Major trophies or not, Arsenal are cooking

Trophies are the currency, but Arteta could not be doing a better job to get them there

Hi, everyone. I’m so sorry this took a lot longer than it should have. Respiratory viruses apparently hate me this winter, and the flu decides to hit harder than it ever has in my life about a month after getting over Covid. But I’m feeling a lot better now and back at it, so normal service should resume as usual.

Stats are from FBRef as usual, apart from possession sequences and PPDA, which are from The Analyst.

Wednesday night was not good for Arsenal.

Porto was a kind draw. This was the kind of tie they wanted to move past those nasty memories of getting humiliated by top sides at this stage in the 2010s. Instead, we saw a sluggish performance in which they never really showed much of anything needed to win on the night.

Source: Opta Analyst

It came as such a shock, infuriatingly making me rewrite this intro, because Arsenal have been playing so well recently. This is a team that looked completely in control of all phases of the game. This team has been excellent. That 1-0 defeat put a dent in their Champions League hopes, and two other very good teams currently sit above them in the Premier League, but that shouldn’t change the fact that Arsenal are for real. Let’s talk about how they got here.

Have we all processed how long ago it was that Arsenal last won the Premier League title? A lot of you probably didn’t even watch football back then. A few of you weren’t even born, which is terrifying. But it still takes me by surprise that this year will mark 20 years since the invincibles side went unbeaten for an entire league campaign.

By comparison, Liverpool hit the “two decades since winning the league” milestone in 2010. That season went very poorly at Anfield, finishing in seventh place as the Rafa Benítez era imploded and no one at the club could confidently explain how the debt from George Gillett and Tom Hicks’ takeover would be paid off. Arsenal are certainly in healthier shape than Liverpool were at that point in time. Manchester United, meanwhile, are only reaching eleven years without the Premier League title, a fate that measures as an existential crisis for most Red Devils supporters. Is 20 years an existential crisis for Arsenal fans? Maybe it should be. Arsenal are England’s third most successful club with 13 league titles, none of which were won with the funding of nation-states or oligarchs.

I’m not an Arsenal supporter but, like most football fans in England at the time, I had a bit of a soft spot for the invincibles team. It was the first side I watched that really cared about aesthetics and providing something enjoyable. To this day, it’s probably the closest mirror to the style of football I personally enjoy watching. It was fluid and technical but fast and exciting. And they were rewarded handsomely for it. But it was a false dawn.

Eleven days after Patrick Vieira lifted the Premier League trophy, José Mourinho’s Porto won the Champions League title on the back of a campaign built around a very organised and disciplined defence. Just over a month after that, Greece won Euro 2004 with one of the all-time great displays of reactive football across the tournament. That summer, Chelsea would hire Mourinho while Liverpool appointed Benítez, both preaching compact and solid defences above all else. Man Utd assistant Carlos Queiroz was advocating the same style of football at Old Trafford, meaning that three-quarters of that Premier League era’s “Big Four” wanted to defend and counter. The only thing bucking the trend was Arsène Wenger’s personal preference for a more technical and imaginative style.

Attacking play did come back into fashion through Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, but the principles at play were very different. Wenger always wanted his players to think for themselves and find their own tactical solutions on the pitch, within his framework of technical football. Guardiola, conversely, wanted his team to attack in a very clear structure, with players following coordinated movements practised and practised in training. The best teams suddenly had a clear idea of how to manipulate space across the whole pitch, married to an aggressive pressing structure off the ball, both phases helping them dominate games in a way that Wenger’s Arsenal couldn’t. It was a puzzle Arsenal never quite solved. Until now.

Arsenal are really good at the moment. They’ve won five league games on the bounce, answering critics who said they might be falling out of the title race. Their Euro Club Index score (sort of like FIFA rankings but for European club sides) this season hit its highest recorded point since the model started in 2007. They have the best xG difference in England’s top flight by a fair margin, which is certainly saying something when you consider the teams they compete with at the top. Mikel Arteta has them cooking.

As a young player, he left his native Basque Country for Barcelona in 1997 at age 15. Arteta spent time at the club’s famous academy before getting to train with the first team under the man who most visibly influenced Guardiola. Yes, that’s right: Louis van Gaal. When people talk about Guardiola’s tactical revolution in the modern game, things inevitably centre on Johan Cruyff, but I think Van Gaal is arguably even more influential here. “Both [Van Gaal and Cruyff] promoted the classic Ajax model in terms of ball progression and formation”, Michael Cox explained in his book Zonal Marking, “but whereas Cruyff wholeheartedly believed in indulging superstars, Van Gaal relentlessly emphasised the importance of the collective”. Modern football as pushed by Guardiola is all about attacking in a clear structure and manipulating space through players staying in their positions. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Guardiola acknowledge Van Gaal as an influence compared to the way he endlessly raves about Cruyff, but juego de posición arguably owes more to the former than the latter.

Arteta spent the bulk of his playing career under the following managers: Luis Fernandez, Alex McLeish, José María Amorrortu, David Moyes, and finally Wenger. That’s ten seasons and over half his career league appearances under gruff Scots prioritising function over form. He then had time with Wenger’s more tactically relaxed approach to trying to play good football, before spending time as Guardiola’s assistant. He’s someone with a much more varied background than most of the top managers currently out there.

What that’s led him to is an approach that clearly takes the principles of Van Gaal and Guardiola, but uses them to slightly faster and more direct ends. An average sequence of possession for Arsenal lasts for 4.52 passes, third best in the league but a whole pass shorter than Manchester City’s average length. 11% of Arsenal’s passes are considered “progressive”, more than any other side in the division. City, by comparison, are at 8%, the second lowest figure. I don’t think one team is right here and the other is wrong. I think Arteta is instructing his players to be more aggressive when they have the ball, while Guardiola is favouring longer spells of patient possession.

Curiously, this hasn’t actually made Arsenal “more attacking” than City. Both teams have scored the same number of goals and generated an almost identical volume of xG, with the Gunners’ edge in the data coming from a more solid defence. Differences, then, are more aesthetic and in the eye of the beholder. And these are not huge chasms here, with both Arteta and Guardiola much more similar to each other than they are to, say, Jürgen Klopp. Having said that, of the two of them, I think Arteta’s approach is probably closer to what most English fans want to see. Arsenal lead the league in shots from “high turnovers”, meaning situations where they win the ball back within 40m of the opponent’s goal. They allow the opponent to make 2.5 fewer passes than City do before trying to win the ball back. The overall structure and framework is the same, but it’s just a little faster, a little more aggressive, a little bit more, well, British.

Arsenal have the league’s third-youngest average age (weighted by minutes played), which I think speaks to some of the stylistic differences. The oldest person to play a serious volume of minutes at Arsenal this season is Leandro Trossard at 29, while pretty much everyone else important is either younger than or coming into their peak years. These are technical and intelligent players who can fit into what Arteta wants, but they’re all young enough to run. That means they could potentially age into a side that has more controlled possession with more mature heads. But right now, these young guys want to run and press. They want to be more front foot and it’s exciting.

Arsenal aren’t favoured to win any trophy this season, but I’d be really optimistic right now. They have the best underlying numbers and best age profile of the Premier League’s top three, with top stars tied down for the foreseeable future. They have a clear tactical identity running from Arteta all the way through the side. They’re making good transfer decisions. There are no guarantees, but if you asked me right now, I’d say it’s more likely than not that they win the Premier League title at some point in the next five years. Arteta is adding his own spin on a familiar framework, and it’s really working.