Happy Monday all, Scott continues to prioritize things like “friends” and “family” and is traveling so you’re stuck with me this Monday.

At times of late, things have just been so busy that there’s almost no time for either of us to get too lost in our thoughts — we’re running family shuttles to and from practices, completing big projects around the house, traveling across the country to attend family events and so on. Heaven knows in my house, we’ve got birthdays for four kids (two still with us, two passed on) in a mad dash from the end of February through the first of May. This week also brings the beginning of another soccer season for my son, which of course means I again don my reflective sunglasses and whistle and do my best to age young men, as it were.

As it happens, I watched the last 30 minutes of Saturday’s Newcastle-Arsenal clash on my phone from a different soccer practice for my son, glancing up and down to watch him make plays while also keeping a close eye on proceedings in London. Far from the first time this season, and I’m sure it won’t be the last over the coming years.

I didn’t really set out to tell you all about my daily schedule here, rather to make the point that things are busy, and while I’ve had so many thoughts about the experience of this season, some of them pretty repetitive, I haven’t had as much time to organize them as I’d like.

Then there’s the tension. As a content creator, for lack of a better term, sometimes it’s easy to dwell in the sanctuary of recurring pieces, as I’ve done with my player rankings that drop weekly or so. But on the topic of reactive or analytical pieces, I admit I’ve been feeling a bit of a paralysis lately. Things have changed pretty rapidly week to week, and we can talk all we want about trends and underlying data, but there’s also the element of…we just don’t know what will happen, and we’re all pretty anxious at this point to reach the end of this and discover our fate.

As we experience this journey, I’ve seen every reaction you could think of, from “this shouldn’t be like this and damn everyone in control for putting us through this” to “actually, it’s pretty impressive we’re still here, all things considered.” Lately I’ve found myself thinking about that contrast of opinions specifically, and while I won’t set out to write in depth on any of this today, it’s left me with a few thoughts I think are worth digging into a little below:

The whole injury thing

It feels like it’s been a long time since we’ve been able to say Arsenal weren’t dealing with a weird number of injuries. Even Saturday, we lost Eze and Havertz and tails immediately tucked between legs, assuming that Kai was done for the season, taking with him any hope Arsenal have of winning anything.

But even that small thought in and of itself introduced a kind of cognitive dissonance we’ve been living with as a fanbase for the better part of two seasons. I posted a bit about it over the weekend, but we got Bukayo Saka back on Saturday after about a month on the shelf. We’re still waiting for Calafiori and Timber and Merino, but I’ll set them aside for now.

Saka is, to me, unquestionably the best player Arsenal have. That’s backed by the years-long panic that his current contract in any moment will be his last at Arsenal, lest we prove to him we can win things. And this weekend’s appearance was his first in the Premier League since March 14, his first in any Arsenal match since the EFL Cup final five matches ago.

Unbelievably, the player many once feared would be ground into dust under the thumb of Mikel Arteta has made just 22 Premier League starts this season, 32 across all competitions. He’s seventh among outfield players in minutes played, behind even Viktor Gyökeres. Even if Saka starts all of the maximum seven matches remaining this season, he would end this season on 69 all competitions starts (nice). For contrast, Federico Valverde has started 106 matches since the beginning of last season. Erling Haaland has started 89. Bruno Fernandes, whose club aren’t even in Europe this season, has started 86.

Of course, Arsenal have had other big injury issues. Martin Ødegaard has made 12 fewer starts than Saka this season and Kai Havertz has started 22 fewer — and to me, those three represent Arsenal’s first and second best attackers and their best creator, for what that’s worth. But just forgetting that for a second, whenever Arsenal come under the microscope for their performances of late, I find myself coming back to this Saka question. Using the above Haaland and Bruno as examples, what would we expect of City and United’s performances if they missed 20 more games than they had? Would we expect those sides to perform as they did with those players, in City’s case remaining in the Champions League and staying atop their domestic league? Would we expect United to remain favorites for third? And if not, why has the expectation for a Saka-less (and Ødegaard-less, for many of the same games) Arsenal to not only stay first, and stay in the Champions League, but to show out and offer their best form of the season? Food for thought.

Needless to say, keeping Saka on the pitch could be a big deal for what remains of the season. As we saw immediately upon his introduction Saturday, he makes a difference.

Reverting to how I began this section, it feels like Arsenal have dealt with a great deal of injuries over the past two seasons, right? I’ve even seen it suggested that this has gone on longer than that. To be clear, Arsenal have absolutely been injured a lot this season and last. Per Premier Injuries, the club suffered the fourth-most time-loss injuries last season (data not yet available for this campaign), but that’s where the outsized injury issues do end. In 23-24, Arsenal were second from bottom in time-loss injuries. In 22-23, third from bottom. As in, having the fewest.

But why does this keep happening? It’s not as simple as 1+1=2 (if it were, building such a deep squad would’ve fixed it), but one domino that has repeatedly set things into motion that needs to be acknowledged, as unsatisfying as it is — shit luck.

When Kai Havertz was clattered into in August, breaking bones in his knee that would keep him out until December or January, that wasn’t an overuse issue. In fact, he’d just come off the bench. Same for Ødegaard getting his ankle rolled in a friendly against Slovenia last season, or getting into a vicious knee-to-knee with Crysencio Summerville this season. And you don’t even need to mention how uncontrollable Mikel Merino’s collarbone or foot breaks in training or Gabriel Jesus’ and Jurrien Timber’s ACL tears were.

But those injuries, crappy luck as they were, came with knock-ons. Ødegaard missed a busy stretch last season at the same time as Merino with his collarbone. That thinned Arsenal’s midfield options and created a lot of work for Declan Rice and Kai Havertz, while also thinning Arsenal’s options at 9. When Timber tore his ACL, that created a body of work that likely contributed to Ben White’s thigh injury, which cost him time last season, further catapulting Timber into a big workload last season and this (and now he’s dealing with a muscle issue, naturally). Havertz’s contact injury this summer essentially forced Gyökeres and Jesus minutes that may not have even happened this season had things gone to plan, let alone driving reduced attacking output in the side.

I’ve certainly seen it suggested before that this could be addressed through squad build, adding more pieces, but it’s hard for me to get on board with the idea that Arsenal’s three left backs, three strikers, 8 or 9 midfielders, two very good right backs, etc., are a thing group. And while there’s been some sentiment that Kai Havertz is “glass” or Ødegaard can’t be relied upon, what’s happened these past two seasons is an outlier for both.

In fact, you may remember Havertz being praised by Mikel Arteta for almost never being injured just last season. And the 63 games he’s missed over the past two seasons are a shift from his career trends and then some.

Ditto Ødegaard, whose ankle roll cost him 14 games last season, as many or more games than he’d missed in every other season to date than one. By the way, as he’s gained a rep these days for being inconsistent…he also only missed one more game last season after returning in December.

But that’s then, this is now, right? Can these two be counted on? That’s the question Arsenal’s physios and front office will have to do their best detective work on to answer. Are Havertz’s knee injury — which accounts for nearly half of his time missed of late — and Ødegaard’s rolled ankle and clashed knee injury — more than half his time missed right there isolated incidents, or have they set off a chain of injury problems that do happen to some athletes as they age? Honestly, it’s impossible to say.

Ekeing it out

This is another one I touched on via social media earlier this weekend, but the concept of barely hanging on to wins has followed me throughout this season. The narrative even goes back to the good times, such as a 1-0 October win over Palace where Arsenal conceded 7 shots and less than half an expected goal - about half of that coming from one shot.

Or there’s a December win at Everton where Arsenal conceded five shots, the last coming at 78 minutes. A week later, Arsenal beat Brighton 2-1 in a match where the Seagulls took four shots after a very lucky bounce let them halve the lead in the 64th minute. These wins were largely dominant and involved Arsenal snuffing out chances on the other side but were not considered by many Arsenal fans and talking heads to be “Good Wins.”

We’ve seen this rise to prominence again lately, be it Arsenal’s controlled two-leg win over Sporting, the draw away to Leverkusen, against Chelsea in the Carabao, Saturday’s result or even the return leg with Brighton, where Arsenal defended a 1-0 lead for 81 minutes but Hurzeler’s men didn’t even get a shot off after the 69th minute.

It’s so, so easy to understand why it’s more fun to win by two goals or three (hell, four) rather than one. One is what an American football pundit might call a “one-possession game.” But digesting all of this information led me to post the below this past weekend:

As I said, like everyone else I will never prefer a one-goal win, particularly in the moment. But another thing worth thinking about - particularly as we enter an age of Premier League talent compression and the potential further reduction of overall goal production, especially from open play - is what under siege really looks like, versus closing out a mostly uneventful one-goal win.

(Note: I have thoughts about how this is impacting attackers’ output and whether players are actually “off” versus just facing more obstacles, but that’s for another day.)

Of course, all it takes is a moment, one mistake. But those come more frequently when you’re not snuffing out the majority of chances before they really get started.

What the heck is gonna happen?

Man, I wish I knew. But Saturday, whether you hated the performance or not, was a huge three points. 20% of what was available from there out. Newcastle are 14th but they’re good, and just got Bruno G back.

By the time the match with Fulham ends next Saturday, Arsenal will have played two matches more than City, just three to go. Potential is there to be six ahead when City-Everton kicks off on the 4th of May, but then City also play Brentford before Arsenal kick another PL ball. So you could go from tied, to six ahead, to tied again, in pretty short order.

It’s going to be a wild ride, with odds fluctuating too much for comfort, and too many scenarios and permutations to count. The biggest thing at this point is to just win…no style points up for grabs here.

Arsenal finally took the big swing on an attacker this past offseason, signing their first number 9 since Kai Haver — er, Gabriel Jesus in 2022. And while seemingly all anyone ever wants is “big guy, kick ball hard,” some of the more refined elements of a striker’s game have been largely missing this season - the ability to consistently hold up play without losing the ball, getting on the end of crosses in the air and making deft movements in the box, to name a few.

Not all of that stuff is easy to measure through a formula, which is why I put a ton of weight on actual film study as well. Last summer that led me in a different direction than what Arsenal did, though the old version of the ADAM formula made the same recommendation.

So, how about going forward? It’s possible Arsenal could move for a new attacker this offseason, and if they decide they’re not done at the number 9 spot, some of the names below will certainly come up.

As per usual, things to keep in mind as you read: This is based on stats, and stats aren’t always perfect. I have always encouraged watching the games for yourself rather than creating an entire opinion based off only the numbers.

The final rank is based on full two-season score, with guys in the top 25 fitting your standard profile for “transfer-friendly age,” which is usually slightly pre-prime. Let’s get into it!

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I am not going to bury the lede here and stick the different outcomes down at the bottom because we all want to know how things look coming into and how they could look coming out of this match.

With the latest injury updates that assume quite a few absences for Arsenal and relatively healthy Manchester City team. That factor closes the gap for this game pretty significantly and combined with this match at the Etihad, City will be slight favorites to win more often but with Arsenal getting a result (which is all they need here) basically a 50-60% chance.

This diverges pretty significantly from the betting odds this week. The markets have become much more bullish on Manchester City than the computer models, perhaps buying into the narrative that Arsenal are bottling it or that Pep has figured it all out. The odds as of Friday morning have this as 51% for a Manchester City win, 26% for a draw and 23% for an Arsenal win. That’s still roughly 50/50 for a result for Arsenal but that’s a pretty significant departure from my odds (or Opta’s).

The difference between how the computer models and the mood around the teams will make this next graphic diverge similarly to the match odds. This will show the changes to the title odds for Arsenal and Manchester City depending on the outcome of the match.

The latest simulation run has Arsenal’s odds of winning the title at an uncomfortably high 79.6%.

Even if with a loss, Arsenal and Man City would be tied on potential points, with both having a max of 85 if the won out but my model would slightly favor Arsenal from that spot. That obviously does not count any sort of change in belief or confidence that this match could give the teams or any of the other intangibles.

The major driver for this is that the remaining schedule favors Arsenal.

Manchester City don’t have Champions League matches, but they will still have a busy schedule with the FA Cup pushing matches into midweek. Everton, Brentford, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace, and Aston Villa are matches where City would be favored but they aren’t push overs and if this Premier League season has taught us anything, it is that there are no easy games here. No one wants this scenario as an Arsenal fan, but it’s not title over even if the team loses (even if the reaction would be that).

For Arsenal a draw is nearly as good as a win. That would make it so that Arsenal would need a combination of 13 points won or dropped by City to clinch the title. Again, with the schedule on paper favoring them, that would be a pretty clear path. Given Arsenal’s incentives and form, I fully expect that they will have no problem playing to not lose in this match.

A win is simply the best overall, that would mean that it is just 10 points won or dropped by City to clinch the title. This wouldn’t END the title race, but it would put it on serious life support.

Now let’s get back into more of the regular programing, getting the stats low down on the opposition here.

Manchester City Performance

This has been an unusual season for Man City, they have tried out a number of different ways of playing and not always looked great trying to figure things out. They have been a strong attacking team (even if they are not nearly as good as previous teams) but they haven’t figure out fully how to stop teams.

For the season, they have been consistently in the good but not elite range.

Looking at things from a match-by-match basis, you can see that they have been a fairly consistently good team, but they haven’t been able to consistently blow teams away like they have in the past and they still have the ability for teams to exploit them if they aren’t at their best, with some uncharacteristic comprehensive losses.

Overall, that has put them in a good position but for the season as a whole, they are ever so slightly below Arsenal.

Manchester City Form

This section is the one that will cause the most grief for Arsenal fans.

Arsenal have not played as bad as perhaps the mood would make it feel like; dropping back from clearly the best team in the League level down towards the good to very good level. In contrast, Manchester City are doing their, find form at the end of the season thing and have looked quite strong.

Depending on the end points you want to use this can look better or worse, but a happy medium of recent form and still good sample size would be eight matches. This generally balances out some of the schedule difficulty, game state and general variance enough to capture what we want looking at the form.

Here is what that looks like on the weighted xG and goals chart.

Here is how the last eight matches have played out on a running basis for Manchester City vs the teams that they were playing.

The matches against Spurs and Liverpool to start this off were not the strongest for them, but everything in the league since then has been fairly dominate. Here are the last matches broken up game by game.

For this same time period, here are then non-penalty shots for and against.

This shows that Manchester City are in a good spot overall right now. Arsenal’s numbers aren’t bad over this run, but you can see that the team isn’t in their best overall period.

Doing a direct comparison for the teams on the attack and defense radar, illustrates this.

The inclusion of the Cups and Champions League helps Arsenal look a bit closer (and that has been a good portion of the matches recently) but this is still a less than rosy overall picture.

Arsenal to get a result here, will need to buck the current trend a bit overall.

Style Comparison

We are all familiar enough with Manchester City that there shouldn’t be anything surprising here. They play a similar style to Arsenal, high possession and deliberate play. Given the incentives and setting,

I would expect that Sunday’s match will play out with Manchester City controlling more of the possession with Arsenal looking to exploit chances on the counter.

It will be interesting to see if Arsenal are better able to execute then they were in the League Cup final. Even though that match didn’t go how we would have wanted, the opportunities were there for Arsenal to hurt City, they just didn’t come off. They will need to make them count here.

I can’t deny that I am nervous for this match, and it feels like there is so much on the line. Not just for the title, but for the fanbase to not tear itself apart. The loss against Bournemouth already was a major blow and even with the team advancing to the Champions League semi-final, the confidence has not returned.

Every bump in the road has been a crisis for us as fans, and it has made for a less fun season that you think it would have given the results and the place that Arsenal finds itself. I have expected this since the summer but that hasn’t really helped it not feel bad to be ingrained in the Arsenal world.

If the worst happens, I know logically and the numbers will back me up that it isn’t over, but the negativity will be so high that I almost certainly will have to turn off all of the notifications online. Honestly, I am dreading that more than anything else and that is raising my anxiety about this match.

Hopefully the result is positive, and we don’t have to deal with that dark path. This is probably the biggest match of Arteta’s tenure at Arsenal for what it would mean both good and bad for the future. Here’s to crossing the fingers that we are looking good Sunday afternoon.

Scott and Adam process a deflating loss to Bournemouth and answer the questions that you provided.

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The conversation starts with the lineup. Neither host saw the announcement until moments before kickoff, and both were caught off guard by the absences of Odegaard, Saka, and Timber — none of whom even made the bench. With a midfield built around Rice and Zubimendi and Havertz dropped into a striker-adjacent role, the left side chemistry with Martinelli never clicked, and Arsenal struggled to generate open-play xG as a result.

The first Bournemouth goal gets a close look: a defensive lapse in the space behind the right back, Ben White caught too central, and a Saliba clearance that agonizingly found the back of the net anyway. Both-things-can-be-true verdict: an avoidable situation that still required a bounce to go wrong.

Despite the loss, Scott and Adam push back on doom narratives. Arsenal led the league in big chances in this match week, and have scored more three-goal games than any other side since December. The vibes around this team, both agree, are genuinely different from the dread-filled early kickoffs of the Emery era.

The Q&A covers Havertz’s best position when the attack is at full strength, and closes with a summer transfer discussion: what type of forward does Arsenal actually need, and which profile fits the left wing.

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I think that there is some truth to the sentiment but largely I think this is a reflection of the pressure of being in a title race (without having won one recently). Given that Arsenal have failed to get over the hump going on 22 years, there is a general disposition to worry in the fanbase, and there is a subset of people looking for reasons why the worst will happen.

Arsenal’s first real bad streak of the season with back-to-back cup exits didn’t help and that highlighted some valid concerns about where the team is currently but it has also brought out some overreaction and over-indexing on the most recent matches as signals to override the bigger picture with the team.

I heard plenty of it given that my model has put Arsenal at 95% to win the Premier League and just wrote about how the end-of-season run-in was favorable to Arsenal plus the different odds of where and when Arsenal could win the League.

It’s easy to be negative and it will give you a nice bump in engagement on social media, but the reality is still much more positive than the “vibe”. This is a good opportunity to do some level-setting and provide context.

The form since the turn of the year

I went through some of this on the most recent KPI updates post but I think that it is still worth reiterating here. Arsenal’s overall form for the season is strong and while it is down a bit currently, it is still the strongest in the League.

If I was playing armchair psychologist this would be where I dug deeper and where I suspect the main issue lies. The anxiety is less about what Arsenal are doing and the overall performances and more about 22 years of near-misses conditioning fans to expect failure. The media has labeled Arsenal as bottlers, often unfairly, and even if we want to fight against that, hearing this constantly seeps into nearly everyone’s thinking.

Arsenal HAVE seen their overall production drop off since the start of the new year in the Premier League (a bit less so in all competitions), the key part that should alleviate some of the worry is that they are still the strongest team in the League even in this diminished form.

The drop off here is concentrated in the attack, with the defense staying consistently strong.

Focusing only on the League also excludes half of the matches that Arsenal have played this calendar year and when you include that the picture isn’t quite as worrying.

There is still a decline in the numbers but overall, it’s more modest.

I have been pretty consistent this season with the view that Arsenal’s attack is closer to good than elite and that was very much the case at the start of the year. Early in the season, Arsenal’s set play dominance carried them closer to that elite standard but since the start of 2026 it has been much closer to that “good” level all around.

This season has also seen a league-wide decline in attacking metrics that make it tough to use our typical shortcuts of looking at the last few Champions as a measuring stick.

This season has been a sharp break from the trends of the past. It’s too early to say if it is a one-off or the start of something new; but there is no debate that it has been different than we are used to seeing. Even so, with the league being different, there are a few numbers within the longer-term trend for Arsenal’s performance that are concerning and worth flagging.

This is again from my KPI expectations article, where I’d point to things that for me, are associated with Arsenal’s ability to control a match and their ability to squeeze a team. This style has grown to be my platonic ideal for what the best Arteta Arsenal looks like, and I have felt like it has been missing lately.

The ability to get the ball into the opposition final third and keep it there has fallen. Arsenal over the last 4-5 seasons have been jokingly called Field Tilt FC and while there isn’t anything overly amazing about this metric, it is associated pretty strongly with winning and dominating matches. I know that I have felt less comfortable with Arsenal not able to pin teams back and that has shown up in the numbers.

The other numbers are associated with this final third dominance as well, the team has had recurring issues where they are struggling to create shots (especially from open play) or even complete passes into dangerous locations that should be leading to these shots.

Some of this could be tactical, with teams moving to a more man-to-man heavy defensive scheme combined with a well-drilled low block, the space in the final third is at a premium. One way that you can try to manufacture space, is playing more in the middle third passing backwards and laterally trying to draw a team out. This has also seen Arsenal more willing to play matches where the possession is closer to even than they were in the past. I think the reasons are similar, if the other team is coming out with the ball that potentially opens up counter-attacking options.

None of this is “bad” on its own. It is just different and it might be part of a transition to something new for Arsenal. Teams can be quite good playing like this and employing these strategies, we just haven’t associated Arsenal at their recent best with this style.

Putting it in context

This isn’t uniformly negative on the trend, and again if you look at the bigger picture beyond just the League it is closer to “normal” but this is a good spot to stop and say, “so how does everyone else look?”

Using my old favorite, the weighted xG and Goals charts we can look at the overall Premier League and where Arsenal have fit inside of this and compared to the rivals.

For the first half of the season, Arsenal were the overall strongest team on the combined weighted xG+Goal difference; they had by far the best defensive numbers and backed that up with the second-best attacking numbers.

Manchester City and Arsenal were the strongest teams on this and have deservedly been the teams in the title race all season long here.

Since the start of 2026, there has been a pretty big shift in the overall numbers and rankings within the League. In the 12 matches played in this span, Arsenal remain the strongest overall team but they have seen their gap to the rest of the chasing pack close up.

Arsenal still have the strongest overall defensive numbers but the gap to a resurgent Manchester United is smaller than it was previously. The attacking numbers haven’t actually dropped much and they are still right around 2nd best but it is in a similar range to Manchester City and Liverpool now, with Chelsea having the strongest overall numbers.

Interestingly, the team that everyone is most worried about in Manchester City haven’t closed the gap at all on Arsenal, and have actually fallen back even further on the weighted xG+Goals numbers. Since the start of the calendar year, they have dropped into the group of good but flawed teams fighting for Champions League spots.

Taking the numbers out of the overall aggregation doesn’t change the analysis much if at all.

The turn of the year starts with Arsenal’s 20th match played this season in the League and you can see that the numbers are down a bit from what the team was doing in the first 19 matches of the season with a few more down or just okay performances but nothing that drastically has altered the trend or suggested that the team has taken a major step backwards.

Where do we go from here?

The dream of the quadruple/treble was fun, even if it was always a long shot, and it really hurts to have been dumped out of both Cups in back-to-back matches.

If we are being honest, as much as we love the cups, they were not the prizes that were going to define the season as a success or failure. This season was built to win now, but the club almost certainly had their eye on ending the Premier League drought and trying to grab the elusive Champions League title that is a massive hole in the team’s trophy collection.

The two biggest prizes are still in front of the team. The losses have shaken our confidence but they really haven’t meaningfully moved the probability for the team winning the League (from 90% to 87%) and Arsenal’s first leg victory in Portugal gives them a very real chance of advancing to their second consecutive Champions League semi-final.

I am still overall impressed with just how consistent Arsenal have played this season. Arsenal’s five-match moving average of weighted goal difference has been between +0.7 and +1.7 all season and the current performance level matches the overall season average.

The highs this season have been quite good but perhaps just short of the level that drives the imaginations for a title-winning team. What this team has avoided however is the real low lows; there just haven’t been runs of form that have seen the team implode or look vulnerable to a challenger surpassing them.

The Champions League is its own thing, small samples in a knockout tournament make the margins incredibly fine. Arsenal wouldn’t be a big underdog and could realistically beat anyone but it is so much more of a lottery. The Premier League, however, rewards consistency over the marathon of a 10-month season. This has been Arsenal’s strength all season long, and this is what continues to make me believe that they will make it over the line. This is one of the most grueling tests of a team, and the League will be where the season is defined.

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More than a few Arsenal players have dropped out of their international commitments this break, which is never comfortable to see and could complicate things if they are truly unable to contribute. However, my more optimistic and grounded in how this has gone with players in the past read of this, is that they know exactly what's coming and want to be ready for it.

Remaining Fixtures for the Run In

Arsenal have seven Premier League matches left, and how things shake out over the next two months will define this season. Here's how my team ratings assess the remaining schedules across the league.

With the final rounds of the FA Cup the future schedule dates will get complicated and move around with teams having games in hand to make up but that shouldn’t alter the overall difficulty too much beyond stacking things up potentially towards the end.

Arsenal have the 14th toughest remaining schedule. The biggest test is obviously the trip to Manchester but the Bournemouth and Newcastle home matches aren’t guaranteed points (there really aren’t too many of these in this version of the Premier League).

Manchester City have the 8th toughest remaining schedule with the back-to-back Chelsea and Arsenal matches looking very tough for them but with a potentially tricky final few matches to close out the season.

Arsenal vs City’s Remaining Schedule

The biggest difference however between Arsenal and Manchester City right now is that because City couldn’t get past Real Madrid in the Champions League, they will not have the next two midweeks filled with a quarterfinal, nor do they have a potential semi-final at the end of April.

I wouldn’t trade that position because I want to see Arsenal try and win the Champions League but it does simplify things for City to avoid a high-pressure midweek match ahead of their Premier League matches.

Here is what the end of season schedule looks with the FA Cup and Champions League dates included.

I have taken a guess at when Manchester City’s postponed round 31 match against Crystal Palace might fall but that will probably depend on the result of their match against Liverpool this weekend.

I have also highlighted the round 34 and 37 matches because these are the dates for the FA Cup semi-final and final and if either team makes it that far these will also move to one of the open midweek slots. It could get a bit congested here at the end of the season.

Some of these final matches can be tough to rate. The varying levels of how much it matters can really screw with things and you can get the classic “on the beach” scenario for what might be a tricky match or an incredibly motivated and desperate team that is fighting for safety or European placement.

Overall, looking at the expectations and the current gap it makes sense why Arsenal are heavy favorites in the Premier League. Manchester City’s max points is 85 if they run the table and that matches Arsenal’s average points right now. To have a chance at the title Manchester City realistically need 22 or 24 points out of their final 24 available here, that would put them at 83 or 85 points. These are still totals Arsenal don’t need to be perfect to beat but anything less and the chances dip significantly.

We have seen Manchester City go on long winning runs but that is now quite a ways in the past. This season, City’s longest winning streak in the League is 6 matches. The last time that they put together a streak of 8 wins was the end of the 2024 season where they won their final 9 matches. If they want to try and pip Arsenal they will have to find that form again but even still it would need Arsenal slipping up.

This season Manchester City have averaged 16.8 points over each 8-match span, they have 21 points twice that includes mostly the same matches on either side of Christmas. They will have to be better than they have been at any other point this season and even then it might not be enough.

Arsenal’s form isn’t sparkling, but it isn’t really as bad as perhaps it might feel like. Arsenal have been one of the strongest and most consistent team’s in Europe this season. Looking at their results this season and you just don’t see many times where the opposition got the better of them.

If you wanted to say that Arsenal have been on the weaker side lately, I wouldn’t fight you too hard about it.

The overall trend for the performance numbers make this claim defensible, but I would ask relative to what? Relative to the amazing team that they were previously because that’s true, but relative to the other teams that they are up against? No that isn’t true.

If there was another team that was on top form and breathing down Arsenal’s neck I might not have the same current confidence but there isn’t.

If Arsenal match what they did in these same fixtures last season they will win the League. Arsenal went 5-1-1 in these fixtures (losing to Bournemouth and drawing with City) and a repeat of that would put Arsenal at 86 points.

This season, over 7 match stretches, Arsenal have averaged 15.4 points and that is basically all they need to do again. They don’t need to play any better or different than they have all year long to make it so that they don’t even need to depend on Manchester City dropping points.

How Much the City vs Arsenal Head-to-Head Changes Things

Now let’s get into the fun of trying to figure out how much a couple different scenarios could move the overall odds.

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What a joy it is to do a ranking in a position where nobody thinks anyone on Arsenal is disappointing.

Quite the opposite, in fact - Gabriel and Saliba aren’t perfect, but they’re probably (definitely?) the league’s best — and probably Europe’s best — CB tandem, and the numbers do appear to back that up. Well done, numbers.

As per usual, things to keep in mind as you read: This is based on stats, and stats aren’t always perfect. I have always encouraged watching the games for yourself rather than creating an entire opinion based off only the numbers. This is at its most true when we’re talking about defensive abilities, so keep that in mind.

The final rank is based on full two-season score, with guys in the top 25 fitting your standard profile for “transfer-friendly age,” which is usually slightly pre-prime.

Okey dokey, let’s get into it!

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Being a person who doesn’t loathe VAR these days feels like an uncomfortable and minority opinion.

A new survey published this week by the Football Supporters’ Association puts some numbers behind that feeling. In the response, nearly three-quarters of the fans that took the survey came out against the current implementation of Video Review.

When asked ‘taking all things into consideration, do you support the use of VAR in football?’ 75.7% of fans replied ‘No’…

These findings back up the FSA’s previous survey in 2021, where fans expressed misgivings about the introduction of VAR.

The vast majority are reporting the same concerns five years on – the loss of spontaneity when celebrating goals, and an overall worsening of the match going experience.

Spending time around fans and this isn’t a shocking revelation. There is clear frustration with referees in general and VAR in particular. I do think however that it is worth examining deeper into what this survey is and isn't telling us.

The FSA's respondents skew heavily toward older match going fans, a group that trends more conservative toward change and more skeptical of new technology, who also have the worst VAR experience by design, given the lack of replays (a very dumb choice and something that can be fixed) and poor in-stadium communication (although maybe better with the announcements). And like any opt-in survey, it over-indexes on people with strong feelings, because indifference or mild satisfaction doesn't fill out online forms.

That doesn't make the data wrong, it makes it a precise measurement of a specific, activated audience. The headline number, 75% opposing VAR, should be read as the ceiling of opposition among engaged fans, not a census of the whole watching public.

This might overstate the extent to which this is a problem with all fans, it does show that there is an underlying frustration, but I think the details on how the support breaks down with different support for the different usage of technology exposes something more interesting: fans do support technology correcting errors. They just hate this implementation.

I think that this is also something that shows that with the laws of the game and the general “unwritten” interpretations complicate the ability to officiate this game in a satisfactory way.

Fans Aren't Anti-Technology, They're Anti-Subjectivity

The overwhelming support for goal-line technology, with 93% of these same fans supporting its use, plus a near 50/50 split on the usage of offside technology (semi-automated makes a big difference here) show that even people that would skew anti-technology usage are not a monolith in being against the usage of technology to improve accuracy.

Where things break down is when we start getting into more subjective decisions and that is a direct reflection of the rulebook not giving definite black and white lines for most calls and the unwritten rules of how the game has been called a major issue for consistency.

This is evident with the magical place called the penalty box. You can have clear situations where contact that would be an uncontroversial foul just outside the penalty box is something that becomes a coin flip. This is because a foul inside the box gives a team a near certain goal, but it makes a mockery of trying to call a consistent game as a referee.

The result is a different standard inside the box than outside it. That inconsistency doesn't live in the rulebook and you won’t find any reference to it when you read through the laws of the game or any of the supplemental documentation. This is something that referees invented and that VAR has inherited.

This is not in the laws of the game; there is no special “well it’s in the penalty area” clause that raises the level of contact required for a foul to have happened but that is how the game is called, most of the time. This also can make using VAR difficult in the situations where a soft foul is actually given, we fall back to that this is technically a foul, and the VAR won’t hold it to the standards of most other similar situations from the season or even the same match.

This isn’t exclusive to penalty box incidents either, the classic example that always gets me upset is the defender who is in trouble and under pressure who feels the slightest nudge or tap falling over. The referee will give them this bailout call with incredible regularity but the reverse situation with an attacker holding off a defender will not be given that kind of soft touch foul. Again, this can be “technically” correct and defended but makes for inherent inconsistency in the game.

The more subjective the call, the less fans want VAR involved, not because they want errors, but because they know human reviewers have the same issues of trying to enforce a rulebook that doesn’t give us black and white lines. Even something like the Key Match Incidents Panel will often see split votes on if something was or wasn’t a foul/red card/penalty. Unlike a goal/no goal, ball out/in, or player offside/onside decision where there is a yes or no answer, we don’t have that with fouls and that’s not helped by the ways that the laws are written.

This feeds into one of the biggest issues that people have with VAR, that it dampens the spontaneous joy of goal celebrations. I don’t fully connect with this and have not found that I celebrate Arsenal scoring any less, but I understand that this could be an issue for people. The part of VAR that people dislike the most is when it gets into these subjective and inconsistently enforced areas.

It can look and feel like they are looking for ways to disallow a goal and in a low scoring sport that’s brutal. It hurts to have a goal taken away but this is often downstream of the change to play on and review it after, we don’t have the watching a legitimate goal wiped out by a clearly wrong offside flag with no recourse situation anymore.

The subjective calls are always going to be tough and controversial. If you take a foul/no foul play and ask 100 people about it, it would be a pretty rare situation to have all 100 agree. This is a legitimate problem and leads to more time without the game being played, but I think that there are ways that we can do even more to address this and make the system work better.

Refinement, Not Removal

Only 18.3% of the respondents in the survey believe VAR has improved accuracy and that is kind of shocking to me. I believe that these people are reaching a conclusion that the evidence doesn’t support, and I think it tells us more about perception of VAR than the reality.

We know that people like and trust goal-line technology but that is almost now just built in and isn’t viewed as something that has helped improve accuracy. People may not always love close offside calls (and hated the drawing the lines process) but there is no doubt that this has increased the accuracy of these calls, and situations of a player getting incorrectly flagged as offside or scoring from a clear offside position takes a massive blunder rather than it being an every week occurrence.

I think you can even say that clear missed red card type decisions are much better now than they were in the past, these are still subjective calls but the benefit of additional angles and seeing things more than a single time at match speed has led to more correct decisions.

It would be a mistake to lose these important improvements in accuracy, and this is where reform and tweaks to the system should prevail over scrapping the whole thing entirely.

I’d love to see a change to the laws of the game that can give us clearer, more objective rules, that can be evenly applied all over the field and equally to all players. That’s probably unrealistic and we will never truly be able to remove the subjectivity and judgement from this.

Barring that, I think that you can get better outcomes with either better setting of what a clear and obvious error is or moving towards a challenge system.

The current clear and obvious error bar doesn’t seem to work very well. It is something that just seems to add another level of subjectivity and judgement where getting to consistent implementation is going to be hard.

I believe that a system where the referee describes what they saw and the reasoning for the call to the VAR and if that matches what the different angles show then the call is upheld. If it doesn’t that should trigger that they go look at the monitor and see the other angles, I don’t think that they should always change their call like we see now after these reviews.

An example of this is a challenge in the box, where the referee has waved away a penalty. They tell the video assistant, “I saw the player make cleanly tackle the ball and won it fairly and that is not a foul” and if the replay shows that the player didn’t make contact or that they went through the attacker first that would trigger a review at the monitor.

This would probably lead to a few more times where the referee needs to go to the monitor and if we don’t want that I am okay with it and that is where I think a challenge system could work better.

Nearly half of respondents here thought a challenge system would worth exploring and I agree here. This can cut down on some of the constant uncertainty, and it moves the responsibility from the VAR to make a judgement call and these subjective decision to each team.

How many challenges and how the process works would still need to be worked out but I can see real upsides to this proposal. My personal proposal is you get one challenge per match, if you win it, you keep it. I don’t know if this is perfect and I would want to see it tested out in real life scenarios, the details matter but the principle is sound. This limits the overall scope, adds drama, adds strategy and keeps decisions with the on-field referee.

Ultimately, the goal is making VAR more like goal-line technology: fast, clear, binary where possible. VAR isn’t perfect and that is much more because the VAR problems are human problems. If you remove VAR from the game, you don't remove the errors. You just make them permanent and lose the gains in accuracy that we have seen.

It hasn’t been a panacea that fixed everything in the game, but it should have never been viewed as trying to do that. It has been a net positive to the game overall but it can and should still be made to work better.

Even though this won’t be super pretty, this remains one of my favorite re-occurring posts that I look at over the course of the season. It gives us a nice grounding and sense of context while providing a view for how the season has evolved.

The Premier League as a whole has shifted quickly towards a new way of playing and that makes much of the stats here look outdated or like poor measures but I don’t like changing things mid season so we roll on with what I set out with back in the summer.

If you’re new here, before the season I go through the key stats (points, goals, expected goals, deep completions, open play shots, and field tilt) and set a baseline for what I would consider a success. These are based on historical performances, and they are set at what teams who have won the title have done. The expectations are high but that is what required to win the title.

The overall headline numbers are rough, but I do think that this is a reflection of the Premier League as a whole rather than Arsenal specifically.

Let’s dig into the nitty gritty here.

Points

Season Avg: 2.25 per match

Last 10 Avg: 2.1 per match

Season Goal: 2.43 per match (92-point pace)

↗️ Arsenal are on top of the table on 86-point pace.

It’s below the target I set at the beginning of the season but has put them into a good overall position where if they maintain that they win the League for the first time in two decades.

Goals

Goals For

Season Avg: 2.03 per match

Last 10 Avg: 2.3 per match

Season Goal: 2.27 per match

Goals Against

Season Avg: 0.71 per match

Last 10 Avg: 0.8 per match

Season Goal: 0.77 per match

Goal Difference

Season Avg: 1.32 per match

Last 10 Avg: 1.5 per match

Season Goal: 1.59 per match

➡️Arsenal lead the Premier League in goals scored (2nd for goals per match), lead the League with the fewest goals allowed, and have the best overall goal difference.

The numbers are below historical norms for goals scored and overall difference but there isn’t a team that is doing it better than them in the League right now. It’s a “miss” for the targets but it really isn’t in the context of the season.

Expected Goals

Non-Penalty Expected Goals

Season Avg: 1.65 per match

Last 10 Avg: 1.77 per match

Season Goal: 1.93 per match

Non-Penalty Expected Goals Against

Season Avg: 0.75 per match

Last 10 Avg: 0.79 per match

Season Goal: 0.78 per match

Non-Penalty Expected Goal Difference

Season Avg: 0.9 per match

Last 10 Avg: 0.97 per match

Season Goal: 1.15 per match

➡️ Arsenal are just a bit off of the pace overall for the expected numbers, but this is similar to how things are playing out with the goals numbers. Arsenal have the most expected goals this season, they have the fewest expected goals allowed, and by far the best overall xG difference.

Open Play Shots

Open Play Shots For

Season Avg: 10.2 per match

Last 10 Avg: 9.5 per match

Season Goal: 12.89 per match

Open Play Shots Against

Season Avg: 5.8 per match

Last 10 Avg: 5.7 per match

Season Goal: 5.52 per match

Open Play Shot Difference

Season Avg: 4.45 per match

Last 10 Avg: 3.8 per match

Season Goal: 7.37 per match

↘ A lot of these metrics move in similar directions, but this is one that is lagging behind both goals and expected goals.

This has improved as the season has progressed but overall, the shot volume, especially from open play, has been a major outlier compared to previous League winners and even within the League this season Arsenal rank just 4th.

Deep Completions

Deep Completions For

Season Avg: 21.87 per match

Last 10 Avg: 22.5 per match

Season Goal: 28.79 per match

Deep Completions Against

Season Avg: 10.71 per match

Last 10 Avg: 10.3 per match

Season Goal: 10.68 per match

Deep Completion Difference

Season Avg: 11.16 per match

Last 10 Avg: 12.2 per match

Season Goal: 18.11 per match

↘ I have been worried about this basically all season long for Arsenal being able to generate attacking threat and it just hasn’t really improved.

Again, this is part of a League wide trend and not exclusive to Arsenal but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Arsenal have also missed the player that has been the best at this over the last few years in Martin Odegaard for significant stretches this season. That probably doesn’t help with the overall numbers here.

Field Tilt

Season Avg: 61.0% per match

Last 10 Avg: 50.8% per match

Season Goal: 71.61% per match

↘ Maybe it doesn’t matter but what happened to field tilt FC?

Overall

This is the time of the season where we all care a bit less about the performance and become much more about the results.

Before we fully switch over, it is nice to get a sense of where things stand and I think that while off the pace of the average winner of recent vintage, this current Arsenal team is standing up fairly well.

I looked deeper into this as questions were swirling about if they would be among the worst ever and given the context and strength of the current Premier League it is a pretty clear and easy no.

I think that we can have something similar with many of these key performance indicators and how they are comparing to previous winners.

Scott and Adam are back to break down Arsenal’s League Cup Final loss to Manchester City and what it means.

If you are a premium subscriber, you can listen to an ad-free version through Substack or you can add to your preferred podcast app through the personal RSS feed.

Add the RSS Feed Here (copy the link) to the podcast player of your choice or click here to listen to the episode directly in your browser, through apple, or below through Spotify:

They push back on the post-match doom, arguing Arsenal’s low-tempo approach wasn’t a failure; it was a deliberate game plan built around missing Odegaard, Eze, and Martinelli. Without your A, B, and C options for getting between the lines, you adapt. City executed better on the day, but this wasn’t a tactical masterclass dismantling.

They also zoom out: Arsenal won the two matches that actually mattered that week, and the League Cup was always the fourth priority. Nobody’s consoling themselves with a Carabao Cup if the Premier League and Champions League are still on the table. One loss, the fourth of the season and the first by more than a goal, doesn’t change the trajectory of a title race.

The episode closes with a look ahead, covering injury cover options, Saka’s potential midfield role, Odegaard’s return timeline, and what rotation might look like for Southampton and Sporting. The international break, annoying as it always is, might be exactly what this squad needs heading into the run-in.

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It has been just about a week now since Arsenal lost in the League Cup Final to Manchester City and there hasn’t been anything posted here on Cannon Stats about it.

That isn’t because I was too miserable to post about it, or that I don’t want to post when things don’t go right or that I am a shill for the club who can’t or won’t be negative about anything Arsenal.

I (and I think that Adam shares this as well) try to stay pretty positive about Arsenal, especially when the longer-term performances point me in that direction. It’s painful to write about a loss, especially one of the most complete performances an opponent has played against Arsenal this season.

I like to think of myself as an even keeled fellow where I don’t get too high when things are going great, nor too low when they are going poorly; that can sometimes come across as contrarian but that is never my goal.

Today, I finally got around to being able to do a proper watching of the match and I thought I would share some thoughts. Mostly I want to keep it on the bigger picture and the longer term than get to dragged into the details for something that happened a week ago and was a one-off match.

One thing that I thought before the match (and retweeted a post that I thought was very good) and I think that we should keep in mind here, let’s not over index and fit the narrative for the rest of the season around this single match.

It is/was important but if we are being realistic, it is the least important of the competitions that we are in this season. Arsenal had a three-match run with very high stakes in Everton, Leverkusen, and this final. If you had asked me (and probably most fans) to pick two matches to win and one to lose, it’s painful to lose a final but that is probably the one here, favoring the Premier League and Champions League.

Before I get too much further into things, I did find the analysis done by Adrian Clarke and Adam Clery excellent here for the match if you haven’t already seen it and are still looking into things.

The Match

I think that for me the best place to start here is with the running expected threat from the match. I think that this paints a nice illustration of the momentum and overall flow here.

For much of the first match, there wasn’t too much from either team. The first 20 minutes favored Arsenal a bit and this is where they had their best chance to score but this wasn’t sustained pressure by any means.

Manchester City also didn’t really have much in the way of threat until they got a good cross into the box as the first half was ending.

The second half in this match is where things got ugly and ultimately where the match was decided.

I don’t believe that there were massive tweaks to the strategy from either team that made this play out in the way that it did, rather I think that this was much of the same general structure and plan from both teams but with poor execution from Arsenal and to be fair to Manchester City really nicely taken opportunities from them as well.

Overall, this match to my eye saw Arsenal chose to try and play a more off the ball and transition style game for better or worse. This was a match where they had spells of possession, but I don’t think that they came in with the mindset of wanting to dominate that ball or use the ball to control the match.

Arsenal came in with a specific plan, perhaps due to the absence of their most creative midfielders and to try and exploit a weakness that has caused City problems all season long, playing fast and playing direct.

For the season Arsenal have played at a 1.95 progressive yards per second pace. They have been one of the slowest teams at moving the ball down the field. In this match they played at a significantly faster pace, trying to get the ball forward at nearly every opportunity and played at a 2.5 progressive yards per second pace.

Outside of a few restarts from goal kicks (where we saw a lot of the 4-man defensive screen from City) this was not a ponderous, probing possession game from Arsenal and I think that was a choice that was made to try and test if City had the ability to stop direct play.

For much of the season, I have seen our fans want to see something closer to this. To see the team willing to take more risk, to get the ball up the field quickly before the defense is settled, trust that the defenders that we rave about can clean up a mess or two and that anyway that could be balanced out by more on the attacking end. This was a solid plan, it was just lacking in a few fine points of execution.

Even in the period where the match is lost, there are moments where it takes a good play from City to stop something potentially dangerous from Arsenal.

Here is a moment in the 53rd minute after a flick on from Havertz where the ball falls to Rice where Arsenal have a 3 on 4 situation and City in an unstructured defensive situation.

It ends up rolling just too far in front of him to control it and make a play but the resulting loose ball nearly still falls to Saka open into space where he could have been 1v1 with the keeper.

Or here is a situation in the 56th minute where after riding some pressure from City where they bent but didn’t break, the ball is at Trossard’s feet and Arsenal have a potential situation where they can have superior numbers on the break.

His pass is poor and Ake beats Saka to the spot. The opportunity to do something dangerous is there but poorly executed.

Here is another one a few seconds later. This follows Zubimendi making a nice headed pass following a blocked shot that potentially sets up Havertz on the break again.

Havertz takes a big touch trying to go fast and it leaves just enough room for Matheus Nunes to come in and make the saving tackle.

I'm not arguing Arsenal played well because they didn't. But they were playing a deliberate, specific way, and the margins that decided the match were finer than the scoreline suggested. They had moments that could have turned the game, and if they executed them or the ball bounces just slightly differently maybe we are talking about an entirely different narrative of the match.

Instead of wow, the relentless pressure of Manchester City kept Arsenal pinned back and suffocated them until they scored becomes the soft underbelly of Manchester City and the naïveté of pushing too many players forwards left room that Arsenal ruthlessly exploited.

These are the fine margins of a Cup Final. I believe that Arsenal are generally better than Manchester City but the gap is not so large that if the team fails to execute their game plan at a high level and make a critical error that it can be overcome.

The Bigger Picture

I have already said that I don’t believe that there is too much that we should try and read from this match. If Arsenal do or don’t go on to accomplish winning any of the bigger prizes this season, I have a hard time placing any major weight on what specifically happened in this match as a reason.

I don’t think that this gives teams a blueprint for how to beat Arsenal going forward. I think that this exploited missing of the strength that David Raya’s passing gives Arsenal playing out from the back and was a day where players that can and should execute better just failed to do it.

I don’t think that this will see the team’s mentality and confidence crumble. It’s no doubt painful but this team has bounced back from tougher losses already this season and has shown major resilience.

I don’t think that this is even something that would fuel the team to new heights either. They don't need this loss as fuel, the motivation was already there. This team is chasing history, and that's been the engine all season.

I personally feel rested and motivated after my own little spring break, hopefully this international break can do the same for Arsenal as they come back ready for what could be a major and historical run in to close out the season.

What is a slump, anyway?

As an Arsenal supporter, that question has powered some big, deep conversations about the club’s best players over the past couple of seasons. And for a spreadsheet nerd like me who needs to watch the games instead of my rows and columns, the definition of “slump” or “off it” seems to come with a higher bar every season.

Was Ødegaard prime De Bruyne last season? No, of course not! But if you put him in a room with 99 randomly selected attacking midfielders, he likely had better numbers and output than 90 of them last season.

This season, the same is true of Bukayo Saka. More detail below, but Arsenal’s right-sided talisman has nine goal contributions in 22 PL 90s a season after getting 16 in three fewer 90s, and that’s spurred a lot of conversation whether he’s slumping, or maybe even whether he’s peaked.

He’s obviously not been perfect every week out this season, but as I sat down to start running these numbers, I didn’t feel a lot of nervousness about whether they’d back the idea that Saka has fallen off. Take a look below and you’ll get a strong sense of why.

As per usual, things to keep in mind as you read: This is based on stats, and stats aren’t always perfect. I have always encouraged watching the games for yourself rather than creating an entire opinion based off only the numbers.

The final rank is based on full two-season score, with guys in the top 25 fitting your standard profile for “transfer-friendly age,” which is usually slightly pre-prime.

So, just where is Saka among the best of the best? Scroll down!

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If Arsenal win the league, this could be the worst team to win the league.

This is a quote from former Manchester United player Paul Scholes on The Good, The Bad & The Football podcast. If you search around or just exist on the internet you will see this sentiment repeated and the same arguments made about this Arsenal team.

It’s often something that is made in bad faith and tinged with tribal jealousy. I am sure that you would have seen similar type of comments from Arsenal fans last season about Liverpool. I have no problem admitting that I haven’t been perfectly above all of that, taking a swipe at that Liverpool title team when this sort of discussion of where teams stack up starts happening.

This time of the year as the title favorite becomes clearer you start getting comments like this and a reflection of trying to figure out where teams rank in the pantheon of former champions.

It’s not done yet for Arsenal (and I really hope I don’t regret this post in a few months) but it was a big weekend for Arsenal’s chances. Arsenal’s late winner combined with a heroic last ditch defensive performance from West Ham gives Arsenal a 9-point (with an extra game played) lead over Manchester City with seven matches to play. Arsenal’s magic number of points won (or City dropped) is down to 16 points and the odds are heavily stacked in their favor now.

This discussion might not be the most good faith and actually trying to come up with the best and worst winners but that doesn’t mean that we can’t go and try and do that. The motto of the moment is you can just do things, so let embrace that and try and make some determinations here.

My methodology here is going to be two pronged and relatively simple. The first measure is going to look at performance relative to their peers for the season that they competed in. The second will be how strong those peers were compared to the rest of European soccer.

I am going to start with the second prong, first because this will feedback into the context of where each team’s performance compares.

How strong is the current Premier League?

If you asked this before the knockouts of the Champions League started you would probably have a slightly different answer but even if many of the teams end up getting knocked out at the round of 16 stage, overall, I think you would still say very strong.

The Premier League has emerged from the post COVID world in an enviable state compared to the other European Leagues financially and that has been leveraged to hoover up talent, not just on the field but also with coaching and technical staff. The Premier League isn’t a socialist utopia with the TV money like American sports leagues sharing money evenly, but they have a much flatter structure than just about any other League and that means that this financial might extends down the League and isn’t just concentrated in a handful of the top teams.

Just for being a member of the Premier League, a team will be among the top 50 in the world for revenue and 15 of the Premier League are in the top 30 of the latest Deloitte Money League rankings, with 9 of the top 20 and 6 of the top 10.

This financial muscle shows up in the different ways that you can rank the Leagues.

There is a fun method that takes betting odds and uses that to infer rankings, and you get a picture that looks like this:

You can take the Opta Power Rankings and you get something that looks like this:

These are great tools but for the historical analysis I am going to use the ClubElo ratings. The main strength here is that there is a long and easy to access historical record and that is exactly what we need here to go back and compare across decades.

Going back to the start of the Premier League era, the League average ratings have seesawed back and forth with different countries having moments where they were dominate. That time is now for the Premier League.

The PL average rating is the highest it has ever been during this stretch and the gap to the rest is only matched by what Serie A had over teams at the beginning of the 1990’s or Spain during the early 2000’s.

By all of the objective measures, the Premier League is at a zenith as the strongest League in the World. What also makes it unique right now is that this is not just a League that is powered by a few strong teams, but rather that basically top to bottom this is a competitive league.

Arsenal are the team with the highest rating in the League and where they are right now isn’t all that special and other teams have been near the same level to where they are rated right now. What is unique this season is that the compression of the ratings and the lack of truly bad teams.

On the graphic above the red lines represent the 25th and 75th percentile team ratings, the current 75th percentile is the highest in the Premier League era but it isn’t too far out of line for where things have been for the last decade. What is worth noting is that the 25 percentile is by far the highest it has ever been and not only that, but it is also higher than the AVERAGE for all Premier League seasons outside of last season. That’s right the 15th/16th best teams right now are rated as higher than every other team that was 10th best in the League.

The median rating in 2025-26 is better than the best teams from several seasons in the 1990’s. It’s not a perfect rating system but that is pretty crazy to think about.

This current level of parity is probably underrated among fans. We have not seen the top teams go out and put up dominate numbers or big blow outs this season and that’s more likely a reflection that there is just not the same gaps between the best teams and the ones in the bottom half compared to seasons past.

Attacking Metrics

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I have been getting better at ignoring the noise of social media during a match, if I do spend time in an online communal place, that place is the Cannon Stats Discord (you should join, it’s free). This often means that I don’t have my finger on the living breathing zeitgeist of the match that is formed through the interaction of all the different voices and commentary of the match.

This can make for a bit of a jarring experience when I do come back on to social media after a match and what you experienced is so incongruous to the “narrative” that had formed.

I had this experience with regards to Gabriel Martinelli against Leverkusen.

I don’t think that this was a sparkling performance from Arsenal’s left winger by any stretch of my imagination, but that he came away as the player that was drawing the most attention and criticism left me feeling confused. That was compounded by the comments post-match where Arteta singled out his chance where he hit the cross bar:

We started the game quite well, had a massive chance with Gabriel Martinelli hitting the crossbar. You score, the game changes completely.

I get that these are coming right after a match and they can be a bit emotional and this isn’t always going to be the cold rational analysis. He is right that if Arsenal score that chance that almost certainly something that alters the game. I think that he is wrong with his assessment that this was a massive chance, however.

This is definitely a good scoring chance, but this is far from gimmie type of scoring opportunity. There is still a defender pressuring him and a goalkeeper in a good position to cover up a good portion of the goal.

On my expected goals model, this rated as a 14% chance, on the Opta model they have it as a 31% chance. Regardless of which you look at, this is missed more often than it is scored and that shouldn’t be an outcome that surprises us.

Even beyond that he was the player that got into position to take the shot, this was a generally positive performance from Martinelli.

He was the only Arsenal player to take more than 1 shot (that’s a problem right there), he assisted the biggest non-penalty chance of the night (Timber’s 84th minute header) and led the team in progressive passes. This is especially clear compared to his starting peers in the forward line who were off of it, especially after the bright opening period.

This isn’t the be all, end all of things but goal probability added, is my metric that tries to tie what a player does to the team’s chances of scoring or conceding. This is generally (but not always perfectly) associated with playing well or poorly. On this he was Arsenal’s second-best player behind Noni Madueke who came on and looked exceptionally bright.

His 0.25 figure here isn’t an amazing total for the stat but it is solidly in the good range and again, it stands out for how much better it is than everyone else (bar Madueke) in the squad here.

Part of a trend

If this was a one-off comment from Arteta, I would probably let it go and not have felt the need to write this up, however this is developing into a clear pattern. There are now several matches where Arsenal struggle to create many good opportunities to score and there is one that falls to/is created by Martinelli and that is singled out for comment.

This is especially noticeable because Arteta will be reluctant to single out others in similar situations (notice he didn’t call out the Timber miss here) or make it about the collective where the team didn’t create enough chances that one or two misses are the difference in a match.

There is a nice thread on Twitter by 1_2spaces that saved me the work of digging up the examples where this has happened to Martinelli.

I wonder why this is? Does Arteta believe that this brings out the best in him, that the public call out motivates him? Or is it more of a frustration factor than a motivation factor? Is it a deflection tactic? These comments almost always come after the team as a whole fails to create enough chances and maybe doing this moves the spotlight from that on to a specific moment?

Whichever that it is so often this specific player, and it is so different than how other players are treated makes me curious and wonder if that is something that a reporter could bring up with him.

Martinelli has developed into a bit of a flashpoint within the fanbase and that’s not in my opinion totally fair but it is the reality. When I looked into his data at the start of the season you can see that he hasn’t turned into a superstar that we had hoped for but he is not the level of player his harshest critics try to say he is either.

I don’t really have an answer here to this, but I can’t help but notice the pattern and wonder why. I think that this is also something where when the team struggles, we as fans (and perhaps as a manager too) fall back on to our hobby horse problem.

• Maybe for some it is Viktor Gyökeres, he wasn’t good and had another match with no shots taken. After a bright opening period he seemed to disappear from the match.

  

• Maybe for some it is Eberechi Eze, he also didn’t manage a shot in this match and ended up creating just one chance for a teammate and was not much of a factor for Arsenal in the final third.

  

• Maybe for others it is Bukayo Saka. He is now Arsenal’s highest paid player, and he’s played well but hasn’t had the end product lately that you expect with this status in the squad. This was a match where he got pulled early with Arsenal down a goal and it was deserved.

  

Regardless of who is the main person to blame for it or really the why it happened, Arsenal didn’t play well here in this match. They ended up leaving with a draw that still leaves them in a good position to advance to the quarterfinals here, but it is not nearly as comfortable as we would have liked or expected coming into the match.

The pressure on the team has really ramped up as we have gotten to the business end of the season and the team is not hitting the heights that we want from them. I don’t have a good reason for the dip in form, nor do I have a way that I can really change of affect this, but I will continue to support the best I can and hope for the best.

Fullback is such a tricky position to really judge, because there are simply so many ways to play the role.

Sometimes, a Jeremie Frimpong is your best bet because he can bomb forward and create chances. Other times, a “centre-back” like Jurrien Timber is the better of the two because he can progress the ball against a press and mop up when attacks get beyond the high line.

To that effect, I even hesitate to call this list a “fullback” ranking. After all, Patrick Dorgu has not entirely been playing as a fullback this season. What about Federico Dimarco or Alex Grimaldo? I don’t know, but they’re all in the same list, so deal with it!

At its core, this list is intended to give you the list of the guys who — to the best of my judgment — give you the strongest blend of defensive security, ball progression, carrying and security, creative passing and goal threat possible. As in life, there are many ways to skin this cat, and below is how I’ve done the skinning.

Things to keep in mind: This is based on stats, and stats aren’t always perfect, particularly for defensive players. I don’t watch spreadsheets — no matter what my haters might say — and neither should you.

The final rank is based on full two-season score, with guys in the top 25 fitting your standard profile for “transfer-friendly age,” which is usually slightly pre-prime.

Anyway, that’s probably enough. Let’s get into some numbers, shall we?

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After finishing up a perfect League phase of the Champions League that had them seeded 1st and avoiding the first knockout round, Arsenal’s Champions League campaign resumes with a round of 16 matchup against Bayer Leverkusen.

It’s illuminating to look back to the last two times that Arsenal were at this stage.

• In 2023/24 this was against Porto and it still felt like a big test for Arsenal’s ability to show that they belonged among the best in Europe.

• Last season came amidst an injury crisis yet there was more confidence but perhaps a touch of imposter syndrome where we were expecting a gut punch to come.

• This season, I have not seen a massive amount of build up for this match, it doesn’t feel like a big occasion, and it is now just one of many matches that Arsenal has this time of year and not something special. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I think that this a reflection that Arsenal come into this tie as the favorite not just in this matchup but also overall for the tournament.

We have come a long way and our expectations for this tournament have matched that. Winning a round of 16 matchup is no longer a sign of growth and ability “to do it in Europe” but rather something that is expected.

This is good, and a team that has aspirations to win the tournament should come into a match like this with this kind of attitude. I don’t think for a second that Arsenal will look past Bayer Leverkusen and, on that note, let’s spend some time digging into the matchup.

Leverkusen Performance

The 2025-26 season for Leverkusen started with quite a lot of change.

The summer saw manager Xabi Alonso leave for Real Madrid and with him, so did many of the title winning key players. Florian Wirtz and Jeremie Frimpong left for Liverpool, Granit Xhaka left for Sunderland, Jonathan Tah left for Bayern, Piero Hincapie left for Arsenal.

That didn’t end the churn, Erik ten Hag came in to replace Alonso but last just three matches.

Since that rocky start however, they have been able stabilize themselves and outside of Bayern, have turned themselves into one of the solidly good Bundesliga teams fighting for the Champions League spots.

In the Bundesliga, Bayern is in their own class and that always makes these graphics look a little funky. Outside of the super team in the League, Leverkusen compare pretty well coming in as roughly the 4th best attack combined with the 3rd best defense.

In the Champions League they were decidedly fine overall. They finished 16th but really came on stronger after starting off with draws to Copenhagen and PSV and a big loss against PSG. They won 4 of their last 5 matches (including away to Manchester City) and punched their ticket to the knockout round.

The overall performance reflects that they are a solidly good team, but they are far from one of the favorites for the tournament.

Leverkusen’s Form

Leverkusen have lost just once in their last 10 matches played between the Bundesliga and the Champions League. They have managed 6 wins and have generally been better than their opponents over this stretch.

They have managed 18 goals scored from a bit more than 15 expected against 7 goals allowed from 10 expected.

They won the xG battle by 0.5 or more in 5 of the 10 matches over this span, with the opposition managing to out create them just once (the most recent one).

In their two-legged tie to earn the right to play Arsenal they got two goals away against Olympiacos and then in the return tie made it an ugly drab affair for a totally acceptable 0-0.

Style Comparison

Stylistically this is an fascinating clash featuring two of Europe's most possession-dominant, passing-intensive sides.

Leverkusen surprisingly have the edge on total passes per match, and will have more per possession than Arsenal but they have tended to play in different parts of the pitch. Arsenal have continued to be Field Tilt FC, even if they aren’t quite as extreme in that regard this season, compared to Leverkusen they have played in the oppositions half much more.

It’s important to include the League stats here but with the Premier League diverging in style (and overall quality) what is probably more interesting is looking at how the teams have compared in the Champions League.

In the Champions League, Leverkusen still have more passes and more possession and that could potentially lead to a matchup where they do actually have more of the ball than Arsenal. For a “big” team, Arsenal are generally comfortable playing like this as well, believing in their ability to control the game through making it be played in the areas that they want it to.

Overall, as an attack, Leverkusen look decent but not elite. They are good at ball progression and hanging on to the ball but they don’t always translate that into dangerous moments.

Against Arsenal’s defense that could be a problem for them, but if they can hold on to the ball enough, maybe they can play the try and let Arsenal beat Arsenal card and see if they can capitalize on a mistake. If they are forced to attack, that doesn’t look to be a major strength for them or something that should cause Arsenal to drastically change their standard game plan.

Defensively Leverkusen are pretty strong, focusing on their defensive possession limiting what teams do against them. They don’t really press or put too much effort into trying to disrupt play.

They defend with shape and structure rather than aggression. A team willing to play through them patiently (or on the counter from their possession) can find gaps and generate chances.

Keys to the game

If I were looking at what Arsenal need to do in this match to tilt it in their favor I would focus on these items

1. EXPLOIT SET PLAYS. This is basically Arsenal’s edge in any match. Leverkusen's set play shots against and overall record suggest that they could struggle to cope with Arsenal’s threat.

2. DON’T BEAT YOURSELF. Arsenal are a very good pressing team but they will probably want to pick their spots to strategically attack the buildup play of Leverkusen. Leverkusen's ball-retention quality looks capable of coping if the press isn’t totally limiting the options and could gift scoring chances that might be otherwise difficult for them to create. This will be important for Arsenal in possession as well, one of the few consistent ways teams have created chances against Arsenal is taking advantage of sloppy play from Arsenal, they can’t make it too easy here.

3. EMBRACE A BIT OF CHAOS? Leverkusen have the hallmarks of a team that wants to limit the opportunities for both teams and see if they can edge it. Arsenal will have a talent advantage in this match and this should be different than the normal low block affair that we see in the Premier League. Arsenal should be willing to embrace a bit more chaos, they have done this a bit more in the Champions League and it has paid dividends for them. I could see this matchup as an opportunity for that as well.

Before we get too far into breaking down the Chelsea match, I want to wish everyone a wonderful St. Totteringham’s Day. From what I have seen this is the earliest that this has ever come in a season. It feels like a bit of small potatoes in the grand scheme of the season, but it is still important to find joy in the little things that life presents us.

Now let’s get into this match. It is a tough one to break down, like the North London Derby that preceded it, this is a match that has some deep dislike and hatred that goes with it.

For myself, being a fan over 5,000 miles away, I have always had more hatred for Chelsea. They are the club that through their unprecedented spending usurped Arsenal in the pecking order of the Premier League. They also had put Arsenal into a bit of a little brother type of position, beating Arsenal over and over, but even more than just that, doing so in a way that felt a bit humiliating. I hate them.

From the start of 2004 through Mikel Arteta taking charge of Arsenal, the outcome of this derby was incredibly one-sided. Arsenal had won just 9 out of 37 played, and they were outscored by 20 goals in that stretch.

Since then, the dynamic has shifted dramatically towards Arsenal. Since 2019, Arsenal have now won 11 of the 17 played, losing just twice while outscoring them by 17 goals. We have now gone 11 straight against them and not lost winning 8.

There are things to pick out this match to analyze but let’s not let the big picture get lost here that beating Chelsea always feels really great.

Arsenal vs Chelsea: The Graphics

Arsenal vs Chelsea: The Debrief

12 - Shots from Arsenal in this match. 8 in the first half and 11 of them in the first 70 minutes of the match.

1.3 - Expected goals, with just 0.4 coming from open play.

4 - Touches in “Zone 14”

0 - Box entries from “Zone 14” and just 2, from the dangerous areas centrally just outside the penalty box.

46 - Passes completed in the final third from open play.

0 - Shots from high possessions won, 12 total chances.

This match felt a bit like a throwback to Arsenal doing about 90% of what you want in attack well but they lacked the most important execution that turns dangerous moments into actual passes completed into the box or shots at goal.

The attacking numbers in this match aren’t bad, but they were not up to what you would expect from Arsenal either. Arsenal struggled to get the ball into central locations and with the few opportunities that they did have, they didn’t turn that into shots.

I think that this is especially true of the first half. Arsenal started off brightly but didn’t quite do enough to turn opportunities into shots, and shots into goals. Arsenal did get a goal, but the way that they played very well could have or maybe even should have produced 1 or 2 more to match the dominance in the match.

Late, this game fizzled out and we will talk more about that later in depth.

I come away from this match mostly positive because even though I want more, I do recognize that this should be one of the harder matches remaining in this season. Chelsea are a weird team but that doesn’t mean that they are a push over at all.

I think that you can make a pretty strong case that for the totality of the season that they might be the third best team in the League. Looking at what they have done when they haven’t picked up a red card (red cards are a bit random but it does seem like most of the ones Chelsea have gotten are well earned and a reflection of the team) they rank as not far off Arsenal and slightly better than Manchester City.

This is an expensively acquired team, and it is full of talent, especially in attack and midfield (that’s where the resale value is). It doesn’t always work as a cohesive team but there is no denying that at least on an individual basis the talent here.

In this match, Arsenal basically shut them down. Here is what they did attacking compared to their average numbers this season.

There is just nothing here that they did better than average and most of these are on closer to their worst than they are to average.

Having a player less matters for this but even in this match, it wasn’t like before that they were playing so well that the red card derailed them. In fact, they almost caused Arsenal more problems down a man and that gives us a good transition into the next section.

Arsenal lose control once again

From the 86th minute to the end of the match:

14 - Passes Attempted by Arsenal, compared to 63 for Chelsea

8 - Passes completed by Arsenal, compared to 54 for Chelsea

57.1% - Arsenal’s pass completion percentage

0 - Final third passes attempted, compared to 20 for Chelsea

50% - The percentage of Arsenal’s passes attempted that were long

1 - Possession sequence that had 3 or more passes (it was 5 passes long and it was in the 94th minute)

Seeing out the game against Chelsea, Arsenal were decidedly less capable of holding on to the ball. Some of that was that they didn’t really make an attempt to do it and some of it was that they looked like they were feeling the pressure and just want to have a momentary break by just getting the ball away from present potential danger.

This is becoming a bit of a worrying trend for me, and it is something that has popped up a bit more in recent matches. Here is what Jurrien Timber said after the match that matches how I saw it:

We stopped playing a bit [against Chelsea], which was unnecessary - especially with a man up. It's something we need to work on, talk about as well. It happened a couple of times this season already.

We put so much effort into the game, especially in the first half, and you have to go up 1-0 or 2-0, but these things happen - especially against a good team like Chelsea.

It’s part of the game, you have to understand what happens in the moment. The energy within the players and the crowd, the anxiety. It’s something we need to address and talk about.

With the cold rational, less being on the edge of my seat, clear headed view the final minutes were not as bad as they felt at the time. That also doesn’t mean that I think that it was good, just less bad. I have higher expectations of what I think that this team should be capable of doing in these situations and I can’t help but feel like this is a bit of tempting fate.

There was something that was said on the Double Pivot podcast and I think it makes a good point. We have come to expect that good teams, and especially teams that win the League play in a certain way. Arsenal have mostly fit the mold of these teams, but they have one crucial departure and that is that they are incredibly comfortable playing defense off of the ball.

When you look back at what Chelsea actually did in this period, it’s not much.

They had a single shot (Caicedo) and dangerous cross that was well delivered into the zone of uncertainty. The cross was the most dangerous moment but saw Arsenal execute like you’d expect from the best defense in the League. The cross was well defended by Gabriel to not let João Pedro make a play on the ball and it did force Raya to push it away dramatically, after he held his position reading the play, reacting late to the ball.

I am not sure that it is inherently riskier to trust your defense to see you through and to execute than it would be to try and hold on to the ball while the other team presses to take it off of you. If you are trying to keep the ball and fail to execute that can open up a team to a potentially good scoring opportunity as well.

It might be something that is rarer, but leads to a bigger chance compared to the defending choice but it certainly has a different feel to it. With Arsenal having been burnt by late goals, we as fans have that in the back of our minds as the time ticks away.

Arsenal under Arteta have been a team that controls a game, even against top opposition. That didn’t always mean that they had all of the possession but even when out of possession it felt like it would more often be Arsenal dictating where the game would be played. This is hard to fully quantify but right now that really seems like a much harder task for Arsenal than it had been previously.

One of the changes is that in midfield Arsenal have a new player and he’s playing in a different way.

Zubimendi Struggles

27 - Pass Attempts (6th on Arsenal), 21 passes completed for 77.8% pass completion percentage with a 97.2% pass efficiency compared to expected passing

4 - Final 3rd Entry Passes

3 - Progressive Passes

2 - Box Entry Pass

3 - Deep Completions (not Cross)

1 - Shot, 0 on target for 0.06 expected goals.

0 - Dribbles Completed out of 0 attempted, plus 0 times fouled.

31 - Progressive Carry Distance in yards

1 - Progressive Carry

0 - Carry into Final Third

3 - Tackles with 0 times dribbled past and 1 foul committed

0 - Interceptions or blocked passes

2 - Ball Recoveries

Martin Zubimendi has had a good first year for Arsenal and has been one of the signings this summer to make the biggest impact on the team. I think that he has adapted well to a new League and has been a major factor for Arsenal leading the Premier League while also being the current favorite in the other three competitions that they are in.

I do think that there is a bit of a potential correlation that this is also the season where Arsenal have less control, especially in pivotal high-pressure situations than they had in season’s past. Zubimendi may play the same position as Jorginho and Thomas Partey but he does it in a different style and I think that is apparent in matches like this.

After the red card, Zubimendi had just 7 passes total (completing all 7). It is great that he completed all the passes that he completed but this felt like a situation that was calling out for someone who be in the situation to receive all over and strangle the game taking the sting and hope out of Chelsea.

Maybe we need to recalibrate what we expect from this player and Arsenal in these situations?

Every top club needs a guy in the middle who makes the attack purr. Some people call that a number 10, some an attacking midfielder, but the truth is they come in many forms.

Whether your creative outlet is a second striker, dribbly boi or a pre-assist machine, the ADAM 2.0 formula is designed to find and recognize them. And, selfishly, I think it does a pretty good job! So let’s dig into who’s standing out in this category as we sit here in late February.

As usual, a disclaimer that this ranking is based entirely on numbers, and I always recommend taking in some matches themselves before forming your full opinion. What you see below doesn’t necessarily represent how I’d rank players, though sometimes I do agree.

Now, let’s take a look!

Radars updated through February 23.

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The Piero Hincapié Derby is on! Arsenal drew Bayer Leverkusen in the UEFA Champions League round of 16 this morning, also being drawn into the blue path. That sets up a Champions League bracket that looks like this:

The draw is a massive win for Arsenal on paper, and while they will need to take care of business, they’re looking at a path to Budapest that could only include Barcelona in the semi final and any of Bayern, Manchester City, Real Madrid, Liverpool, PSG or Chelsea in the final itself.

The Leverkusen tie kicks off the week of March 9 in Leverkusen, Germany, sandwiched between an FA Cup visit to Mansfield and a home match with Everton the following weekend. The second leg, of course, will immediately precede the Carabao Cup final against Manchester City.

The matchup with Leverkusen is Arsenal’s first competitive fixture with them since 2002, when they won once and drew once against them in the second group stage of the Champions League. That Bayer side did top the group, though, and went on to lose to Zinedine Zidane and Real Madrid in the final.

(The two also met in the 2024 preseason, with Arsenal winning 4-1 - hence above screenshot).

Looking at this season, the matchup is one that certainly favors Arsenal. Kasper Hjulmand’s side are sixth in the Bundesliga, riding hot-and-cold form that’s seen them beat the likes of Manchester City in the Champions League or RB Leipzig away in domestic play, while also drawing at 14th-placed Borussia Monchengladbach and losing to mid-table clubs like FC Augsburg and Union Berlin away from home.

Leverkusen primarily line up in a 3-4-2-1, deploying two attacking midfielders/wingers behind a striker, most often Patrik Schick. Their primary creators are wingback Alex Grimaldo attacking wide from the left and Aleix Garcia, central midfielder with a nice knack for a final ball. Ernest Poku, the diminutive Dutch winger/AM formerly of AZ Alkmaar, has been a nice revelation in those number 10 roles and carries plenty of threat as well.

At the back, Leverkusen are still led by Edmond Tapsoba, whose own links to Arsenal go back five or six years. Tapsoba is a capable ball-player but can make mistakes in defense, and could be exploited by Arsenal’s attack. Robert Andrich, Granit Xhaka’s former double pivot partner, has also been primarily deployed as central centre-back, joining former Liverpool starlet Jarell Quansah. As we’ve seen before, if Leverkusen are to stun Arsenal, it’s most likely going to come down to Arsenal failures at the back or a superlative performance by that back three, or former Brentford keeper Mark Flekken.

As for the rounds beyond and their potential opponents, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. But one good thing worth reminding you of, dear reader: As top seed from league play, Arsenal have home second legs all the way through the semi final, which could be massive.

As we sit here, some other thoughts on the winners and losers of the draws today:

Winners

Barcelona

With their style, nothing’s certain, but Barcelona like Arsenal avoided a tougher path to the final than they could have had, getting the Spurs-Atleti matchup opposite their meeting with Newcastle. The Magpies, meanwhile, are in poor form and will likely be missing Bruno Guimarães for both legs. You may remember Barca winning 2-1 at St. James Park in September.

Bodø/Glimt

Kjetil Knutsen’s side are in the enviable position of playing with house money in the round of 16, and they’ve been drawn against Sporting, who will be feeling every drop of pressure there is to this tie. Sure, a potential clash with Arsenal awaits in the round of 8, but this club only scored its first goals of the Champions League this year, and now we’re talking about a winnable round of 16 tie.

John Textor

You love to see a good guy catch a break, don’t you? Textor’s Crystal Palace avoided the one draw I would’ve worried about, were I them, avoiding a potential round of eight matchup with BlueCo II - er, Strasbourg. Those two could now only meet in the final. Palace start off with Cypriot club AEK Larnaca (not to be confused with AEK Athens), with the winner of relegation battlers Fiorentina and Polish club Raków Częstochowa next up.

Meanwhile, Textor’s other club, Lyon, were drawn opposite both English clubs in the Europa League and given a path to the final that I think, having watched the league stage, could favor them. They’ll start with Celta Vigo, with the winner of Genk-Freiburg waiting in the next round.

Losers

Real Madrid

It has not been a season to remember in Madrid, and the draw has only made things harder. City are the early betting favorites for the round of 16, and even if Madrid got out of there alive, it’s likely Bayern Munich will be waiting for them. Personally, I think the road ends here for Álvaro Arbeloa’s guys, but let’s see.

Manchester City

Speaking of that matchup, City will very likely have two tough games with Real Madrid immediately after an FA Cup away game with Newcastle and between league matches with West Ham (away) and Crystal Palace (home). That sounds manageable enough, but a CL win would send them into a tie with Bayern Munich (or Atalanta, to be fair) which would include a second leg in Munich, if the Germans beat Atalanta. That second leg would fall on the week of April 13 … just before they host Arsenal in the league. The first leg, likely at home, would be the same week they visit Stamford Bridge. Time to flex your depth!

Aston Villa

Unai Emery is used to being in that sort of slightly-above-average tier of these competitions, where he seems to thrive, but Villa are to me the major favorite for the Europa League, and the draw only solidified that. Villa have Olivier Giroud’s Lille up first, but Les Dogues have been in entirely uninspiring form of late and would be a relatively inexcusable loss, should it go down that way. The reason I sort Villa into this column is that they’ve drawn the tougher run to the final, with Nottingham Forest and other clubs-that-looked-pretty-good-in-league-play Roma, Stuttgart, Porto and FC Midtjylland all on the same side of the bracket. Winnable for certain, but Emery will face pressure all the way - while also trying to stay in the title race!

Anyway, if you didn’t know it already, I friggin’ love UEFA competitions and draws. Only like six months to the next one!

My dearest CannonStats subscribers and readers,

They tried to take away the data and ruin the ADAM 2.0 formula. They have failed.

With a huge thanks to Scott, I’ve been able to get creative and adapt, replacing what I used to have with what we have moving forward. And though it meant a bit of a break in the rankings pieces here, we’re finally back and cooking with rankings once again.

Today, it’s the turn of those central midfielders who aren’t full 10s but aren’t deep-lying, defensive destroyers either.

As usual, a disclaimer that this ranking is based entirely on numbers, and I always recommend taking in some matches themselves before forming your full opinion. What you see below doesn’t necessarily represent how I’d rank players, though sometimes I do agree.

Now, who needs an intro? Let’s go!

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