It has been one hell of an international break.
The first break of the season always sucks and this one was not an exception. The obvious big story here was that the whole Premier League landscape was shaken up with Manchester City’s years long cheating finally turning from an allegation to an actual finding.
This is huge news and unfortunately, I am concerned that it will hang over the rest of this season like a fart in an elevator. Even if Manchester City can’t fully tie this up in more lawfare and delay the process, the best case scenario is that this will still take months to resolve. We will have almost certainly have the majority of this season played where we know that a team has cheated but everything just goes on like nothing happened. It is going to be weird.
Then we have the normal international break stuff. I took the opportunity to totally disconnect so I didn’t watch a single minute of any of the action but I have seen the injury reports and it is typically ugly.
For Arsenal we have seen Christos Tzolis lost for several weeks, Kai Havertz injured and Ezri Konsa pick up a knock. The Tzolis and Havertz injuries look like they will keep the players out for Arsenal matches and test the depth. Hopefully the Konsa injury isn’t one that will see him miss any time but that is not what is needed when you add it to the already stretched right sided defender depth chart for Arsenal.
I am thankful that this is over now and that we can get back towards a bit of the more normal schedule and that will start with looking at Arsenal’s matchup as the first match of Premier League’s round 6 against Leeds United.
Let’s breakdown the stats for this matchup.
Leeds Performance
Leeds were not as flashy as Sunderland where they finished last season, but they might have actually performed better last season than them. So far this season they have been able to carry that over. They have not lost yet this season in the Premier League and sit tied for 4th with a bunch of teams on 9 points.
They have the 4th best goal difference at +4 and the 9th best xG difference in the League. This puts them solidly in the upper part of the table for the weighted xG difference here ranking 7th (Arsenal are 4th).
Looking at their 10-match rolling average over the last two seasons really shows how strong and consistently they have played. The early numbers last season carry over the performances from the Championship but even when those aged out they never looked like a team that was riding their luck to stay up.
So far this season they have played a pretty balanced schedule against the other mid-table teams but this will be their first test against one of the “Big 6” in the Premier League.
For the same fixtures from last season, Leeds have picked up the second most points from last year. They are +4 and have done so with a +6 swing in goals and a +3.0 improvement in expected goals.
Arsenal had Leeds number last season, winning by a combined 9-0. It would be excellent to see a repeat of that in this match.
Leeds Form
