Arsenal have their firepower back - but will Arsene Wenger make the most of his star players?

A transfer window that could have been catastrophic for the club has now become – with very little competition – their most successful window of the decade. But what next for the club?

Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang have been reunited at Arsenal (Getty)

Is this the first week of an Arsenal resurgence? Or just the moment when they managed to stop their slow descent towards irrelevance, finally finding their footing and insisting that enough was enough?

Either way, a transfer window that could have been catastrophic for the club has now become – with very little competition – their most successful window of the decade. Yes, they have lost their best player in Alexis Sanchez but that was inevitable and overdue. They have added two top players, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, and best of all have secured their next best player, Mesut Ozil, at the club for another three seasons after this one.

On the pitch, results have been as bad as ever: four points from four games in the league, including defeats at Bournemouth and Swansea City, an embarrassing FA Cup beating at Nottingham Forest but also victory over Chelsea in the EFL Cup semi-final to slightly even things out.

But this is Premier League football in 2018, where the success of clubs in signing and re-signing players matters to many more than results. And in those terms Arsenal are ending the month with a better squad than the one they started with. And who would have expected that on New Year’s Day?

The mood at the start of the month was fairly bleak, with Sanchez and Ozil both entering their last six months and looking beyond the Emirates. If Arsenal lost both of them, whether in January or the summer, their squad would be shorn of its stardust, a team fully deserving of being in sixth, with even fourth-placed Liverpool motoring away from them.

The turnaround started with the decision to cut their losses on Sanchez, a player who they should have sold in the summer and who had contributed almost nothing since his move to Manchester City collapsed. Wenger decided to move him on quickly as long as Arsenal had a replacement. Sven Mislintat, the new chief scout, had a long-standing interest in Malcom at Bordeaux, having tried to sign him for Dortmund. But he proved to be too expensive this month so Arsenal moved on.

But Mislintat also had a good relationship with Mkhitaryan from their time at Dortmund, and so he was targeted to be part of the Sanchez deal. Once personal terms were ironed out he was in, and Arsenal had a ready-to-go 29-year-old attacking midfielder who would fit perfectly into the Wenger style.

Mkhitaryan was not a direct replacement for Sanchez so the club went looking for another explosive forward. There was one on the market at Dortmund in Aubameyang, a player who Wenger had even tried to sign last year. Knowing that it was a rare opportunity to sign an instantly-ready number nine, who has far more running power than any of their other forwards, Arsenal put up the money and signed him for £56m, even more than they spent on the now slightly redundant Alexandre Lacazette.

Arsenal had been negotiating with Ozil’s representatives about a new contract and on 12 January Wenger said he was increasingly optimistic of reaching a deal, saying “there is still an opportunity for him to stay”. Wenger said that Ozil wanted both big money but also a big opportunity to win trophies. Arsenal now felt they were in the position to provide both. They offered Ozil more than double his salary at £350,000 per week. But it was the arrivals of Mkhitaryan and Aubameyang that convinced Ozil there was a competitive future at the club.

Arsene Wenger has acted decisively this January (Getty)

So for the rest of this season, Arsenal have two new shiny signings who should be able to rescue the flat-lining league form. Aubameyang cannot play in the Europa League but Lacazette can take responsibility there, in what could still be Arsenal’s best route into next season’s Champions League. How exactly they fit Ozil, Mkhitaryan and Jack Wilshere into the team remains to be seen – it may force Wilshere to move deeper – but it is a far better headache to have than wondering, when you look at an Arsenal team-sheet, where on earth the quality is meant to come from.

Paying top money to three top players aged 28 and 29 is not how every well-run club operates and these contracts could be a burden down the line. But after years of drift, Arsenal have almost lost the right to look four or five years ahead. They need to improve now if they do not want to get left behind, and big contracts and big signings of established players is the best immediate way of doing that. Arsenal have their firepower back. The next question is whether Wenger still knows how to deploy it.