In his early days at Barcelona Alexis Sánchez was given the nickname “Cachai?”, which translates loosely into English as “do you understand what I’m saying?”. The point being: no, they didn’t. Sánchez is from Tocopilla on Chile’s far northern seaboard, a place where the locals speak in a brogue so thick with slang and grammatical oddity that Sánchez basically had to learn to speak Spanish in order to communicate properly with his new team-mates.

While it is tempting to see a favourable Arsenal-based omen in this – Patrick Vieira was given the nickname “What?” in his early days at Highbury – then it must be said Arsenal’s £31m summer signing already looks entirely in tune with his new surroundings. This is perhaps unsurprising given the obvious tessellation between player, manager and club. As Sánchez prepares to take part in his first competitive Arsenal fixture against Manchester City at Wembley on Sunday it is hard to imagine the tactical demands of his relocation to north London have been cause for any great culture shock. This is, after all, a club where the only real fluency required is a command of the international language of the attacking midfield, and where Arsène Wenger’s obsession with his ever-fattening roster of inside-forwards has gone from an exasperated in-joke to a point of endearing late-career eccentricity.

The signing of Sánchez from Barcelona has pushed Arsenal’s spending on nimble-footed midfield attackers to £150m in the last five years, while in the same period Wenger has spent just £13m on functioning centre-forwards – albeit Sánchez could yet end up redressing that imbalance a little given the early uncertainty over where exactly he might end up playing.

Already there is a suggestion Wenger intends to convert him into the kind of pacy, hard-running central striker his team so obviously needs, just as Thierry Henry and Robin van Persie were both ushered in from the left wing and transformed into refined and thrillingly complete central strikers. Sánchez has the speed, close control and finishing ability to suggest he might thrive as a cutting edge. His goals in Chile’s 2-0 defeat of England the last time he played at Wembley were evidence enough: the first a severe little poacher’s header nipping in front of Leighton Baines at the far post; the second a finish of real craft, racing in on goal and dinking the ball over goalkeeper Fraser Forster with a delightful sense of ease.

For now though Sánchez is likely to settle in at Arsenal in a more familiar deep-lying role. With this in mind, and with Yaya Sanogo likely to start in front of a pedigree midfield at Wembley – the footballing equivalent of marching into battle in full Napoleonic regalia and then pulling out a popgun – some will conclude that for a second successive season Arsenal have spent a large amount of money on a player they don’t really need. Just as Mesut Özil has been dismissed at times as an attacking midfield luxury too far, so there will be a temptation to see in Sánchez a William Carvalho-shaped hole, a Radamel Falcao-flavoured absence.

This, though, is to overlook the qualities he does bring, most obviously a refreshing sense of brawn and purpose. Arsenal’s falling away in winter last season was marked out by a general sense of attacking entropy, not just a lack of pace but a lack of boldness. Sánchez was compared by his new manager to Neymar this week, but it is his non-Neymar qualities – upper body strength, hard-nosed direct running, a touch of nastiness – that will add something distinct to this Arsenal team.

Sánchez looks like an upgrade wherever he plays, most obviously in an attacking midfield trident with Aaron Ramsey and Özil, a deliciously potent prospect. There has always been a slightly parasitic quality to Özil’s creative gifts. The German is above all a very needy little genius, reliant on runs being made, space being found, angles fashioned by other players. Sánchez will run tirelessly into the spaces Özil looks to open up when Arsenal counterattack, and just as some of Özil’s best moments at Real Madrid involved combinations with Cristiano Ronaldo, perhaps he might find a similar synergy with another fearless, muscular runner.

If the prospect of this delightfully versatile centre-forward cum roving creative powerhouse seems almost too good to be true it is worth remembering that Sánchez arrives in the Premier League with plenty still to prove. In 2011, after a supremely productive season at Udinese he was voted the most promising young player in world football in a Fifa poll ahead of Gareth Bale and Neymar. The same year he signed for Barcelona and seemed a perfect fit for the highly mobile, highly fluid Guardiola-era forward line. In the event, his time at Barcelona was marred by some niggling injuries. Last season was his most productive with 19 league goals and overall his record is fine: Sánchez played 141 matches under three different managers at Barça, scored 47 goals and provided 34 assists.

There have also been 10 goals in the last year for Chile, for whom Sánchez has occasionally played as a central striker, but more often as an attacking midfielder, from where his Arsenal career is also likely to be launched as Sánchez joins Santi Cazorla, Jack Wilshere, Özil, Ramsey, Lukas Podolski, Serge Gnabry, Theo Walcott, Joel Campbell and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain in the crush for a starting spot.

With this in mind there is at least a kind of coherence to Wenger’s obsession with bolstering his ball-playing strengths. A defensive midfielder or a proven goalscorer might have provided a more complete starting XI, but the suspicion is Wenger gave up trying to create a complete team some time ago, and is instead set on creating a completely Arsenal kind of team. The theory suggests that it is better to feed a strength – fluidity, mastery of the ball in midfield – than to worry over a weakness, in much the same way Barcelona resisted signing a muscular centre-half for so long simply because with a muscular centre-half they would have ceased to be quite so distinctively Barcelona.

So Wenger has thrown his lot in with the polyvalent, ball-playing inside-forward, of whom Sánchez is at least a more concentrated form, a player of unusual directness and precision. Arsenal’s major summer signing will run out at Wembley, in a match that could yet see Arsenal win two trophies in two matches after eight years of famine. Quite where he starts – and indeed where he ends up after that – promises to provide not just a fascinating subtext, but a potentially vital detail in the progress of this emerging team.