Does Arteta need to rotate more?
Arsenal have made the fewest changes to the starting eleven this year, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
This season Arsenal have made the fewest changes to their Starting Eleven of any team in the Premier League. They have made just 36 changes (this looks at the previous starting XI in the League, if a player starts in match 1, does not start in match 2, but is back in the lineup for match 3, that would be counted as two changes) that is significantly lower than the League average of 73 changes and stands in stark contrast to their title rival Manchester City.
This has caused some worry that Arsenal and Mikel Arteta may not have rotated enough this season, especially in light of the late-season wobble/collapse. I think perhaps there is some merit to this but I think it is also a reflection of where the team is on the table compared to where they were in the total development of the project.
If you look at Arsenal’s squad usage this season it is very heavily weighted towards a small group of players. Arsenal have 8 players that have played at least 75% of the available minutes this season (William Saliba will drop out of this next match) and their most used eleven players have all played more than 60% of the minutes this season (Gabriel Jesus will probably get into this group as well over the next two matches).
Looking at Arsenal’s distribution of minutes compared to the rest of the Premier League they stand out as one of the teams that relies on a smaller squad of players, with players 1 through 11 playing more often and players 12 through the end of the bench playing less.
So do Arsenal and Arteta not rotate enough and should they rotate more?
I think the short answer is probably a bit more but I am not sure with the way the team was currently constructed there was room or a need to make a ton more changes. This season was pretty close to as good as you could have expected for getting the most out of the first eleven and I think that was a major reason that Arsenal have been in the current spot on the table that they currently occupy.
If Arsenal had rotated more often early in the season, do they pick up the same points totals? It is a counterfactual that we cannot prove but my intuition is that if Arsenal had chosen to start more matches with Reiss Nelson over Bukayo Saka, Mohomad Elneny for Thomas Partey, Eddie Nketiah for Jesus, Rob Holding for Saliba, or Kieran Tierney for Olexander Zinchenko that probably leads to more dropped points early in the season and a lot of people that are not exactly thrilled in the hour leading up to kickoff.
Maybe that puts Arsenal more in the 2-3rd fight and they never are really in the title fight but the end of the season goes a bit smoother with less minutes in the legs of key guys.
What I think this points to is that the team is ahead of schedule and that one of the key things for this summer will be to add players where the delta in talent between the starter and the player that covers for them is smaller and it isn’t something that would make you feel a player is dropped and that they are instead rotated with more of a job share.
Right now I feel like there are really just three players on the team where that is true (Leandro Trossard, Jorginho, and Takehiro Tomiyasu). Perhaps Jackub Kiwior moves into that role next season, and one of Emile Smith Rowe and Fabio Vieira, and one of Nketiah/Folarin Balogun also pushes up but right now I think that is a question mark. The summer goal will be to push the trusted squad size from 14 to 17-18 and I think that will help with some of these rotations headaches that we are seeing.
I am certain we will have a lot more coverage about this as the season ends.