The window closed at 11pm on Tuesday, and we ended it selling rather than buying. Gabriel Jesus has joined Barcelona, Fabio Vieira has gone back to Hamburg on a permanent deal, and Ethan Nwaneri has left on a season-long loan to Borussia Dortmund. Three out, none in on the final day, and a late push for Julian Alvarez that fizzled into nothing. For a champion side defending a title, that is a deadline day that raises more questions than it answers.

The exits themselves are defensible in isolation. Jesus had fallen behind Kai Havertz and Viktor Gyokeres after a third serious knee injury, Vieira never adapted to the physicality of English football across four years, and Nwaneri needs minutes we were not going to give him. What unsettles is the shape of it: a forward line trimmed on the same day a replacement did not arrive.

Jesus is the headline departure. He has completed a permanent move to Barcelona for a base fee reported at £8.6m, rising to as much as £12.9m with add-ons, and signed a three-year contract in Catalonia. Barcelona turned to him only after Atletico Madrid refused to sell Julian Alvarez, which is its own small irony given where our own transfer window ended up.

Four years at the club brought 84 appearances and 21 goals, a return shaped more by fitness than by ability. When Jesus was fit and sharp he changed how we pressed from the front, and the 2022-23 season before his first knee injury showed exactly what he offered. The problem was that those spells grew shorter and rarer, and a third significant knee injury left him behind two strikers Arteta now trusts more. Selling a 29-year-old on descending fitness for a fee that could reach eight figures, with a sell-on clause reportedly included, is sound business. It is also the end of a player who, at his best, was central to the identity of this side.

Vieira's exit is the cleanest of the three. He joins Hamburg permanently for a fee in the region of £7.7m to £8.5m, having spent last season there on loan. Hamburg declined to activate a £17m option and negotiated the fee down, which tells you how the two seasons on loan, first back at Porto and then in Germany, had reset his market value.

He arrived from Porto in 2022 for £34m and leaves having made just five Premier League starts. That is a heavy loss on the balance sheet, £34m in and roughly a quarter of it back out, and it belongs in the same conversation as the wage-bill and contract-management questions that keep recurring around this club. A sell-on clause is reportedly included, which softens the accounting slightly. Vieira was a technician who never solved the physical demands of the league, and both sides are better for the clean break.

The Nwaneri loan is the one to watch, because it is the one we will see again. He has joined Dortmund for the season with no option to buy, framed explicitly as a development and game-time move, and he returns to us next summer. Dortmund moved for him after Giannis Konstantelias suffered a long-term cruciate injury, and Nwaneri, who spent the back half of last season on loan at Marseille, needs the regular football a title-defending Arsenal midfield cannot guarantee a 19-year-old.

There is a fixture note worth flagging now. Under UEFA rules a player on loan is eligible against his parent club, and Dortmund visit the Emirates in the Champions League league phase. Nwaneri could line up against us on November 24. A homegrown talent facing the club that raised him, in our own stadium, inside three months of leaving. That is the kind of subplot that writes itself.

This is where the honest worry sits. We spent heavily earlier in the window rebuilding the spine, but the final day was pure subtraction up front, and it came without the arrival that would have justified it. The Alvarez pursuit, long and public, collapsed when Atletico held firm. A late look at Malick Fofana from Lyon did not turn into a deal. Gabriel Martinelli, meanwhile, was in Riyadh finalising his own exit, which we will cover in full separately, leaving the left flank thinner still.

Add it up and the forward department is lighter than it was in August, resting heavily on Gyokeres and Havertz through the middle and on the fitness of the wide players we kept. That is a gamble for a side competing on four fronts. Arteta has backed the group he has, and the Community Shield and three league wins to open the season suggest the group is good enough. But depth is tested in November and February, not August, and this deadline day did nothing to deepen it. We trimmed the squad and trusted what remains. We will find out across the winter whether that trust was placed correctly.