Arsenal have adapted in the absence of Ødegaard, but they still miss him

Going deep on how Arsenal have been impacted by the loss of their captain

Martin Ødegaard possesses a unique ability to progress the ball. Looking at his place among players in the top five leagues over the last few seasons makes this very clear.

Using the player season tool on Stathead from FBref I looked at players who have excelled at helping their team’s progress into the final third and into the penalty area. These are similar skills, but they are often something where a team will have specialist players for each, and rarely have a player that makes a major contribution to both of these.

Since the 2022/23 season, filter so that it is only players that have had at least 400 final third entries and 200 passes completed into the penalty area, you get this list of players:

From Stathead via FBref. Looking at players with at least 400 final third entries and 200 penalty box entries

That’s a short list and it puts him among elite company. These are very talented players, and Ødegaard puts himself in an even more unique spot by also adding in the most goals and assists of this group as well.

A couple of weeks ago, I looked at how Eberechi Eze was interpreting the role that Ødegaard plays in a different way and in this post I am going to look further into how Arsenal’s numbers and style have changed in the absence of their captain.

I have done something like this before (January of last season) but this feels like a good time to revisit it now that we have seen a bit more of Arsenal without him and with Arsenal making moves in the transfer market to try and address some of the dependency.

Losing a top player is always going to be something that has an impact on a team. Trying to measure this is always tough, but it is something that we intuitively know. We also have now had the unfortunate experience of seeing Arsenal for extended runs without Ødegaard in the team. This at least gives the opportunity to see a bit more how the team has been able to play without him.

Since the start of the 2022/23 season, Arsenal have played 161 matches in the Premier League and Europe. Ødegaard has appeared in 136 of those matches, playing 125.9 nineties over this period, which is 78% of the available minutes.

Here is how it looks with the total minutes played broken out by each match for Arsenal over this span.

One of the imperfect ways of trying to look at this is using with and without stats, this as the name suggests, looks at how a team does with a player in the team vs how they do without them on the field.

With soccer/football this can be less helpful than it is in free substitution sports like basketball or hockey, where there are substantially more periods (and scoring), but while not a silver bullet, it can help us get a directional sense for things.

Looking at the stats for Arsenal and Martin Ødegaard, without him in the team, Arsenal take a hit overall as expected.