Martinelli's cold streak, bad luck or something worse?
Arsenal's Brazilian winger hasn't scored since March and it is getting people asking questions about him.
Gabriel Martinelli is a muse that I think will be a long running topic for the next few months.
Perhaps not dissimilar to what Kai Havertz and Oleksandr Zinchenho were last season. The reasons will be different this time with Martinelli, but I think that there is a subset of the fanbase that has taken up a position that I think has gone too far out to an extreme that isn’t supported by what we have seen in the performance and in the data for the player.
I hope that in hindsight the analysis done here for Martinelli will look as good as what I think I did looking at Havertz and Zinchenko.
Framing the problem
There are a couple ways to get me riled up one of those is using time period to denigrate a player that includes a time when the team isn’t playing (aka the summer offseason) and to use games played when the player has had lots of substitute minutes.
It is a pretty disingenuous way of going about things and even if your critique had merit, I am going to be less inclined to listen to whatever opinion that person has because they are showing that they are ready to use bad faith methods to try and make their point.
This has been something that has been used against Eddie Nketiah in the past where people loved to use his games played stats but ignore that lots of those were short minutes at the ends of games (I am not against criticism of Nketiah and have done plenty) and now they are doing something similar to Gabriel Martinelli with his current run of no goals scored.
You will see things online that Martinelli hasn’t scored in 6 months! His last goal came March 4th, 2024 against Sheffield United, that 200 days ago it is true.
What this ignores is that he also spent a month of that time hurt, and an additional three of those was the offseason (May 19th to August 18th, it didn’t feel that long but it was nearly full 3 months from the end of the season to the first game this season).
Those 6 months are now more like 2 months. That’s still not good and that should be the argument rather than doing something that exaggerates things by a factor of three.
Overall, this is 17 matches played, but of those he started just 7 of them and played just 3 full 90s. This in the end is just 800 total minutes and 8.9 nineties, which is pretty squarely small sample size where weird things can happen and we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw from that.
The performance
It is clearly true that Martinelli is not playing as well as he has played in the past right now. Since he has come back into the team after his injury in March 2024 he’s looked just okay, producing numbers and performances that had him rightly fighting for his starting spot with Leandro Trossard.
Before his injury he was performing much better and while he wasn’t on a huge positive finishing run like he had done the season before he was still looking like a very valuable player overall, even before any caveats about how his role/positioning had changed and the overall left hand side dynamics of the team.
After the injury there was a significant drop in shots, xG, goal probability added, his touches close to goal, overall involvement in play, and his ability to beat a man or carry the ball towards goal.
The numbers weren't poor, yet there was still a notably significant decline from what he had done pre-injury.
In my view, the statistical decline following the injury has unfairly colored perceptions of his performance last season, which was not significantly different from the previous season when his potential was still highly regarded. The decline in performance was real, but also not unexpected for a player coming off of a foot injury.
To a certain extent has seen a bounce back this season (including his last start of 2023/24) outside of one important part, his ability to get shots off and then to finish them.
The finishing
For his career Martinelli has been close to his xG. He has had streaks where his finishing has been below his xG and some cold spells but overall with going on 250 shots for him in my database with Arsenal he has tracked pretty well to his xG.
He has also pretty strongly matched his post-shot xG values to his goal numbers, suggesting that there isn’t anything particularly wrong with the way he shoots for this as a measure for the type of chances that he gets.
He doesn’t look like a plus finisher adding extra expectation with his ability to put shots in tough to save locations but he is also not a bad finisher and has generally done well to have his post-shot xG track to his actual xG.
The main point of the numbers above is that in the much larger sample size of his career there are not massive red flags for his finishing. xG seems to do a good job describing and estimating the chances that he has gotten for his career and doesn’t suggest that he is an outlier on either side with his ability to turn chances into goals. This is not Gabriel Jesus who has consistently been below his numbers and bad finishing runs the expectation rather than the exception.
You can never say anything with 100 percent certainty but it does look like his current run of no goals scored is exactly that, an exception to his overall performance for his career.
This is a run of 18 shots that have been worth 2.5 expected goals and he has not had any of them find the back of the net. It has not been fun and getting into the soft factor stuff that might be post fact narrative, he looks like he is pressing, trying to score all the goals with each shot, and even trying too hard vs letting it naturally come to him.
An interesting thing is that his cold run compared to something that has been more typical with these is that his post-shot xG has still been fairly strong and has tracked the xG as well. More recently as he seems to have gotten more into the funk it is has dropped off but overall, still showing good ability to at least place the shots.
His shot map also doesn’t show any other major red flags from a finishing perspective (it is light in shots and that is a worry for me but a different conversation).
His shots are clustered in the central locations, he isn’t spamming long shots into crowded blocks and is still putting more shots on target than the average player with a bit over 44% needing a save.
Final thoughts
Looking at this and it really does look like there isn’t anything broken with his play, things are just not finding the back of the net for him. There is a lot of competition for his spot and with Arsenal fighting for a title it is hard to play a guy going through a rough patch into form but the more I look at the performances from a higher level and the data the more I come away thinking that this is a funk than a permanent problem for the player.
I am still very high on Martinelli, perhaps revising down the chances of him hitting the very high ceiling I imagined for him a year or two ago but still pretty confident that this is an above average left winger who has a lot to offer Arsenal if he can be given the opportunity to get back to his best.
I am glad to see your analysis, which coincides with my impression from watching the games that he is still creating offensive threat and there does not seem to be anything drastically wrong with his play, except for a cold streak finishing. Your analysis does not however really address how much he contributes on defense and tenacity. Arseblog mentioned this recently but its one of the most noticeable aspects of his play when he’s seen in person, as opposed to on TV(most of mine are on TV but I’ve seen a couple live). He is constantly moving and sprinting to cover and press. He works very hard and contributes to the defensive alertness that is a trademark of Arteta teams. My personal theory is that Arteta picks offensive players by their defensive skills—Jesus, Havertz. Odegaard, Saka and Martinelli are all very strong defensively, hard working and alert. Those seem to be “non-negotiables” and as long as Martinelli keeps contributing on that part of the game, I think he’s going to keep playing major minutes.