Arsenal have signed former Leeds United goalkeeper Illan Meslier on a free transfer, the club announced today. Coincidentally, the 26-year old Frenchman made his Leeds debut at the Emirates in January 2020. In total, he made 215 appearances for the club across seven seasons, although his final appearance came in spring 2025 after Daniel Farke dropped him.
When he made that debut in North London, he seemed primed to become a standout goalkeeper and many thought him in line for the French national team
job at some point. Since tallying the 4th-most clean sheets in the Premier League in ‘20-’21, his career stagnated. Leeds were pretty poor for a few seasons and bounced between the PL and the Championship. Meslier played behind porous defenses and shipped a bunch of goals. Many of those weren’t his fault, but a fair few were. His actual goals conceded were above expected goals against. Put differently, he was allowing more goals than the data suggested he should be. That’s not where you want to be as a goalkeeper.
According to The Athletic, Meslier remained a positive presence in the locker room and a popular teammate despite the on-field struggles and the eventual loss of his starting spot. That aspect of the move makes sense. Arsenal seem to have a tight-knit group of players, and you wouldn’t want to disrupt that kind of chemistry by adding a malcontent.
Beyond that, the move is a bit of a strange one. Why would a 26-year old former standout / young phenom goalkeeper move to a club with one of the best goalkeepers in the world, David Raya, as an established number one and a quality number two in Kepa Arrizabalaga? It seems as if Meslier would be better served by a move to a club where he’d be closer to meaningful playing time.
Meslier might be closer to playing time than it would appear. There have been reports that Kepa might want to be a starter and is interested in a move away from North London. The 31-year old has a £5M release clause in his contract, which is what Arsenal paid to buy him. If Kepa is leaving, signing Meslier to be the no. 2 makes sense.
The Illan Meslier that we’ve seen most recently for Leeds is probably not good enough to be the Arsenal backup keeper. The change of scenery to a more talented roster at a stable, i.e. not in the midst of a promotion / relegation fight, should help. It’s a limited role regardless — Kepa made 12 appearances for the club last season, all but one in the domestic cups. But if Inaki Cana (the goalkeeping coach) and Arsenal can help Meslier rediscover the form that had people talking about him as one of the best young keepers in the world a couple of years ago, it’ll turn out to have been a tremendous piece of business.
That best case is not particularly likely to happen. The most likely outcome is that Meslier is an acceptable stopgap that buys the club a couple of years of development for guys like Tommy Setford and Khari Ranson. If Meslier is dreadful, Arsenal will be in for a backup keeper again next summer without having lost much beyond a cup game or two.
Given goalkeeper aging curves, David Raya likely has two or three years of top-level play in him. Gianluigi Buffon was effective into his late-30s. Opinions on 33-year old Alisson are rightly mixed. On the other side of things, Manchester City decided 32-year old Ederson wasn’t good enough and moved on last summer, although that might have been in part because Gianluigi Donnarumma is clearly better and came available. That’s a long way of saying Arsenal don’t need to be concerned about life after David Raya just yet, although they’ve likely got a vague idea of what they’d like to do and when.
Independent of whether Meslier is joining Arsenal to be the 2nd or 3rd keeper, it appears as if Tommy Setford is heading out on loan. The 20-year old is highly rated and needs to be playing regularly. That potentially open no. 3 spot would be filled by somebody from the academy. Khari Ranson stepped into the no. 3 role at times this past season when Setford and Alexei Rojas (who left the club this summer) were injured. Jack Porter played for the first team in the 2024 Carabao Cup. The team is high on Lucas Martin Nygaard, too.
I’ve written too much about the not-number-one keeper at Arsenal. Welcome, Illan!
