On Thursday morning Arsenal discovered their opponents for the opening day of the new Premier League season.
The Gunners will welcome Nottingham Forest to the Emirates Stadium on August 12, six days after a Community Shield meeting with Manchester City at Wembley and preparations for both games are due to get underway at the beginning of next month when the senior stars report to London Colney.
As revealed by football.london earlier in the week, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has already been handed a quadruple fitness boost with Oleksandr Zinchenko, Gabriel Martinelli, Mohamed Elneny and Takehiro Tomiyasu all set to be involved in the club's pre-season program.
The group missed the end of the season just gone because of calf, ankle and knee injuries respectively but are expected to play some part of the warm-up fixtures ahead of the new campaign to prove their fitness, and there's hope that William Saliba will also be available having been sidelined since March with a back problem.
"It's probably too early to say. He's been evolving in the right way," the Spaniard said last month when asked if there were any worries about Saliba being ready for pre-season. "The last few weeks have been much more positive than the previous two months. We wanted to protect him.
"It was an injury that needed some caring and attention, and we've been pretty conservative to give him a chance to have a good pre-season to have a chance to go again next season."
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In addition to the aforementioned quartet and perhaps Saliba, barring any late national team call-ups or departures, Benjamin White, Gabriel Magalhaes, Rob Holding, Gabriel Jesus, Eddie Nketiah, Leandro Trossard, Reiss Nelson, Arthur Okonkwo, Cedric Soares, Albert Sambi Lokonga, Nicolas Pepe and Marquinhos are the other Arsenal first-team players that are effectively guaranteed to be present for the start of pre-season.
However, Arteta is likely to be without Emile Smith Rowe, Fabio Vieira and Nuno Tavares as it's been confirmed that the trio have been named in the England and Portugal squads respectively for this summer's European Under-21s Championship which gets underway in Georgia next Wednesday.
If both nations live up to pre-tournament predictions of being among the favourites to lift the trophy and qualify for the knockout stage then the earliest they can return to Arsenal is the beginning of July which is when pre-season training is due to commence at London Colney.
In fact with England and Portugal on course to meet at the quarter-final or semi-final stage - should they progress from their respective groups of course - it's safe to say the Gunners won't have more than two players in the competition after July 5 one way or another.
Whether it's Smith Rowe or Fabio Vieira and Tavares heading home early remains to be seen, but it would appear that due to their international commitments, they probably will not be named in the squad that heads out to Germany for a training camp at Adidas HQ from July 10 for a game against Nurnberg three days later.
Then the squad will travel to the United States of America for their pre-season tour. The first of three fixtures will be against MLS All Stars XI in Washington D.C on July 20, before facing Manchester United in New York on July 23 and then rounding off the trip with a game against Barcelona in LA on July 26.
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