Arsenal, losing balance and central progression

Arsenal's left and center continues to look broken

There is a lot of hand-wringing and worry about Arsenal at the moment. Losing two matches that the team was favorites to take maximum points from and winning just one in five matches hasn’t helped the mood in the fanbase.

Even though the actual performances haven’t been bad (actually they were mostly good) the points haven’t come and that is putting Arsenal under the microscope for what is wrong.

I like to say that when you win playing poorly you don’t have to give the points back, you just need to worry about making sure the poor performances don’t continue. The reverse is true when you play pretty well but don’t get the points that the performances deserve. That doesn’t result in getting a bonus point but often leaves me in a happier place for the future because you just have to generally keep doing what you were already doing.

I spend a lot of time looking at the metrics and how the team looks compared to others and I keep coming away feeling that the team is in good shape but even within that goodness there are still some nagging worries that won’t go away.

One of the theories I have is that the balance in the team is still off as Arteta and the players adjust and reinvent themselves from last season. The biggest high-level changes in the team are that Arsenal have become less direct, and more deliberate this season, seemingly making a trade-off of more control/domination at the expense of some of the more risky play.

Arsenal this season is Red, last season is yellow

Overall, the Premier League has become more deliberate this year compared to last year so it isn’t just Arsenal but even within that, Arsenal have moved further away from the average team.

That isn’t surprising to me, watching the team play it does feel like that is a feature rather than a bug of how they want to play this season. Arsenal are not averse to trying to attack directly, they are generating more shots (3.3) from that this season than last (2.7) but it does seem that if that chance is not there, the team looks to build very deliberately.

There was a video circulating after the Fulham that showed examples of the types of risky/direct passes that were turned down in favor of a more methodical building approach.

I don’t think that these were always the wrong choice but it was a good illustration of the major changes and gives a good segue into the main area that I wanted to look at today.

Change in Buildup

Last year the Arsenal buildup was very balanced, more of the final third entries came from the left than the right but the difference was pretty small. For progressive passes more came from the flanks but it was still mostly even.

This season that balance is gone.

Arsenal are on the cusp of breaking my scales for this graphic, with over half of the final third entry passes now coming from the right side, a massive departure from the very neat 30/30/30 type we saw last season. On progressive passes, it isn’t quite as stark with the shift to one but the difference is still notable, and with a further departure from progressing through the midddle.

The lack and change in the central progression is a big red flag and worry for me. Arsenal have generally built from the wide areas but last year there was pretty significant central progression as well. Central and half-space progression is very closely tied with creating dangerous shots, either through directly setting up shots or by playing the pass that splits open for the pre-assist. This year these types of passes has dropped off significantly.

We will come back to this in a bit but let’s first start with the final third entries.

Looking at the end location of the final third entries from last season, most are to the areas that Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli take up but there is a fair amount in the halfspaces as well.

This year the halfspace receptions are down pretty significantly, going from a nice pretty teal color indicating something closer to the middle of the road for frequency to a cool blue shade of sadness.

Saka and Martinelli are receiving more often, up 2.5 receptions per 90 and the players in the more central locations (Odegaard, Havretz compared to Xhaka, Nketiah, Jesus) are down over 1.25 receptions per 90.

There is something that Twitter user and former tactics writer for Arseblog Arsenal Column wrote that really had a light bulb turning on type of situation for me.

Arsenal have tended to create overloads wide, especially on the right side. This is where a lot of the buildup is coming through and like pointed out in the tweet above I don’t think it is an accident.

When you see Arsenal press, it is seldom central outside of closing down a goalkeeper or a player in the action of passing, the action in the middle of the pitch is looking to make it so those passes are not attractive funneling things wide where Arsenal will often spring things and look to win the ball back.

Starting from these wide locations in buildup dovetails with this pressing plan as Arsenal will already generally have the numbers and structure in place to press effectively should they lose the ball. Some of the few times that Arsenal have been effectively countered this season has been when they have tried to play through the middle more.

This shift with a larger emphasis on going wide early and playing a more set and methodical style has helped Arsenal to become one of the top out-of-possession teams with an impressive defensive record. Like all things in life, this increase in defensive stability for Arsenal hasn’t come for free, with questions being raised if the attack is good enough and me here, writing this describing and trying to make sense of the changes.

Paying the cost

Last season Arsenal combined to have good volume of shots from open play with 11.6 per match (4th in the Premier League) and a solid xG per shot of 12.6% (5th), coming out looking like the 5th best open-play attacking team in the League. They backed that up with positive finishing making everyone very happy on their way to becoming the highest-scoring team in a 38-match season in the club’s history.

This year the numbers are surprisingly not that dissimilar.

Shots per match from open play are up, coming in at 12.0 per match (4th), average shot quality is down a bit to 10.7%, bringing the per match down from 1.4 per match to 1.3 and overall that has put Arsenal 8th overall from open play (driven a lot by other teams looking stronger this season and not just Arsenal coming down a bit).

What makes a MASSIVE difference is that Arsenal have gone from a positive finishing team to a negative finishing team on these shots.

Last year Arsenal had a slightly positive bump from the post-shot xG values going from just under 55 to just over 61, and from there they still converted more of those shots into goals.

This season the finishing has been a negative factor going from almost 26 goals expected to 23 based on shot placement and then dropping further with the actual finishing.

Last season was probably an anomaly, good teams can and do have persistent seasons above expected but generally not to the level that Arsenal exhibited last season. This makes intuitive sense, xG models are calibrated to the average player and good teams have players that are generally better than average.

For Arsenal this season I don’t think that there is a good explanation to point to suggesting that players that we thought were very good (but perhaps not as good as goals might have indicated) are now suddenly below average. Coming into the season Arsenal would have been expected to regress to the mean/true talent level but instead, it looks like the opposite of the positive variance bug has hit the team.

I am worried about this but less about the overall finishing, where I pretty strongly hold that this is a cold run of form that should correct itself (hopefully soon but you never know), but rather more with the drop in creation.

I think that this is tied directly to one of the other big changes this year, the loss of central progression. This is the issue I am most concerned about when it comes to the quality of the chances Arsenal are creating and it can be seen clearly in the change to where the key passes are coming from.

Arsenal’s were pretty balanced last year (this is a recurring theme) but created most of their chances from central locations. There is still a fair amount coming from wide, especially with the passes straight across the face of goal from the left, but a major portion came from the areas right around the “D”.

This season by comparison the left is down a bit, with the central location down significantly and the right as the main area for creating shots. Many of the shots that were at the “D” are now about five yards wider to the right and gone almost entirely from the left-hand side.

This is not exclusive to chance creation with deep complitions and progressive passes showing a similar pattern. This has not gone without notice and has pointed persistent questions about the way the team was constructed this summer, especially with the move divisive moves of the window.

The Kai Havertz Conundrum