Bukayo Saka reached two notable milestones in Arsenal\u2019s 2\u20130 win over West Ham United on Saturday. The outing was his 200th Premier League appearance and his 100th goal involvement in the competition.<\/p>\n
The England international celebrated his 24th birthday last month and, by the time he reached those landmarks, had already made 314 appearances for club and country in all competitions since making his senior Arsenal debut in November 2018.<\/p>\n
Manager Mikel Arteta had praised Saka ahead of the match, saying: \u201cThe numbers that Bukayo has at his age are already astronomical.\u201d He repeated that admiration afterwards, adding: \u201cWhen you look at those numbers, 200 games, 100 goal involvements [in the Premier League], it\u2019s unbelievable. His age, what he\u2019s doing, the manner that he\u2019s doing it as well, really impressive. That\u2019s the kind of players that we need to achieve what we want.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arteta also reflected on how Saka\u2019s role has evolved. \u201cOn my first game here, I visualised Bukayo playing as a left back!\u201d he said. Saka had already been playing at left back for England\u2019s youth teams prior to the Spaniard\u2019s appointment. After Arteta took over at the end of 2019, Saka became Arteta\u2019s starting left back, a position he occupied for several months before moving higher up the pitch on the opposite flank midway through the 2020\u201321 campaign.<\/p>\n
Saka is now the eighth Arsenal player in the Premier League era to reach 100 combined goals and assists in the competition. His split is slightly weighted towards goals at 55 compared with 45 assists, a balance that underlines his dual threat as scorer and creator.<\/p>\n
Thierry Henry remains the club\u2019s leading figure in this metric with 249 combined goals and assists (175 goals, 74 assists). With Saka still in the early stages of his career, the prospect that he could climb further up Arsenal\u2019s list is a recurring theme in commentary around his progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his 200th Premier League game, Bukayo Saka reached 100 goal contributions and turned heads. more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3561,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,172],"tags":[826,1019],"class_list":["post-3562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-epl","tag-bukayo-saka","tag-creative-players"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}