How serious do Arsenal need to take the League Phase?

After a certain point extra wins don’t mean as much in the League Phase and Arsenal should be willing to rotate a bit more along the way.

Arsenal finished top in the League Phase of the Champions League last season winning all eight of their matches.

For this they were awarded a good path to the final (as you’d expect with proper seeding). They were able to avoid the toughest matches and that set them up to have a run to the final where they were a few coin flips away from winning it all.

I think that it is good that UEFA set things up to reward League Phase performances but they can’t help themselves and still feel the need to take every opportunity to draw balls out of bowls and introduce randomness.

This makes it so that even though they want to try and reward teams that do well in the League Phase that is not always a guarantee. and it can still be a bit of a crapshoot because UEFA love adding randomness with draws. Arsenal ended up on the good side of the bracket but they had an equal chance to have ended up in Bayern Munich’s position.

The big question for me then is how much effort should Arsenal put into trying to make sure that they finish towards the top of the League Phase table?

There are obviously a few priorities that need to be balanced here.

First is that the number one job is to not get eliminated at the League Phase. Last season 24th place needed 9 points and a -2 goal difference, in 2024-25 that was 11 points and a -4 goal difference. It would take a disaster for Arsenal to finish below that and the worst case scenarios for Arsenal should still see them 11+ points.

The next priority here is to finish inside of the top 8 and avoid the first knock out matches. For Arsenal, these games would slot into the part of the calendar that is tough but not back breaking. It would be after the FA Cup 4th round that could be an opportunity to rotate, a home match against Fulham, then a tough match away at Old Trafford.

We have seen that finishing in these spots hasn’t killed teams in the knock out rounds given that PSG has now twice finished outside of the top 8 spots and gone on to win the whole tournament but they are a bit of a special case where they can kind of sleep walk through the first half of seasons figuring things out.

Finishing in the top 8 has taken 16 points in both of the last two seasons. So that should be the rough target for Arsenal, that requires going 5-1-2 or 4-4-0 or better. Arsenal have some tough matches but that on paper looks very realistic as a minimum expectation for this team.

Once we get beyond locking up a top 8 finish, I think that the benefits of moving up additional spots on the table diminishes quite a bit. With the randomness, it just too hard to try and position yourself into an optimal spot for a draw.

Given the Premier League will likely be a slug fest with no breaks, the pre-knockout Champions League matches might be one of the opportunities to get some rotation in and keep the full extent of the squad engaged and sharp.

I highlighted this in my post yesterday about the usage of the squad. I still don’t think that you will see wholesale change from Arsenal most weeks; the players still want to play in these matches, it is important to keep building continuity and chemistry within the squad, and no one likes to see Arsenal lose matches.

As things stand, Arsenal should be in a good position to make this happen and hopefully the march towards 16 points starts tonight with a win away at Napoli.