Thierry Henry is talking about last week’s end of soccer’s summer transfer window, a blitz of billion-dollar activity in which Arsenal’s Premier League rivals broke records in pursuit of Mikel Arteta’s defending champions.Arsenal made big plays for big players of their own, both for Real Madrid’s Vinicius Junior and Atletico Madrid’s Julian Alvarez, but instead found themselves two men down in attack having sold Gabriel Martinelli, Gabriel Jesus and Leandro Trossard and sending Ethan Nwaneri out on loan for the rest of the season, despite spending €40million ($45.8m, £34m) on 24-year-old winger Christos Tzolis.After Arteta’s team won the Premier League and reached the Champions League final last season, there were plenty of fans who craved an extra sprinkle of stardust to propel the north London club into a period of extended dominance. But former Arsenal striker Henry, speaking to The Athletic ahead of his return to the CBS Sports studio for the U.S. network’s UEFA Champions League coverage starting this week, makes a different case.In a Premier League where change has been the order of the day, where more than half the division’s 20 managers or head coaches were appointed this calendar year and players are recycled across clubs with ever more brutality, Henry sees strength for Arsenal in continuity. He also takes lessons from the big winners of world football during the past two seasons, when Spain won the World Cup without a cast of billboard names and Paris Saint-Germain conquered Europe in both years by finally abandoning its indulgence of stars and prioritizing the collective under coach Luis Enrique.“A lot of people right now are focusing always on names, transfer windows, and, ‘My god, this guy’s gonna change my club!’” Henry says on a video call held last week. “No. You being a team and having cohesion will change your club. You having an identity, and a coach who knows what needs to happen and 11 players running, whatever their names are, will change your club.“Sometimes, we go so much into, ‘Let’s go and buy that guy — he will change the club’. It’s easy to say now that PSG is a good team. When all those guys (including Kylian Mbappe, Neymar and Lionel Messi) left two years ago, everyone thought, ‘Oh my god, where are they going to go from that?’“Then they got Bradley Barcola, and then they got (fellow attacker) Desire Doue. At that time, you’re not thinking those guys are going to do what they did. But because Luis Enrique is so sound on how he likes to play, they have done it. Do you remember what (PSG’s 2025 Ballon d’Or-winning France forward) Ousmane Dembele said? He said, ‘If you don’t run at Paris Saint-Germain, you’re out’. Simple as that.“If you look at Arsenal, you don’t have an offensive midfielder or a striker that was in a (Premier League) team of the year last season. But they’re a team.“People might have been saying about Spain, who is that guy (Alex) Baena playing on the left, or who is (Mikel) Oyarzabal? They conceded only 10 shots on target the whole tournament. They made France and Argentina look like normal teams (in the semi-final and final, respectively).“With transfers, you’re not sure of anything, but what I’m sure of is everybody needs to run, coaches need to have a great identity, and the plan is to be coachable.”At Arsenal, Henry says he sees a set of players unaffected by ego or sense of place in the dressing room. He highlights how Eberechi Eze tore Tottenham Hotspur apart home and away last season, scoring five goals in those two games, but also at times accepted his contributions would come from the bench.