There are patterns in football you can quantify. Arsenal’s striker injury curse is not one of them—it’s more a storm that’s swept through north London with the timing of a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s been three and a half years with the same headline: The Gunners, rejuvenated and rampant, suddenly struck with another striker crisis at the very moment when a Premier League summit looks within their grasp. It’s a story that’s become part of the club’s DNA, statistically baffling and yet all too familiar for those who live and breathe the Emirates.

Arsenal's Injury Woes

The toll? Unrelenting. Gabriel Jesus’s knees. Kai Havertz’s hamstrings. Viktor Gyökeres’s muscles, barely unpacked in London Colney, before joining the roll call of the wounded. And this past weekend, at the Stadium of Light, the curse felt absolute: all three sidelined, Arsenal’s front three a patchwork of improvisation, nerves—and ultimately, dropped points, as Sunderland pounced for a 2-2 draw that left the Gunners’ title challenge shrouded in uncertainty.

Online odds providers still make Mikel Arteta's side huge favorites to claim the title this season. The latest in-play odds at Bovada currently list them as an odds-on 3/4 frontrunner, clear of both Manchester City (9/4) and reigning champions Liverpool (9/1). But even so, alarm bells are already ringing around the Emirates, with Gooners worldwide lamenting their team's miserable luck when it comes to keeping strikers fit.

“It’s been seven front-line players out for two months,” Mikel Arteta told the media, voice edged with both pride and fatigue. “Big credit to the team for what they’ve done.” That credit belongs to the unsung protagonists—the men thrust into the breach while the stars recover. Throughout the last three and a half years, manager Arteta has been forced to think outside the box for solutions to his never-ending woes. Luckily, he has found several players only too willing to help him out in his hour of need.

Eddie Nketiah

Winter, 2022. Qatar’s World Cup is still echoing, and Arsenal’s campaign has the look of destiny about it—until Gabriel Jesus’s right knee buckles, plunging the club’s forward line into chaos. The Gunners were top of the table before the midseason break, winning all but two of their 16 games, their Brazilian hit man netting five goals along the way.

With Jesus sidelined for months, Arteta was forced to turn to academy product Eddie Nketiah, his only other senior striker. The young Englishman had been forced to wait the better part of six years for a sustained first-team opportunity, and when it came, it looked as though he would take it with both hands, netting in his first two starts in the wins against West Ham and Brighton, as well as a crucial brace against Manchester United. Then, the goals dried up.

From January 22nd onwards, Nketiah wouldn't find the net again all season. Gabriel Jesus returned in April, coinciding with an Arsenal slip-up that would ultimately cost them the title. 12 months later, the prodigious academy product was gone, sold to Crystal Palace for £30m in the summer of 2024. By November 2025, he finds himself backing up Jean-Philippe Mateta at Selhurst Park, a cautionary tale of what might have been.

Mikel Merino

Every crisis, Mikel Arteta seems to relish the challenge: who can become the surprise solution? Last season supplied the sternest test yet: Jesus’s ACL and Kai Havertz’s torn hamstring threatened not just form but identity. The Gunners were already a million miles behind pace-setters Liverpool in the Premier League title race, but a promising UEFA Champions League run meant that the Spanish manager needed to find a solution and fast.

Arteta, rejecting orthodoxy, moved Mikel Merino—a central midfielder by design and a deep-lying one at that—into the No. 9 role. The gamble worked beyond expectation. The former Real Sociedad man's debut as an emergency makeshift striker saw him net two against Leicester, with further strikes coming against Chelsea and Fulham. On the continental stage, Merino bagged against PSV Eindhoven and Real Madrid en route to Arsenal's first semifinal appearance since 2006.

In Arsenal's hour of need this season, Merino is the man that Arteta has turned to once again. A brace against Slavia Prague and an assist in the draw at Sunderland have certainly helped his side out, but the Gunners will be hoping that any one of their three recognized strikers returns sooner rather than later.

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Leandro Trossard

Signed for £27 million from Brighton in January 2023, Leandro Trossard swiftly emerged as the chess piece Arteta didn’t just want but needed. As Jesus and Havertz became recurring guests in the treatment room, the Belgian's number was called again and again, but through the middle, rather than out wide.

Trossard obliged with a cocktail of intelligence and unpredictability: goals, assists, and a capacity to float seamlessly between winger, false nine, and second striker. There have been plenty of headline moments too—an assist for Declan Rice in a seismic win over Manchester City, crucial strikes against West Ham and Porto, and a series of Champions League nights where his knack for ghosting into space proved priceless. In the most recent trip to Sunderland, it was Trossard who rifled home from distance late on, seemingly winning it for the Gunners until Brian Brobbey broke hearts in injury time.

Trossard isn’t a classic marksman—but maybe that’s the point. He drops deep, links play, and arrives unannounced, making Arsenal’s attack harder to read and harder to silence. As the list of absentees continues to grow, it could well be Trossard whom Arteta has to lean on for a reliable source of goals.