Arsenal injury news: Arteta drops major updates ahead of Sunderland

Arsenal will be hoping to extend their lead at the top of the Premier League table when they head to the Stadium of Light for their clash with Sunderland tomorrow night.

Title challengers Liverpool and Manchester City will be playing each other on Sunday afternoon, giving the Gunners the opportunity to push back at least one of their rivals this weekend with a win over the Black Cats.

Arsenal are in imperious form of late, having kept eight consecutive clean sheets and earned 25 league points so far, with just one defeat chalked up in the Premier League.

The Premier League leaders will face no immediate threat to their top spot if they fail to take all three points away from the North East tomorrow.

Still, the opportunity to pull further ahead of their experienced competitors would be massively advantageous at this stage of the season.

In terms of injuries, Mikel Arteta has had his fair share of key players suffering problems over the campaign so far.

On whether there were any changes to the long injury list ahead of the trip to Sunderland at the weekend, Arteta took to his pre-match press conference to deliver an update:

“No news, we remain the same and nobody new that can join the squad, so all the same.”

Despite no immediate returns, the Arsenal boss did tease the potential comeback of Noni Madueke, Kai Havertz and Martin Odegaard following the upcoming international break:

“Some of them, all of them, I don’t know. There are a lot of things that have to happen in the next two weeks, and everything has to be perfect, but I think we’ll be very close with most of them to be in a really strong position.”

The North London derby will be Arsenal’s first game after the international break, so supporters will be hopeful that key players can return and make an impact.

New signing Viktor Gyökeres will be one of the most concerning injury issues for the manager and fans in the coming weeks, as his recovery timeline remains unconfirmed after suffering a muscle injury against Burnley last weekend.

The 27-year-old Swedish striker was ruled out of the Champions League clash with Slavia Prague, where Mikel Merino was deployed in a makeshift centre-forward role.

Speaking ahead of the European clash, Arteta revealed:

“No, he’s not available. He hasn’t trained today, and we need to do some more tests and scans to understand the extent of the injury.”

Although fairly vague, the Arsenal boss has confirmed there will be no returns to the squad for the clash with Sunderland this weekend, so it’s very unlikely Gyökeres will feature.

Nevertheless, the two-week break will give the striker plenty of time to recover ahead of the congested festive fixture list upon their return, so there will be hope that he can make an impact from then on.

Rebekka Arnold is an experienced writer with a strong background in digital media, PR and football journalism.

Since 2021, Rebekka has written opinion pieces and match reaction content for Football Fancast, part of the Snack Media network, building on her growing presence in the football community through viral Twitter content and podcasting.

Now at Transfer Tavern, Rebekka brings her sharp eye for analysis and deep passion for the game to deliver engaging football opinion and breaking transfer news content.