I watched Arsenal’s All or Nothing documentary series recently, two years later than planned. It felt timely, a welcome reminder of the size of the task that faced Mikel Arteta in trying to revive a club that had lost its way.
Three games into that 2021-22 season, Arsenal were bottom of the Premier League — no goals scored, nine conceded. In Arteta’s words, he and his players were “getting hammered by everybody”.
“In difficult moments, you question yourself,” the manager said after consecutive defeats against Brentford, Chelsea and Manchester City. “You have fears. Difficult things happen in your mind. Can I turn it around? Do I have the energy today to go back tomorrow and transmit what I have to transmit? How are we going to do it? Are people going to believe in what we are doing?”
Arteta was only 37 when he took charge of Arsenal in December 2019. The club was in a terrible state. Arsenal had been drifting for years under the Kroenke family’s ownership, languishing in mid-table, fractured, lacking inspiration, direction and positive energy.
His first two and a half years in the job were spent battling against mediocrity, a meek dressing-room culture and corrosive situations involving his two star players, Mesut Ozil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. He kept emphasising the long-term nature of the challenge, but by the time the Amazon Prime cameras started rolling in the summer of 2021, it was a fight for survival.
The transformation at Arsenal over the past five years has been enormous. To take that unhappy, divided, joyless club and to bring it back together and take it — drag it — so far in the right direction has taken some doing.
To keep the good times coming, to oversee such huge individual and collective improvement, to lead them back into the Champions League and to force their way into a Premier League title race for a third consecutive season, has been hugely impressive. An assessment of his first five years in the job? Excellent, a textbook illustration of how to re-energise a club and rebuild a team.
(If it feels like there’s a “but” coming, there is.)
But Arteta’s tenure will be judged, ultimately, on what happens from here. It has felt for the past few years as if Arsenal are building towards something big, whether the first European Cup in their history or a first Premier League title since 2004. Nobody at Arsenal, least of all Arteta, wants this period of the club’s history to be defined by a succession of near-misses.
Arteta after missing out on the title on the final day of last season (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
In each of the past four Premier League campaigns, Arsenal have recorded more points than the season before: from a nadir of 56 points (eighth) after Arteta took over midway through the 2019-20, to 61 points (eighth), to 69 points (fifth), to 84 points (second) to 89 points (second) last season, just two points behind champions Manchester City.
An improvement on last season’s total would not guarantee winning the Premier League title, but it would be sure to take them very close — particularly if Manchester City’s crown was to slip, as seems to have transpired.
Yet so far, this season has brought regression. Not dramatic regression, but still hard to refute. Arsenal are in second place again, but they are six points behind Liverpool, having played a game more. At present, they are on course for 78 points (11 fewer than last season). They are also on course to score 73 goals (18 fewer than last season) and concede 38 goals (nine more than last season). None of that sounds like title-winning form.
Arteta said in late December that his team had to be ready to capitalise on any slip-ups from Liverpool over the months ahead. Drawing two of their next four games, away to Brighton and at home to Aston Villa, was not what he had in mind.
The difficulties Arsenal have faced this season are well documented — injuries to key players, contentious refereeing decisions — and, as they demonstrated with their win over Wolverhampton Wanderers last Saturday after Myles Lewis-Skelly’s controversial red card (since overturned on appeal), there has been impressive defiance in their response to adversity.
To ask whether Arsenal have what it takes to be Premier League champions is not to suggest there is some kind of softness or fragility to this team — as has perhaps been the case at times in the two decades since the club’s last league title. It is more a question of whether having reached this stage, they can discover the sense of adventure and freedom that a title-challenging team requires.
Last season, they found it. From the turn of the year, they won 16, drew one and lost one of their final 18 Premier League matches, taking 49 points from a possible 54, scoring an average of three goals per game in that period. That they ended up two points short of the summit can be attributed to two things: 1) the points they dropped earlier in the campaign, notably during a run of one win in five games in December, and 2) the relentlessness of Manchester City, who won 19 and drew four of their final 23 games to secure a fourth consecutive Premier League title.
There will always be a desire to find fault with a manager whose team falls just short, but in the case of Arteta and Arsenal last season, it seemed unnecessary. There were regrets — ifs, buts and maybes — but perhaps they were just beaten, narrowly, by a better and more experienced team. And if the pattern of Arteta’s tenure was to be repeated, maybe they would be stronger for that experience.
When asked by Sky Sports earlier this month what he had learned from the previous two seasons, Arteta replied, “That you can always do better and you can always improve. With those numbers, normally you win and we should have two Premier League titles. The reality is we don’t, so there’s more motivation, more eagerness, more enthusiasm to say, ‘Can we still be better?’. My answer is yes, in every department, so let’s go for it.”
Encouraging words. But that part about how “normally you win” and how “we should have two Premier League titles” is not quite true.
Arteta had seemed destined to eventually take the title from Guardiola’s City (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
In the past 21 seasons, which started with Arsenal’s “Invincibles” raising the bar in 2003-04, only two teams (Manchester United in 2010-11 and Leicester City in 2015-16) have won the Premier League title with 84 points or fewer. The past eight Premier League titles have been won with totals of 93, 100, 98, 99, 86, 93, 89 and 91 points. As commendable as Arsenal’s performance last year was, 89 points would have earned as many third-place finishes (two) as league titles (two) over the past eight seasons.
As Arteta said, Arsenal needed to be stronger than last season. From somewhere, they needed to find another gear. So far that hasn’t happened. And while every Arsenal supporter can reel off misfortunes or injustices, there is also, beneath it all, a nagging concern that performance-wise they have rarely hit the same heights as in the previous two seasons.
The evidence is there in the goals-scored column, which raises the familiar question of whether Arsenal need a more reliable, more specialist goalscorer than Gabriel Jesus (now out for the season with cruciate ligament damage) or Kai Havertz. Arsenal’s leading Premier League goalscorers this season: Havertz with eight, Gabriel Martinelli with six, Saka with five, Leandro Trossard with four, Jesus and Gabriel with three apiece. Liverpool’s: Mohamed Salah with 19, Luis Diaz and Cody Gakpo with eight apiece, Diogo Jota with five, Darwin Nunez with four, Dominik Szoboszlai and Curtis Jones with three apiece.
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It isn’t just about finishing. When it comes to expected goals (xG), a metric which reflects the quality of chances created, Arsenal’s total of 37.6 is only the seventh-highest in the league. That figure — as with goals scored — is inflated by big wins against Leicester City (4-2) and West Ham United (5-2).
Comparisons with Liverpool are unfavourable, but so are comparisons with last season’s Arsenal. In half of their 38 Premier League games last term, Arteta’s team recorded an xG of 2.0 or higher. Only six times did their xG drop below 1.0. So far this season, they have registered as many sub-1.0 xG matches (six) as 2.0-plus xG matches. By contrast, Liverpool have recorded 2.0-plus xG in 15 of their 22 Premier League matches to date. Only twice have Arne Slot’s team fallen below 1.4 xG, let alone 1.0 xG.
But it doesn’t take xG data to tell you that Arsenal are creating fewer chances. To the naked eye, their football this season has looked considerably less fluent, less imaginative, less incisive. Injuries to Martin Odegaard earlier in the campaign and Saka more recently clearly haven’t helped, but even when they have had one or both of those players on the pitch, there have been too many games this season when Arsenal have looked a little stifled, struggling to turn a difficult afternoon into an uplifting victory.
They did it at Wolves last week, prevailing in trying circumstances, but that was only their 13th win in 23 Premier League matches this season. On other occasions, a dead-ball routine, devised by their set-piece coach Nicolas Jover and facilitated by a wonderful delivery from Saka or Declan Rice, has yielded the breakthrough. Proficiency at dead-ball situations is something teams should aspire to rather than disparage, but it is also fair to say that a team with title-winning aspirations, which scored 88 and 91 goals in the previous two Premier League campaigns, should be finding solutions in open play more easily than Arsenal have done this term.
Arsenal have become more attritional. Jordan Campbell wrote about it here in the opening months of last season, detailing how they were creating fewer chances through the central area of the pitch and committing fewer players forward, “a different beast to the team who raced into the Premier League (in 2022-23) with a dizzying, free-hand attacking approach which eventually came unstuck after emotional and breathless matches with the title in sight”.
To use a Wengerism, they have played with the handbrake on. So did Wenger’s teams at times — the brilliant, title-winning teams, rather than the less durable sides that followed. There comes a point in a title-challenging team’s evolution when it has to find a more ruthless, more serious, more pragmatic edge. Wenger’s Invincibles certainly did in the 2003-04 season after missing out to Manchester United the previous season.
The last Arsenal team to see it over the line, in 2004 (Jim Watson//AFP/Getty Images)
Two decades on, Arteta’s more controlled approach and the reinforcement in defensive positions was vindicated last season, if not by the final outcome then by an improved Premier League performance that took them so close to the title.
But this season, the balance seems to have shifted again. It hasn’t looked right. Prioritising new recruits in defence (Riccardo Calafiori) and midfield (Mikel Merino) over the forward line last summer — leaving it until the final hours of the transfer window to sign Raheem Sterling on loan from Chelsea — looked questionable at the time and, arguably, regrettable with hindsight.
At the time of writing, it is far from clear whether attacking reinforcements will arrive before Monday night’s transfer deadline; with long-term targets Benjamin Sesko (of RB Leipzig) and Alexander Isak (of Newcastle United) seemingly off-limits this month, Arsenal made a serious enquiry this week about England forward Ollie Watkins, only to be knocked back by Aston Villa.
But if the talk internally is of needing more firepower, more speed, a player who can bring goals, inspiration and something different, then that seems to reflect a greater need than merely to cover the absences of Saka and Jesus. And so it should. As talented as Arsenal’s attacking players are, their numbers swelled by the exciting emergence of 17-year-old Ethan Nwaneri, there is a lack of reliable goal threat, compounded in recent months by a lack of reliable creative threat. Whether that is a personnel issue or a confidence issue, it is something Arteta needs to resolve.
It is so hard to do what Arteta is trying to achieve at Arsenal. Indeed, it is hard to do what he has done to date, having taken over a club and a squad that five years ago was every bit as dysfunctional and depressed as the mess Ruben Amorim has inherited at Manchester United.
That stat about four consecutive years of improved points totals in the Premier League bears repeating. The only times that has happened previously in the Premier League era are Leeds United from 1996-97 to 1999-2000, Chelsea from 2001-02 to 2004-05, Aston Villa from 2006-07 to 2009-10 and Leicester City from 2017-18 to 2020-21. Leeds’ improvement took them from 13th to third, Villa’s from 16th to sixth, and Leicester’s from 12th to fifth. Only Chelsea (from finishing sixth in 2000-01) have gone on to be champions and that took an unprecedented level of investment after Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003.
No team has improved in five consecutive top-flight seasons in England since Manchester United, under Sir Alex Ferguson, went from 13th in the old First Division in 1989-90 to winning the first two titles of the Premier League era.
There are numerous other examples in the Premier League era of teams evolving into title challengers over a period of three or four years but failing to make the last step. Arsenal found themselves in a similar cycle in the late 2000s and early-to-mid-2010s under Wenger — build, compete, challenge, fall away, repeat — as did Liverpool under various managers through the 1990s and 2000s and Tottenham Hotspur under Mauricio Pochettino in the mid-2010s.
In many ways, Arteta’s challenge can be likened to the one Jurgen Klopp faced at Liverpool. Klopp didn’t quite manage four consecutive seasons of improvement in the Premier League, but the overall trajectory — from 60 points (eighth) to 76 points (fourth) to 75 points (fourth) to 97 points (second, plus Champions League winners) to 99 points (champions) — was spectacular, even if it proved to be a little boom-and-bust in the four years that followed.
The final step is the hardest. Klopp and Liverpool made it look easy, matching Manchester City almost stride for stride in 2018-19 before leaving them for dust a year later, but clearly it wasn’t. Klopp said in the summer of 2019 that his team would have to be “very close to perfection” to wrestle the title from Manchester City. If that was a challenge to his players, they rose to it.
Klopp showed that City could be beaten (Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images)
The concern with Arteta and Arsenal is that, so far this season, they haven’t looked ready to do that. Not often enough, anyway. They have shown resilience, character and many of the things people talk about in this country when they debate a team’s title-winning credentials, but not enough quality. A team that appeared ready to be the next champions of England has suddenly looked more inhibited, less confident, less ready to go out there and — as Arteta put it in just about every team talk featured in All Or Nothing — to “play forward and attack them”.
Another of those Arteta team talks in the documentary sticks in the mind. It was the one in December 2021 when, with his team seventh in the Premier League after back-to-back defeats by Manchester United and Everton, with his players stunned by his decision to strip Aubameyang of the captaincy after an alleged breach of discipline, the manager scribbled two words on a whiteboard and asked his players what was more important: the journey or the destination.
It was neither, he told them. It was the company they were sharing in that dressing room and the positive energy they were helping to transmit to each other as they tried to find a way forward. And at that stage of their evolution, it was the perfect message.
In time, though, it becomes all about the journey. Arsenal’s under Arteta has been a hell of a ride over the past five years, but it will come to be defined by what comes next and, yes, by whether they reach their destination.
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(Top photo: Mikel Arteta; by Alex Pantling via Getty Images)
