Does Arsenal suffer more injuries than other Premier League teams?

No matter what it might feel like there isn't anything especially that looks like an outlier for Arsenal and the injuries that they suffer.

It’s no fun when a player gets an injury, especially when they are a player that you expect to play a key role for your team. Injuries feel like events that can derail a match, a run of games, or even throw off a full season.

For Arsenal, injuries at the wrong time and to the wrong players has been one of the major factors that has made the difference between having a good season and having a great season that ends in lifting a trophy and a parade through North London.

Whenever Arsenal suffer an injury, you can bet that there will be major reaction online. Some of the common messages that you will see would be along the lines of the following (certainly not limited to): there needs to be an inquest into training methods, a review of the training methods, a check on the pitch hardness, the players are being run into the ground, the manager doesn’t care about health, the medical team needs to be replaced.

Much of this is tied to the emotions that come with losing a key player and there is almost certainly some hyperbole tied to it but I do also believe that there is a belief that the type and amount of injuries that hit Arsenal are among the worst in the Premier League.

This is the type of things that gets my spidey senses going and makes me want to check on what is a bit of the folk wisdom among fans. Is there actually a problem here?

My intuition and quick looks would have had me say that Arsenal didn’t have a unique problem (to a bit of ridicule when I brought this up on a podcast) but what does a deeper look tell us?

It’s not super easy to get injury information but one of the more robust and available options comes from Transfermarkt.com so for the rest of the data that comes in this article we will be using this data source. They have data going back many years but for this I have gone back to the 2017-18 season so that we have coverage of the full Mikel Arteta years plus two seasons prior.