New season, new Arsenal?

Arsenal don't create like last season. Is this the new bar?

Arsenal were one of the truly elite clubs in Europe last season, and pretty much every metric proved it. They didn’t walk away from the campaign with a trophy, but through 19 games the club had gathered an incredible 50 points, and fans were really feeling it.

A summer window with four big first-team acquisitions later, Arsenal are again one of Europe’s elite through nine league games. Their goal differential is 16th in Europe, with an underlying xGD that puts them tied for 10th. They’ve allowed the fourth-fewest shots on target per 90 on the continent, and only three European clubs let their opponents have the ball in their defensive third less.

But the story hasn’t been about Arsenal being good (second in the Premier League table at time of writing, on 21 points after 9 and unbeaten), has it?

Instead, it’s been about Arsenal’s dropoff in scoring. Through nine games, the Gunners have 12 non-penalty goals, which is eighth in the Premier League. No doubt, Arsenal have become excellent at controlling games, relying on territorial dominance rather than volume creation to defeat Manchester City in the league for the first time in six years. The same could be said about the wins against Nottingham Forest, where Arsenal jumped out to a 2-0 lead and never really relinquished control of territory, even after giving up a goal, or against Everton, a match where Arsenal put the clamps on defensively and hit 74% possession, but created around 1 xG.

That sort of deliberate, cautious approach has persisted all season, creating a number of games where Arsenal were dominant in possession but sterile in attack. Is that by design? For example, is the manager telling his players to slow their approach to set up the correct shape prior to attacking (to allay any fears of a counter-attack), or are players playing worse? Or maybe, is it a little bit of everything?

As much as we like to point directly to a singular answer (or, often, a player) and say, “That’s the problem,” it feels like so much is going on here. I won’t dedicate much digital ink to these issues today, but among the many factors at play, when I step back and take a longer look:

• Arsenal have had poor injury luck. Martinelli, Jesus, Partey, Zinchenko and Timber have all missed significant time with injury, and even Saka finally missed a game. The front three started 14 consecutive games together last season, and didn’t do so even once this season until game 9. That’s also slowed down bullet two…

• Integration of new players and new relationships. You’d think at some point Arteta was specifically planning for a team with, say, Zinchenko, Havertz and Jesus playing together. We haven’t seen much of that. Meanwhile, the relationship between Martinelli and Havertz has taken time to form (same for Martinelli-Rice) and Havertz-Nketiah hasn’t been the most natural. Even if Havertz was playing remarkably well, he would need synergy with players sharing spaces with him, and that’s not happening yet. He’s very much not a 1:1 for Granit Xhaka, and it seems pretty obvious he wasn’t meant to be. But that’s a change that has ripple effects.

• Arsenal are facing the lowest blocks in all of Europe. This has been documented elsewhere, but go take a look.

• Nine games is still a small enough sample that gimmicky game-state stuff like going down to 10 men after dominating for 60 minutes will mess with numbers. So will letting the foot off the brakes after scoring two on like 0.2 xG in the opener. More time will smooth out kinks like that (not that every other game has been a masterpiece).

• Finally, there has been a tangible shift in play style. Arsenal are allowing 0.79 npxG per 90 this season, second to only Manchester City. It’s about a 20% improvement over last season’s 1.00 npxGA per 90, third in the league and still very good. Five of this season’s opponents have put up 0.6 npxG or less, something the club did 12 times all of last season, putting them on pace to nearly double that mark. That’s pretty solid and signifies the emphasis on control, in my mind.

Anyway, enough of the excuses! Let’s look at some numbers and figure out whether this thing can be salvaged.

As I reviewed data of the league season so far, something started to stand out to me: Yes, Arsenal are dominating possession, and yes, Arsenal are creating fewer open-play chances than they have in the past. But I also noticed some other stuff, which I teased a bit in a tweet last night.

As things stand, Arsenal are seventh in the continent in penalty-area touches per 90 minutes, with 32.1. That’s just ahead the high-flying Napoli.

How are they getting those touches? Mostly via the pass. They’re also seventh there, just below the likes of PSG and Bayer Leverkusen and ahead of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester City.

So, what’s the problem?

As I looked around, I felt like I found a symptom (maybe not a cause): Arsenal aren’t turning enough of these box touches into valuable shots. See below:

You can see Arsenal are taking about the same number of shots as Newcastle or the very boring Juventus, while taking quite a few more touches in the penalty area. The Gunners are currently 30th in shots per 90 in Europe and 31st in non-penalty xG per 90. That’s more of a “meh” in the attacking sense.

You can also see something of a correlation here as the clubs go from left to right. Arsenal, Chelsea, Atletico should be considered more outliers on this chart than anything else. If Arsenal were following along with the crowd, their ability to turn touches into shots should be more around Inter, whose 1.66 npxG per 90 would be sixth in the Premier League rather than Arsenal’s current 12th.

So that’s the symptom. What’s behind it? Aside from the above bulleted reasons/excuses (depending on your perspective), which I do think weigh in here, I’ve singled out a couple of things I think may also be weighing on the Gunners.

The first has been well-covered, and that’s Martin Ødegaard. I wrote here how he’s creating less so far this season, and based on the quality we’ve seen from him even going back to before Arsenal, I think this will smooth out. But it’s still worth noting that he’s simply not playing his best football right now, with notable eggs laid against Spurs and Chelsea and even his good games involving less creation than we saw a season ago.

An additional point to add here: on the whole, Ødegaard is losing the ball too much. He’s currently at 3.9 turnovers (miscontrols + dispossessed) per 90 minutes. That’s something like 30% more turnovers than his Arsenal career average of 2.77 per 90, and it’s also less than Gabriel Martinelli and Bukayo Saka. Keep in mind this is while 1) making the same number of touches in the attacking third, more or less, as last season and 2) taking players on about half as often as Arsenal’s dynamic wing pairing.

So, to put it simply: The captain needs to play better. He needs to win his attacking duels and place his passes better. That will go a long way.

The other player I want to address individually is Gabriel Jesus. Four starts isn’t enough to me to start really diving into numbers, especially when three of them are Spurs, Chelsea and City, but Jesus has also seen something like a 10-15% uptick in his turnover rate in his small sample so far this season. He’s also attempting more take-ons than ever (and succeeding a lot) but it has felt like some attacks have ended with him, and perhaps there’s a rounding into form that needs to happen after Gabby’s knee cleanup.

Am I worried? A little. But one of my takeaways from the 12 games we’ve seen to date is this: Arsenal hasn’t been at its best for most of these games, have missed key players for almost all of them, and remain 6-3-0 in the league and in fine shape in the Champions League. When I look at numbers surrounding various clubs’ starts in their respective league, I don’t really put Arsenal on any sort of “false position” watch list (*casts a glance at Stuttgart, Monaco, Fiorentina, Girona), and that’s despite their penalty haul. A big chunk of that is down to defense and territorial dominance.

So yes, definitely some bumps to iron out. But in a season that’s still bound to have nearly 40 games to go, they won’t be the last. Excited to watch more football this week.