Mikel Arteta says Arsenal are caught in a “really dangerous circle” with injuries – but denied they are a result of overtraining.
Arsenal have suffered injuries to a number of key players throughout the season and will be without midfielder Declan Rice, defender William Saliba and forward Leandro Trossard for the match against Club Brugge in the league phase of the Champions League on Wednesday.
Trossard, who scored in the loss to Aston Villa at the weekend, only just returned from injury but was brought off before the end of the game despite only being introduced as a second-half substitute.
Arsenal are still without forward Kai Havertz and defenders Gabriel Magalhaes and Cristhian Mosquera, while striker Viktor Gyokeres is just returning from injury.
The Gunners have also made a change to their Champions League squad because of injury, with Gabriel Jesus, who has been out since January after cruciate ligament surgery, replacing 15-year-old Max Dowman – who picked up his injury playing for Arsenal Under-21s in a friendly against Manchester United on Saturday.
But when asked if overtraining was the cause of the problems, Arteta rejected the idea.
“No, because we don’t train.” Arteta said referring to the short turnaround between games at this point in the season before saying his side trained for “20 minutes” on Tuesday.
“We don’t have time to train. So training is not there but obviously the fact that you are missing players, you are loading other players more [as] a consequence. It’s a really dangerous circle that one.”
Arsenal also had to deal with long-term injuries to Havertz and Bukayo Saka last season, while centre-back Gabriel missed an important couple of months at the end of the last campaign.
And Arteta said that alongside the Arsenal medical team he was always looking at the reasons for the injuries they suffer.
“Some of the players have played over 150 games in two seasons so it starts to get overloaded. You start to ask them again and again and again to do that [and] at some point they will break down,” he said.
“It’s something that we are constantly looking at. We have played a lot of games with a lot of players missing that puts a lot of stress and then more injuries but we are on it.
“I’m really happy what we’re doing in terms of the medical stuff and everything that we are trying to bring together, but sometimes as well we need some things to go on our side.”