For all of Arsenal’s historic success last season, one glaring issue kept threatening to derail them: injuries.
Their nemesis is a familiar one. In the 2022-23 season where William Saliba’s back injury against Sporting Lisbon in March effectively wrecked Arsenal’s Premier League title challenge, capitulating in the run-in as Rob Holding stepped in to replace the Frenchman. Two years later, injuries to strikers Kai Havertz and Gabriel Jesus in January saw the Gunners fall away again, their 2025 title bid extinguished by March.
Last season they faced the same conundrum. Of Arsenal’s 22 outfielders, only Martin Zubimendi and Myles Lewis-Skelly avoided injury in the 2025-26 campaign – and Lewis-Skelly only started five league matches. It tested the newly bolstered squad to the limit, and perhaps only that added depth got Mikel Arteta’s side through to a first league championship in 22 years.
Even before pre-season begins, the Arsenal sidelines look set to be crowded. Jurrien Timber pulled out of the Netherlands’ World Cup campaign with a persistent groin issue, while Saliba is managing a back problem.
An achilles injury means Bukayo Saka is currently unable to train on consecutive days for England, which has seen him make just two starts so far at the World Cup. Declan Rice has been nursing a neural issue for months, which is affecting his lower back and hamstring.
It’s an area the Gunners have long been concerned about, and they are now acting with a mass medical team shake-up.
Declan Rice has been nursing a neural issue for months, which is affecting his lower back and hamstring
Head of performance Tom Allen (right) has left the Arsenal staff this summer as Mikel Arteta (centre) shakes up his medical department
Lead physical performance coach Sam Wilson (right) has also left the club after 12 years
At the centre of the revamp is Spanish physio Joaquin Acedo, a long-term Arteta associate who was brought in during the final months of last season to investigate Arsenal’s processes around player fitness and injuries. He was on the team’s title parade bus, and is fully integrated and part of the staff for next season.
Daily Mail Sport understands that the pair’s relationship goes back to Arteta’s playing days at Real Sociedad in the 2004-05 season. An injured Arteta came across Acedo’s radar when the physiotherapist was working at Cadiz and treated him. Acedo subsequently looked after his fellow Spaniard when he moved to Everton and supported him throughout his playing career. It’s a bond that has spanned two decades, a professional relationship developed into a friendship built on years of collaboration and trust.
The arrival of Acedo kickstarted the new-look medical team at Arsenal, with head of sports medicine Dr Zafar Iqbal the first big departure. It took insiders by surprise, the news announced just days after Arsenal’s Champions League final defeat against Paris Saint-Germain. Iqbal previously worked for Liverpool and Crystal Palace, before joining the north London club in 2024.
Tom Allen, head of sports science, followed soon after. Allen had joined the Gunners from Aston Villa in 2017 as a sports scientist before being promoted by Arteta in 2022. Sam Wilson, lead physical performance coach, is the latest to leave. Wilson initially worked with the academy sides after joining in 2014, and was elevated to the first team five years later. He is moving to Parma, reuniting with Carlos Cuesta who left Arteta’s coaching staff last summer to take the top job at the Serie A side.
Although not all the departures have been sackings this summer — some have left on their own accord — the goal has been simple: approach revamping the medical department in the same manner of the playing squad.
When the likes of Oleksandr Zinchenko, Mohamed Elneny and Gabriel Jesus were deemed surplus to requirements, they were either benched or sold. A similar pattern is now occurring with the medical staff over the summer.
The various vacancies are already nearly filled. Arsenal are set to bring in Dr Arnaldo Abrantes from Aston Villa. Abrantes previously spent three years at Nottingham Forest from August 2020 to 2023, following a sprinting career that saw him qualify for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. He will join ex-Villa colleague physiotherapist Carmen Marquez, who moved to Arsenal earlier in the year.
It’s understood that Villa’s injury record under former Gunners boss Unai Emery was noticed internally at Arsenal and is a factor in targeting the pair. In the last two seasons across all competitions, the Midlands club have the best injury record of all English clubs competing in European competitions in terms of matches missed due to injuries.
Joaquin Acedo, a long-time Mikel Arteta associate, has been drafted in to review Arsenal’s injury processes and was even on the club’s open-top bus for their title parade
Dr Arnaldo Abrantes (left, seen competing in the 2008 Olympics 200m), will join from Aston Villa
Former Juventus and Aston Villa physio Carmen Marquez Sanchez (left) has joined Arsenal and is set to be joined by Bayer Leverkusen’s 29-year-old physical trainer Jose Jimenez (right)
Rehab specialist Eneko Angulo is leaving Real Betis after 12 years to join the Gunners, while Braga fitness coach Antonio Gomes and 29-year-old physical trainer Jose Jimenez from Bayer Leverkusen are also expected to join. Jimenez was at Cadiz before joining Leverkusen in October.
The mass changes signal a strong pivot towards a fresh approach, but won’t be a sudden magic bullet, though. Far from it. Arteta’s training plans are known to be taxing. He believes that resilience — physical and mental — is forged in struggle.
That reached boiling point last season. Days after Arsenal’s 2-1 defeat to Bournemouth in April, a number of senior players gathered to discuss the cumulative toll on their bodies. They felt on the brink, with Arteta looking to up the ante after the loss. Eberechi Eze, one of the more genteel members of the group, had chosen to relay those concerns to Arteta, asking if the players could be afforded more space.
Subsequently, days off were increased and the intensity of sessions dialled down a notch – and it paid off. Arteta’s willingness to ease off showed there was already an acceptance that something had to change. So, the medical staff will have their hands full balancing these demands against the need to rest players.
The message is clear. With a wholesale overhaul behind the scenes, Arsenal hope fewer days in the treatment room will prove just as important as any signing in their bid to retain the Premier League title.
