Why Lisa Baum Might Be Arsenal Women's Most Interesting Signing So Far

Some more Arsenal Women transfer news dropped today (Tuesday 14th July 2026) as the club announced the signing of 19 year old Lisa Baum on a permanent deal.

I’ve spent much of today thinking about this signing have to admit, the more I think about it, the less interested I am in Lisa Baum herself, which probably sounds like an absolutely crazy way to start an article that’s meant to be about Lisa Baum, but stick with me because I promise there is a point to all this!

Like most Arsenal Women supporters, I did exactly what everyone else did this morning. I watched the announcement video, had a look through the “Lisa Baum’s first day” photos, read the club’s articles, watched a few clips of her once again on YouTube, had a scroll through social media to see what supporters from RB Leipzig were saying about her and also what supporters of clubs like Barcelona and Bayern Munich were saying after missing out on her.

Then I started reading what the media were saying, partly because I was curious to learn more about her from their point of view, but also because I always find it fascinating to see where the conversations go whenever Arsenal Women announce a new signing.

Regular readers and listener will know that I know a fair amount about Lisa Baum already from the work I’ve done profiling her in the first week of the Arsenal Women: Trailblazers podcast. But now she’s here and confirmed I can see that Arsenal have beaten some pretty serious competition to sign her, that she really is regarded as one of Germany’s brightest young talents and that she joins the club having already built a really impressive reputation for herself despite still being at what is really just the very beginning of her career.

The problem is that looking at a lot of what came out with regard to articles about her today, you end up feeling like you are reading the same thing over and over again.

Look, I’m not having a go at the journalists because I am starting to understand how this world works. You see that Arsenal Women have signed someone you’ve possibly never watched before so the first thing you probably want to know as quickly as possible is who she is, where she’s played,  get some clues as to what sort of player she is and why Arsenal may want her. Perfectly reasonable and it’s an important part of football journalism in age where time is of the essence in terms of getting your content out before anyone else.

They’re just not the questions I find myself interested in (because I did my homework on her weeks ago rather than waiting for the signing right?).

Once you get past all the facts, understand who Lisa Baum is and why she’s so highly rated, you would hopefully, like me, find yourself thinking about Arsenal Women’s Football Club instead. More specifically, I find myself wondering why Arsenal have decided that Lisa Baum is the player they want to invest in right now, because I don’t believe clubs with serious ambitions spend money on nineteen-year-olds simply because they’re good footballers. There are loads of good nineteen-year-old footballers. Identifying the one you believe can become something much more than that? That’s what’s really got my curiosity.

I think what this signing is potentially about is not just Lisa Baum the player, but Lisa Baum the decision.

Take a step back from this transfer and look at it in the context of the other signings Arsenal Women have made so far this transfer window, it starts to feel less and less like an individual signing and more like a piece of a larger puzzle Arsenal are putting together. Georgia Stanway brings proven quality and leadership. Ona Batlle arrives with Champions League medals, serial Championship winning experience from Barcelona and all the technical security we spoke about in the last article. Selina Cerci gives Arsenal another proven goalscorer, Geraldine Reuteler brings versatility and intelligence across a number of attacking positions and then, sitting a bit differently to all of those, is Lisa Baum.

At 19 years of age she’s the youngest of the group by some distance - the others are all in that “entering peak years” 25-27 year old range.

So is she possibly the signing that tells us the most about how Arsenal are thinking.

That’s a fascinating way to look at this right? Because it says something that goes beyond the newsflash of one teenager with great potential arriving from Germany. It says something about how Arsenal see themselves now and, perhaps more importantly, how they want to see themselves three, four or even five years from now, because I don’t think you make a signing like this unless you’re already thinking much further ahead.

So that’s the conversation I’d like to have, dear readers, if you don’t mind. 

Not because Lisa Baum isn’t worth talking about. Quite the opposite! But I just feel that understanding why Arsenal wanted Lisa Baum in the first place is ultimately far more interesting than simply repeating who she is.

Why Would Arsenal Sign Lisa Baum Now?

The Trailblazers question then is why Arsenal would spend money and use up a valuable squad place on a 19-year-old attacking player at a point when the club is supposedly aiming to win the WSL and Champions League this coming season, because when you look at the existing squad you can certainly argue that wide attacking players are not exactly something we’re desperately short of now.

We already have Mariona Caldentey, Chloe Kelly, Caitlin Foord and Olivia Smith capable of playing in those areas on both flanks, Selina Cerci has joined the group capable of playing off the wing as well as centrally and then to add to the embarrassment of riches there’s Geraldine Reuteler, giving Renée Slegers another player who can operate across several attacking positions, so on the surface you could look at Lisa Baum and wonder whether this is really the area where Arsenal need to invest again when we also need a central defender to provide back up to Leah Williamson and potentially a third goalkeeper too.

The thing is, the best recruitment departments don’t only look at the positions they urgently need to fill today, because if that’s all they are doing then they’re almost always reacting to something that’s already gone wrong. A player gets injured, you suddenly realise a player is actually running their contract down and isn’t going to sign that new one you spent months putting together, another player decides they want to leave and suddenly you’re scrambling around trying to find a replacement at exactly the same time that every selling club knows you’re desperate and every other big club is looking at the exact same list.

That’s not proper long-term planning.

What Arsenal appear to have done with Lisa Baum is to identify a player before they absolutely need her - probably one of the hardest things to get right in football because you’re asking the recruitment team to make a judgement based not only on the player Lisa Baum is today, but on the player they believe she might become after two or three years of training every day with a host senior internationals, playing under Renée Slegers and gradually adjusting to the speed, physicality and expectations that come with representing Arsenal Women in the WSL.

That’s a very different kind of decision to signing somebody who has already reached or is entering their peak.

When you sign a player like Georgia Stanway or Ona Batlle, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting because they’ve played hundreds of senior matches, won major trophies and performed regularly at the highest level. There’s still always some risk involved because players have to settle into a new club, a different system and a different group of teammates (hey there London City Lionesses if you’re reading this), but the evidence in favour of success is already there for everyone to see.

With a 19-year-old, what you’re buying always comes with a bit more uncertainty.

You’re buying potential, one of those words that gets used so often in football that it almost loses its meaning, because every promising young player seems to be described as having great potential and every signing announcement contains some hope that the club can’t wait to help them develop.

But potential is in no way a guarantee.

There’ll be parts of Lisa Baum’s game that still need improving. There’ll be matches where she looks like an exciting young player and others where she simply just looks young. She may need time to adjust to English football, time to understand what Slegers wants from her and time to become comfortable around a squad full of experienced internationals who are all competing for the same minutes.

And actually, writing as the thought just popped into my head, here’s another reason I hope Arsenal supporters give Lisa Baum that time, because one of the things I’ve really loved about watching Arsenal Women over the last year is watching players develop in front of our eyes. Smilla Holmberg is absolutely the best recent example. The player we first saw breaking into the side isn’t exactly the same player we watched win a FIFA Women’s Champions Cup medal. Confidence grows. Understanding grows. Decision-making becomes quicker. They become more comfortable with the people around them and with the way the manager wants them to play. Footballers, particularly young footballers, aren’t finished products when they arrive and I sometimes wonder whether we’ve become so used to judging transfers almost instantly that we’ve forgotten one of the nicest parts of following a football club, which is watching somebody become the player everyone hoped they could be.

The problem is that football supporters, and social media in particular, aren’t always good at allowing young players that time because we want to know immediately whether a transfer has worked or not. Someone plays well in their first match and we’ve signed the next club legend, the next superstar. They have a couple of quiet games and suddenly people are asking what the hell the recruitment team were thinking.

We all do it. I’ve done it I’m sure, I think, at some point (I can’t remember ever having done but I can’t be that perfect, surely).

You get excited about a new signing, watch their first few touches much more closely than you’d watch anyone else normally and start looking for evidence that proves whatever opinion you formed before they had even kicked a ball.

I think Lisa Baum is probably a player we’re going to have to judge very differently to our other signings.

She may contribute immediately, and I certainly hope she does, I believe she will, but her first season shouldn’t be treated as some kind of final answer on whether or not this was a good signing. Arsenal may be buying her now precisely because they don’t want to be in the position two years from now where everybody in Europe suddenly realises how good she is and the price, competition and difficulty involved in signing her become completely different. Or become a Salma Paralluelo situation (I still hope Arsenal FC give the money to the women’s side to make that happen by the way). 

That’s the gamble - Arsenal are effectively telling us they believe they can see where Lisa Baum is going before the rest of football gets there.

And if they’re right, then signing her at 19 rather than waiting until she is 22 could end up looking like one of the smartest decisions the club has made in this entire rebuild. I must actually mention Smilla Holmberg here, a 19 year old who in just her first half a season with the club has made such a massive impact and contribution to the first team. I really hope it’s the same start for Lisa too.

I also think it says something interesting about Arsenal’s confidence, because you’ve got to be pretty sure of your recruitment process to invest in a player whose greatest value to us might not become obvious right away. It’s so much easier to sign a player everyone already knows, announce them with an amazing reveal video and enjoy the immediate fan-approval that comes with bringing in an established star.

Signing a player like Lisa Baum asks supporters to trust the process a little more. It asks us to believe the people inside the club have watched far more than the collection of YouTube clips most of us are now busy working our way through, that they understand the details of her game, her personality, her ability to learn and how she is going to fit into this squad over time.

More importantly, it suggests Arsenal are no longer just thinking about how to catch the teams ahead of them at home and abroad today.

They’re thinking about how to stay ahead once they get there.

So What Exactly Are Arsenal Getting?

At this point (and I appreciate you so much if you’re still with me) you’re probably thinking, “That’s all very interesting Roberto, but at some point can you talk about the actual footballer Arsenal Women have just signed?”, which fair I guess because I’ve managed to get this far into an article about Lisa Baum without actually profiling Lisa Baum.

The reason I’ve done that is deliberate - I believe that understanding why Arsenal wanted her helps us understand the player much better than by me just simply listing her stats. But now we’ve talked about the bigger picture, let’s look at the footballer herself because this is another area where there are one or two lazy assumptions already beginning to creep into other articles and commentaries online.

Whenever a young attacking player signs for a big club, especially someone whose built a reputation by directly taking on defenders and creating chances, it’s very easy to reach to use age-old adjectives. Direct, quick, fearless, exciting, great potential, good in one-on-ones. We’ve all read those descriptions hundreds of times before and it’s not that they’re necessarily wrong, they’re just not especially helpful or imaginative because you could probably use most if not all of them to describe half the young wingers in Europe.

So what actually makes Lisa Baum different?

The more women’s football I watch, the more I find myself paying attention to the things players do when they don’t have the ball, or perhaps more accurately, the decisions they make before they receive the ball, because that’s usually where you start to see the difference between a player who’s simply talented and a player who really understands the game.

Anyone can look good in a compilation video. In fact, if we’re being totally honest, YouTube has probably convinced all of us at some point that we’d just discovered the next Ballon d’Or winner, only for reality to kick in a few months into the season and remind us that football is played over 90 minutes, not four minutes of perfectly edited highlights with an amazing soundtrack.

What impressed me as I started watching more of Lisa Baum wasn’t really the moments everyone notices first. It wasn’t the dribbles or the goals or the pace, although she’s certainly got plenty of those qualities. It was how often she seems to make sensible decisions, particularly for someone who’s still only 19 years old. There are young players who always look like they’re trying to create the moment of the match every time they get the ball, and while that can be entertaining, it’s not always what the team needs.

Lisa Baum doesn’t really strike me as that sort of player, the same way that Smilla Holmberg didn’t the first time I saw her play for us at the Emirates Stadium.

Lisa looks like someone who understands when to attack her full-back, when to release the ball early, when to make the run without necessarily expecting to receive the pass and when to work hard for the team out of possession. Those things don’t normally make the social media clips or YouTube compilations because they’re not glamorous, but I reckon they’re exactly the sorts of things that coaches notice right away.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Renée Slegers during her relatively short time as Arsenal manager, it’s that she seems to value intelligent, versatile and hard-working footballers just as much as talented ones.

That’s a really important distinction. There are lots of talented footballers, but there are far fewer players who consistently make good decisions under pressure, understand space, recognise when the game needs slowing down and when it needs speeding up and who are prepared to do the less glamorous parts of the job because they understand that winning football matches isn’t just about the moments that end up in the highlights reels on socials.

I’m not suggesting for one second that Lisa Baum is the finished article because she obviously isn’t, but that’s part of what should excite Arsenal supporters rather than concern them. If she was already the complete player at 19 years of age, Arsenal probably wouldn’t have been able to sign her because she’d either already be at Barcelona, Bayern, Chelsea or one of the other European giants who were reportedly interested in bringing her in.

What Arsenal seem to have identified is a player with an already good standard, but also the raw materials they believe they can develop further on the road to being great, and that’s where I get really excited because we’ve already seen, even in Renée Slegers’ relatively short time in charge, that players DO improve under her. They gain more clarity when it comes to their roles, more confident in possession and generally look like they understand exactly what the manager is asking them to do. I’ve seen it with my own eyes from my very fortunate vantage point at the stadium, right behind the dugout.

That’s no accident, good coaches don’t just improve teams.

They improve footballers.

So the conversation shouldn’t be about whether or not Lisa Baum is already good enough to become an important Arsenal player.

The better question is how good Arsenal believe she can become after two or three years of working in this environment every single day, because I think that’s the version of Lisa Baum the recruitment team have really spent their time assessing.

If that’s true, I think this signing becomes even more thrilling than it already felt on announcement day.

One thing I also keep coming back to with this signing is that I think it tells us something about how Arsenal Women see themselves now, because if you’d asked me a few years ago what sort of club Arsenal were in the transfer market, I’d probably have said we were still trying to catch the very best teams in Europe.

I don’t think that’s the case anymore - I think Arsenal now expect to be one of those teams.

Now, before anyone jumps into the comments saying, “Well of course they do, they recently won the Champions League and they just won the FIFA Women's Champions Cup”, that’s not quite what I meant. Winning Europe’s biggest competition changes expectations, but it doesn’t automatically change the way a football club thinks. There are clubs who win a major trophy and immediately spend the next couple of years trying to recreate the exact squad that won it. They keep looking backwards because they’re frightened of losing what they had.

Really successful clubs don’t usually do that.

They celebrate what they’ve achieved, enjoy it (and absolutely should because nights like Lisbon don’t come around every season), but while everyone else is still admiring the medals and basking in the glow of the trophy, they’re already thinking about the next team, the next cycle and the next group of players who are going to keep them competing at that level.

I believe that’s exactly what we’re seeing this summer.

Looking at Arsenal Women’s transfer business as a whole before Lisa Baum’s signing, it doesn’t feel random. It doesn’t feel like somebody has booted up Football Manager, looked at the squad and simply bought the highest-rated player in each position. Every signing feels like it solves a different problem. They all improve the squad immediately. All add bags of top level experience. All of them add flexibility to a degree. They all increase competition for places. Then along comes Lisa Baum, who on the face of it isn’t being signed because Arsenal desperately need another wide player right now, but because Arsenal don’t want to be desperately looking for a world-class one two or three years from now.

There’s a really important difference between those two ways of thinking.

One is reactive, the other is proactive.

One waits till a problem to arise before trying to solve it, while the other tries to make sure the problem never arises in the first place.

I know that probably sounds like common sense, but football clubs don’t always operate like that because there are so many pressures pulling them in different directions. Managers understandably want players who can help them win now, this coming match weekend, this season. Supporters want exciting signings they already know. Sporting directors are trying to balance budgets, contracts and succession planning all at the same time. Owners want success now, but they also want sustainability in three or four years’ time.

Getting all of that right isn’t easy to juggle and that’s why I think Lisa Baum’s signing has got me thinking about this all so much.

Not because I expect her to start every match this season, though if she forces her way into the side it’d be amazing, but because I think this transfer asks us to trust something we don’t actually get to see (and certain flat-earther type fans in the comments sections would believe is a thing).

The recruitment process! That’s the bit we never get to see.

We only ever see the finished product - the announcement video, the shirt number, the interview, the photographs and eventually the player running out onto the pitch at the Emirates Stadium or Meadow Park.

What we don’t see and if most of us are totally honest, even consider, are the hundreds of hours of scouting, the conversations, the character assessments, the discussions about how a player might develop, whether they’ll suit the dressing room, how they learn, how they respond to setbacks and whether they’re the sort of person you want representing Arsenal for the next five or six years.

That’s the bit supporters never really get access to. So we absolutely must be, as passionate and often emotional fans, be a little bit careful before deciding after potentially three substitute appearances whether Arsenal got this one right or wrong.

If the recruitment team have done their job properly, then they haven’t just signed the player Lisa Baum is today.

They’ve signed the player they truly believe she is going to become.

And if that’s true, I think that’s a super exciting place for Arsenal Women to be as a football club because it says they’re no longer just planning to get through this season.

They’re planning to dominate the next era of the WSL.

We’ll only really know whether Arsenal have got this one right in two or three years’ time, and that’s exactly why I’m excited by it. Lisa Baum may or may not become one of the best wide players in Europe, none of us has a crystal ball and can answer that today, but if Arsenal’s recruitment team have got this right then we might eventually look back on this as one of those signings that seemed sort of sensible at the time before becoming blindingly obvious in hindsight.

Personally, I can’t wait to watch that journey unfold.