in the squad. Last season, Real Madrid won LaLiga and the Champions League without a recognized center forward. Although Kylian Mbappé isn’t necessarily a traditional striker, he still fits the “use up lots of possessions with his own shots” mold. They signed him — and now they’re unlikely to win a single trophy this season. They scored 2.29 goals per game last season; it’s down below 2.1 this season.

PSG, meanwhile, might be the favorites to win the Champions League. They may have become the best team in the world after losing Mbappe and turning Ousmane Dembélé, perhaps the premier example of the triple threat in world soccer right now, into a false nine.

In 2021, Chelsea won the Champions League without a center forward, then they signed Romelu Lukaku in the summer in an effort to push on and win the Premier League … and they got worse, benched him and then got better again. They finished a distant third to Liverpool and City, neither of which was playing a traditional center forward, either.

If we take the idea from earlier, expand to 200 possessions to get a bigger sample and look across the Big Five top leagues in Europe this season, here’s the top 20 for usage rate:

The only two players leading attacks at a level that would really improve Arsenal this season are Kane and Robert Lewandowski, who are both legendary-level players who were well established before their current teams signed them. Also, per the site FBref, they both make way more money than any player currently on Arsenal’s roster.

As a study in the International Journal Financial Studies found last year, center forwards command higher transfer fees than players at any other position. So not only is the traditional center forward overvalued in the sport’s conventional wisdom, but the position is probably overvalued in the transfer market, too.

Now, there’s probably someone out there who fits the traditional center forward mold and who would immediately make Arsenal better. But every signing is a risk, and if you’re Arsenal, you can’t just bank on being better than everyone else at finding that particular player. Any striker Arsenal tries to sign is going to cost a ton of money, and he’ll carry a large deal of risk.

Any player who doesn’t contribute as much to keeping possession could potentially weaken Arsenal’s defense — by the same or to an even greater degree than he helps Arsenal’s attack. Plus, there’s the chance he doesn’t improve the attack at all, by eating up too many possessions with attempts for himself.

Every attacking signing is a risk, of course — every signing is a risk, at every position — but players who can contribute in multiple phases of the game are less likely to flop because they have multiple pathways toward helping their new team win matches. Plus, they don’t require as much of a tactical reorganization from the rest of the squad.

Arsenal absolutely do need to find a way to add more goals to their team next season, but thinking that improved attacking performance can come only from a center forward is an outdated, uncreative, risky and expensive way to try to solve the problem.

Just think back to last week: Arsenal beat Real Madrid 3-0 in the Champions League quarterfinals. One team started a 28-year-old center midfielder it signed for €32 million over the summer at center forward. The other one opted for the most expensive and productive young goal scorer in the history of the sport.

I’ll let you figure out which one was which.