Arsenal have announced the nine players they’re releasing ahead of the 2018/19 season, with more potentially to come in the following weeks.

Last Friday, Arsenal had to submit their list of players they’re retaining for the coming campaign, along with those they’re releasing.

There are also some players in a third “offer” category, meaning the club has offered them a new deal, but the player hasn’t accepted it yet. Jack Wilshere falls into this category, for example. We won’t find out the future of those players until they decide whether to accept their offer.

The list of out-of-contract players without an offer on the table (and therefore leaving the Arsenal team) is as follows:

  • Marc Bola
  • Santi Cazorla
  • Alexander Crean
  • Aaron Eyoma
  • Ryan Huddart
  • Chiori Johnson
  • Hugo Keto
  • Per Mertesacker
  • Tafari Moore

Per Mertesacker, as most people will already know, is taking up an academy role with Arsenal from next season. Although he won’t be playing anymore, he’ll still remain with the club. Meanwhile Villarreal have already announced they’re bringing in Santi Cazorla for pre-season.

Probably the two most surprising of the other seven players are Marc Bola and Tafari Moore. Both players had strong loan spells in general, with English lower league clubs. Unfortunately, Arsenal clearly don’t feel they did enough for new deals.

In fairness, given they’re both 20 years old, this was understandably the make or break point.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see a few more changes before next season. Arsenal are currently priced at 2/1 for a top-four finish in 2018/19 (this calculator here shows £10 would return a profit of £20). Clearly they aren’t favourites to return to the Champions League under new management.

It’s up to Unai Emery to prove the doubters wrong, and based on last season he might need to shake things up a bit more to do so. We’ll see how the remainder of the summer pans out.