At a Glance:
One player argues for being Arsenal’s best player throughout the year
Topped his position’s rankings in one vital stat
Had some crucial performances in the 2025/26 season
There are many arguments one could make for who has been the best Arsenal player this season, given that it was a standout campaign for the Gunners as they won their first league title since 2004.
Declan Rice came ever so close to winning the PFA Player of the Year award and Arsenal’s backline only shipped 27 goals over the course of the entire Premier League campaign, while attackers such as Viktor Gyokeres and Leandro Trossard created some iconic moments for the club.
But there is one player you can easily state a case for as being not only the strongest Arsenal performer in 2025/26, but also perhaps the most impressive player in the Premier League all season.
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David Raya is easily Arsenal’s standout player of the 2025/26 season
At 30, David Raya is one of the more experienced players in the Arsenal squad, with his reliabilty and consistency showing exactly why Mikel Arteta brought him to the club in 2023.
He entered this season having win the previous two Golden Glove awards (albeit his 2024/25 award was shared with Mats Sels of Nottingham Forest), and he cruised to the same award in 2025/26 with 19 clean sheets, four ahead of second-placed Gianluigi Donnarumma.
Having played in 37 games, this meant that he did not concede a single goal in over half of the matches he was the goalkeeper in, and while this was in part down to Arsenal’s sometimes inpenetrable defense, it was also down to Raya being an extremely safe pair of hands.
Raya boasted a 69.8% save percentage over the course of the league campaign, ranking him seventh out of all goalkeepers in terms of that statistic, and was occasionally the only reason that Arsenal were able to see out a game.
He was also able to keep nine clean sheets in 14 games in the Champions League, and even though Arsenal were not able to beat Paris Saint-Germain in the final, the ex-Brentford man was a key reason as to why they got there.
Raya’s best displays throughout the season picked up vital points for Arsenal
In the opening game of the season, David Raya also fended off a ferocious Manchester United side that set the tone for how Arsenal were going to play throughout the remainder of the season, where he made seven saves in the game with five of them coming from inside the box.
Raya is arguably the reason Arsenal were able to pick up the Premier League trophy after Manchester City lost to Bournemouth in Gameweek 37, as his point-blank save against Mateus Fernandes in the Gunners’ 1-0 win over West Ham was perhaps the defining moment of Arsenal’s eventual trophy lift.
Perhaps his best performance of the year came in the quarter-finals of the Champions League away against Sporting, handling immense pressure well in order to see Arsenal through in a 1-0 win in a match where he made five saves from close range.