Arsenal lose Caldentey for two months

The midfielder suffered the injury in Arsenal’s 4-2 defeat at Manchester City, and manager Renee Slegers did not try to dress it up as a short interruption. “It’s a bigger hamstring injury,” she said. “The estimation right now is between eight to 10 weeks. We’ll see.”

She added that Caldentey has been re-scanned and that the healing process “looks good”, which is the sort of line clubs offer when they need to acknowledge bad news without making it sound worse. The central fact remains the same: Arsenal are losing a player who has often made their football look steadier than their league position does.

That matters because this is not an Arsenal side coasting through the opening stretch and treating one injury as manageable inconvenience. They have won one of their first five Women’s Super League matches and sit 10th in the table. When a team starts like that, the absence of its calmer players stops feeling like routine squad rotation and starts looking like the removal of one of the few parts that reliably works.

Caldentey has been a key player since joining from Barcelona two years ago and was the 2024-25 WSL Player of the Year. Arsenal do not just lose quality here. They lose a midfielder who can slow a match down when it becomes frantic, keep possession in the right areas and spare the rest of the side from wasting attacks through impatience.

The wider injury picture does not help. BBC Sport reports Arsenal will also be without injured England forward Chloe Kelly on Saturday, while summer signing Selina Cerci is out after knee surgery. Slegers said Cerci had been struggling, that the issue worsened and that “we had to intervene unfortunately.”

On Cerci, Slegers said: “Germany did a scan and the best solution going forward was to clean [the knee] up with surgery.” She also suggested the problem had already affected the player’s ability to settle, saying it was “one of the reasons why it was harder for Selina to get into the team because she missed some parts of pre-season.”

Arsenal host Birmingham City next, and the timing is poor in the obvious way and in a less obvious one. Injuries can become excuses for teams already playing below themselves, but they can also expose how little margin for error was there to begin with. Caldentey’s absence does not create Arsenal’s problems. It removes one of the players most capable of helping them play through them.