Let’s start with the numbers, because they are the reason a 25-year-old Brazil international was available in the first place.. In the Premier League last season Martinelli made 30 appearances but only 11 starts, scored once, and assisted four. His one goal came from 4.04 expected goals, a conversion rate of 3.4 per cent, and his shot accuracy was under 45 per cent. Arsenal won the title and Martinelli was a bit-part player in it. Mikel Arteta then left him out of the matchday squad for the Community Shield and the opening league game against Coventry, and Arsenal accepted the fee.

In the Champions League he managed six goals in 14 appearances, seven of them starts, from 4.11 expected goals, with two assists and a conversion rate above 30 per cent. UEFA's own tracking has him at a top speed of 34 kilometres per hour with 30 completed dribbles and 11 runs into the penalty area across the Gunners route to the final. 

The more useful reading however is about the type of matches he performed in. Arsenal's league games last season were mostly about breaking down a set defence, and Martinelli's best attributes, straight-line speed and the timing of a run beyond the last defender, have less to offer against a block that has already retreated. European ties gave him space to run into, and he ran into it. His Arsenal league record, 41 goals and 24 assists in 191 appearances, belongs to a wide forward who does his best work when the game is stretched.

Which is probably why Al Hilal wants him. Inzaghi's Inter attack was a pair rather than a front three: one forward dropping into midfield, one running the channels, with the wing-backs providing the width. Watkins is the runner in that pair, as the club's 58.4 million euro purchase confirmed on Sunday. The open question was who plays beside him, and who covers when Watkins rests across a season that now includes an eight-match Champions League Elite league phase on top of the Pro League and the King's Cup.

Summerville answers part of that. The Dutchman arrived from West Ham in July for a guaranteed £55 million after seven goals and five assists in a relegated side, and then two goals and two assists at the World Cup. He is a left winger who cuts inside on his right foot and carries the ball through the inside channel, which is where he creates. In Inzaghi's shape that makes him a natural second forward, dropping to receive and playing the ball into the space Watkins attacks, or a left-sided wing-back in the more attacking versions of the 3-5-2. Running in behind is a smaller part of his game.

Running in behind is most of Martinelli's. He is right-footed and played most of his Arsenal career from the left, and the Champions League data shows a player whose value comes from penetration rather than construction: 11 runs into the box and 30 dribbles in seven logged matches, against one assist. Where Summerville wants the ball to feet on the half-turn, Martinelli wants it played ahead of him. Put them on the pitch together and Inzaghi has a dropping forward and a running forward, with Watkins as the reference point in the middle, which is close to the Lautaro Martínez and Marcus Thuram pairing Inzaghi used at Inter.

The squad case is simpler. Salem Al Dawsari turned 35 in August and cannot start every match in a season that could run past 50 games. Malcom has been sold to Al Jazira. Marcos Leonardo has gone to Ajax and Darwin Núñez is on loan at Al Diriyah. Without Martinelli, the forwards available to Inzaghi for the opening weeks are Watkins, Summerville, Al Dawsari and Mohamed Kader Meïté, who is 18. For a club that went 34 league matches unbeaten and finished second by two points, that is a thin room, and the shape of last season's failure explains why depth matters more than another star name.

Al Hilal scored 85 league goals last season, second only to the champions' 91, and Yassine Bounou shared the golden glove. The gap to Al Nassr was made of draws rather than any collapse in quality, and draws in a long season tend to come in the weeks when the first-choice front line is tired, rotated, or excluded. The Leonardo case is the cautionary one: the club's top scorer was left off the foreign-player list for six consecutive matches last spring, and Inzaghi still had to field a team. Three forwards of similar standing means that a suspension, an injury or a registration decision no longer forces a change of system.

Something else to consider is that  the Champions League Elite has expanded to 32 clubs this season, with 16 in the West region playing eight matches each between September and February before the knockouts, and the finals are staged in Saudi Arabia. Al Hilal were seeded in Pot 3 for the draw, a tier below Al Nassr, and open against Al Gharafa in mid-September with Al Sadd to follow in October. Al Ahli have won the last two editions and Hilal went out in the round of 16 last season. The club that has spent most heavily on European strikers this summer is also the club whose continental record has slipped behind a domestic rival, and Martinelli's Champions League numbers are the most direct answer the market offered to that.

There are also reasons to be careful though, and the first is the one Arsenal supporters will point to. A winger who converts 3.4 per cent of his league shots in a title-winning side is not a finished product at 25, and Arteta's decision to drop him for the start of this season was a football decision before it was a transfer one. Martinelli's league expected assists last season were 1.24 across 1,073 minutes, which is low for a wide forward at a top club, and his pass completion sat around 73 per cent. In Pro League games where Hilal hold most of the ball against a retreating defence, he will need to be more than a transition player. He was not asked to be that at Arsenal, and nobody yet knows whether he can be.

The second is integration: three new forwards in one window, a new striker partnership, and a coach in his second season with a system that took Inter time to run properly. Summerville arrived in July and had the pre-season camp in Austria; Watkins and Martinelli will have had days to adjust.

The third is the one that applies to the whole project. Hilal have paid Arsenal's record sale fee, with a sell-on clause attached, for a player whose contract and quality of life were the deciding factors according to reporting in Brazil. A 25-year-old on a long contract is an asset the club can resell, a different model from the one that brought Neymar and Benzema to Riyadh, but it depends on him producing in the Gulf what he produced in Europe's top competition.

What can be said with some confidence is that the three signings make sense together in a way that none of them quite makes alone. Watkins gives Inzaghi a striker who plays every week and finishes at half a goal per 90. Summerville gives him a creator who can play as a second forward or a wing-back. Martinelli gives him a runner for the matches that open up, which in the Champions League Elite is most of them, and cover for the weeks when the league does not. The title was lost by two points last season with a striker room that never settled, and the three signings are a direct response to that.