For all the marbles, Man City vs Arsenal Match Preview
This is most consequential match of Mikel Arteta's tenure at Arsenal and it will define if the fanbase is happy or if it will tear itself apart.
This match has been looming as the big one for a while. I had hoped that with Arsenal’s margin for error that they had built up that this one wouldn’t be such a title decider yet here we are and it really feels like it is.
I am not going to bury the lede here and stick the different outcomes down at the bottom because we all want to know how things look coming into and how they could look coming out of this match.
With the latest injury updates that assume quite a few absences for Arsenal and relatively healthy Manchester City team. That factor closes the gap for this game pretty significantly and combined with this match at the Etihad, City will be slight favorites to win more often but with Arsenal getting a result (which is all they need here) basically a 50-60% chance.
This diverges pretty significantly from the betting odds this week. The markets have become much more bullish on Manchester City than the computer models, perhaps buying into the narrative that Arsenal are bottling it or that Pep has figured it all out. The odds as of Friday morning have this as 51% for a Manchester City win, 26% for a draw and 23% for an Arsenal win. That’s still roughly 50/50 for a result for Arsenal but that’s a pretty significant departure from my odds (or Opta’s).
The difference between how the computer models and the mood around the teams will make this next graphic diverge similarly to the match odds. This will show the changes to the title odds for Arsenal and Manchester City depending on the outcome of the match.
The latest simulation run has Arsenal’s odds of winning the title at an uncomfortably high 79.6%.
Even if with a loss, Arsenal and Man City would be tied on potential points, with both having a max of 85 if the won out but my model would slightly favor Arsenal from that spot. That obviously does not count any sort of change in belief or confidence that this match could give the teams or any of the other intangibles.
The major driver for this is that the remaining schedule favors Arsenal.
Manchester City don’t have Champions League matches, but they will still have a busy schedule with the FA Cup pushing matches into midweek. Everton, Brentford, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace, and Aston Villa are matches where City would be favored but they aren’t push overs and if this Premier League season has taught us anything, it is that there are no easy games here. No one wants this scenario as an Arsenal fan, but it’s not title over even if the team loses (even if the reaction would be that).
For Arsenal a draw is nearly as good as a win. That would make it so that Arsenal would need a combination of 13 points won or dropped by City to clinch the title. Again, with the schedule on paper favoring them, that would be a pretty clear path. Given Arsenal’s incentives and form, I fully expect that they will have no problem playing to not lose in this match.
A win is simply the best overall, that would mean that it is just 10 points won or dropped by City to clinch the title. This wouldn’t END the title race, but it would put it on serious life support.
Now let’s get back into more of the regular programing, getting the stats low down on the opposition here.
Manchester City Performance
This has been an unusual season for Man City, they have tried out a number of different ways of playing and not always looked great trying to figure things out. They have been a strong attacking team (even if they are not nearly as good as previous teams) but they haven’t figure out fully how to stop teams.
For the season, they have been consistently in the good but not elite range.
Looking at things from a match-by-match basis, you can see that they have been a fairly consistently good team, but they haven’t been able to consistently blow teams away like they have in the past and they still have the ability for teams to exploit them if they aren’t at their best, with some uncharacteristic comprehensive losses.
Overall, that has put them in a good position but for the season as a whole, they are ever so slightly below Arsenal.
Manchester City Form
This section is the one that will cause the most grief for Arsenal fans.
Arsenal have not played as bad as perhaps the mood would make it feel like; dropping back from clearly the best team in the League level down towards the good to very good level. In contrast, Manchester City are doing their, find form at the end of the season thing and have looked quite strong.
Depending on the end points you want to use this can look better or worse, but a happy medium of recent form and still good sample size would be eight matches. This generally balances out some of the schedule difficulty, game state and general variance enough to capture what we want looking at the form.
Here is what that looks like on the weighted xG and goals chart.
Here is how the last eight matches have played out on a running basis for Manchester City vs the teams that they were playing.
The matches against Spurs and Liverpool to start this off were not the strongest for them, but everything in the league since then has been fairly dominate. Here are the last matches broken up game by game.
For this same time period, here are then non-penalty shots for and against.
This shows that Manchester City are in a good spot overall right now. Arsenal’s numbers aren’t bad over this run, but you can see that the team isn’t in their best overall period.
Doing a direct comparison for the teams on the attack and defense radar, illustrates this.
The inclusion of the Cups and Champions League helps Arsenal look a bit closer (and that has been a good portion of the matches recently) but this is still a less than rosy overall picture.
Arsenal to get a result here, will need to buck the current trend a bit overall.
Style Comparison
We are all familiar enough with Manchester City that there shouldn’t be anything surprising here. They play a similar style to Arsenal, high possession and deliberate play. Given the incentives and setting,
I would expect that Sunday’s match will play out with Manchester City controlling more of the possession with Arsenal looking to exploit chances on the counter.
It will be interesting to see if Arsenal are better able to execute then they were in the League Cup final. Even though that match didn’t go how we would have wanted, the opportunities were there for Arsenal to hurt City, they just didn’t come off. They will need to make them count here.
I can’t deny that I am nervous for this match, and it feels like there is so much on the line. Not just for the title, but for the fanbase to not tear itself apart. The loss against Bournemouth already was a major blow and even with the team advancing to the Champions League semi-final, the confidence has not returned.
Every bump in the road has been a crisis for us as fans, and it has made for a less fun season that you think it would have given the results and the place that Arsenal finds itself. I have expected this since the summer but that hasn’t really helped it not feel bad to be ingrained in the Arsenal world.
If the worst happens, I know logically and the numbers will back me up that it isn’t over, but the negativity will be so high that I almost certainly will have to turn off all of the notifications online. Honestly, I am dreading that more than anything else and that is raising my anxiety about this match.
Hopefully the result is positive, and we don’t have to deal with that dark path. This is probably the biggest match of Arteta’s tenure at Arsenal for what it would mean both good and bad for the future. Here’s to crossing the fingers that we are looking good Sunday afternoon.