Mikel Arteta Addresses Bukayo Saka's Injury Concerns
Mikel Arteta cut a worried figure as he assessed Bukayo Saka’s growing injury list and admitted Arsenal must now rethink how they use their star winger.
Saka limped off in the 2-2 draw with Bayern Munich in the Champions League with a thigh problem and is due to undergo an MRI scan, with Arsenal braced for bad news. Arteta revealed the 25-year-old had “quite a lot of fluid in the area”, leaving medical staff unsure about the full extent of the damage.
What is clear is that Saka will miss Saturday’s Premier League game against Everton. Inside the club, there is concern that the issue could be a grade-two tear, an injury that might sideline him for up to six weeks at a critical stage of the season.
A body feeling the strain
This is no isolated setback. Saka has been carrying the scars of a relentless schedule for more than a year.
He missed a large chunk of last season with hamstring, hip and achilles tendon problems, then suffered another hamstring issue in 2024-25. Since September 2023, he has sustained 11 separate injuries. For a player once seen as virtually indestructible, the pattern is impossible to ignore.
Arteta insisted he has already been trying to protect his most important attacker.
“It’s certainly been different in the last year or so,” he said when asked if Saka is still robust enough to start every match. The Arsenal manager pointed directly at the modern calendar: the volume of games, the intensity, the squeeze on recovery time, and the added strain of international duty.
Saka was left out of the starting XI against Lille in the Champions League last week, a decision rooted in those concerns. Arsenal faced three games in less than six days, each one high-stakes, each one demanding 90 minutes of sprinting, pressing and duels.
“You are there until the last minute, you are chasing the game, you want to win,” Arteta said. The necessity to win every time they step on the pitch drives selection, but it is now colliding with the physical limits of even their most durable players.
From iron man to injury watch
Saka’s workload over the past three years has been extraordinary.
Between 2021 and 2024 he missed only three Premier League matches. He broke the club record by playing in 83 consecutive top-flight games, an iron-man run that underlined both his talent and his toughness. He is already closing in on 300 appearances for the club he joined as a seven-year-old.
Arsenal recognised his importance with a lucrative new contract in February, a deal that placed him among the highest-paid players in the club’s history. He has become the face of the project, the homegrown leader of a side trying to turn promise into trophies.
But the very consistency that made him indispensable is now part of the problem. The miles in his legs are catching up with him.
Asked whether he feared burnout for a player who made his Arsenal debut just three months after turning 17, Arteta pushed back, but with a clear caveat.
“I don’t have that feeling at all,” he said, before stressing the need to “create the right ecosystem around the player to fulfil his qualities”. The message was unmistakable: Arsenal must be smarter, not simply braver, with Saka’s minutes.
“Whenever he comes back,” Arteta added, the club will have to decide “how we are going to manage his load, what he is capable of to sustain having an impact in the team.” The days of simply writing Saka’s name on every teamsheet without a second thought appear to be over.
Door opens for a record-breaking teenager
Saka’s absence against Everton rips a hole in Arsenal’s right flank, but it may also accelerate the rise of the club’s next prodigy.
Max Dowman, just 16, is in line for more meaningful minutes. He has played only nine minutes in the league this season, but those few flashes have already changed his life. In March, against David Moyes’s side, he became the youngest goalscorer in Premier League history.
Arteta did not hide the emotional pull of that moment.
“There is something inevitable to go back to that memory and the feeling of the moment,” he said. “That’s with us, that’s going to stay in that stadium for a long, long time.”
Inside the training ground, Dowman has backed up the hype. Arteta described a teenager who seizes every opportunity, however brief, and makes something happen.
“He’s training and every time he’s got a moment to play, he’s showing that he’s a player that is going to impact the game,” the manager said. “For sure he’s going to have minutes.”
Arsenal now stand at a delicate crossroads: balancing the need to protect the player who has carried them for years with the temptation to unleash the one who might carry them next. How they handle Saka’s recovery, and how quickly Dowman can shoulder some of that burden, may define more than just the next six weeks. It may shape the future of Arteta’s entire project.
