How good is Selina Cerci, and who exactly have Arsenal Women signed?
When Selina arrived at Arsenal this summer, the headline numbers made her fairly easy to understand. She’d scored 16 Bundesliga goals in 2024/25 to finish as the league’s top scorer, then another 16 the following season. She’s a German international, she’s quick, physical, strong in the air and she scores a lot of goals.
Then I started looking properly at the career underneath those numbers, and realised I’d started her story far too late.
Because Cerci was already becoming one of Germany’s most exciting young forwards at 21. She’d scored 13 goals in 15 Bundesliga appearances for Turbine Potsdam, broken into the German national team and looked as though her career was heading very quickly in one direction.
Then she tore her ACL.
In this episode of Arsenal Women: Trailblazers, I’m going right back through Selina’s journey, the injury and difficult years that followed, how she rediscovered herself at Hoffenheim and what those extraordinary back-to-back 16-goal seasons actually tell us about the player Arsenal have signed.
But I also wanted to understand why Renée Slegers wanted Cerci when Alessia Russo and Stina Blackstenius are already here. So we’re looking at how Selina actually plays, her physical and aerial threat, her forward intent, the creative side of her game that developed at Hoffenheim and the different possibilities she could give this Arsenal attack.
And there’s another side of Selina I wanted us to get to know as well. Away from football there’s fashion, travel, coffee, padel, cycling, a lucky embroidered teddy bear that follows her into the dressing room and a rather particular pre-match relationship with both sets of goalposts.
The more I researched her, the less interested I became in simply asking how many goals Selina Cerci might score for Arsenal.
She’s spent the last few years finding out whether she could get back to the player she was becoming before everything stopped.
Now we get to find out how much further she can go.
🎙️ Arsenal Women: Trailblazers, with Roberto Revilla.
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