Why Arsenal's Problems Are Even Worse Than You Think

Hello everybody, Adam Cleary from 442 here. Happy New Year, by the way, if you didn't see yesterday's video. And, um, yeah, Arsenal, what's happening there? Going into the Aston Villa game, there was talk that if they could get a win there, you'd have to consider them title favourites, but it's been just one win in the last five since, and now it's not good. All right, so first off, this is not the Arsenal side that started against Fulham. I'd said I'd done a little bit of rotation up front and in defence, but this is pretty much the Arsenal side we sort of expect in most of the games this season. And the thing is, it's not too dissimilar from the Arsenal side of last season. Obviously David Rye instead of Ramsdale, that feels like a big change. Declan Rice is a huge addition. He starts whenever possible, but other than that, in pretty much all the major areas, you've got the same key players. The main difference, though, is not in the personnel, it's in what they're trying to do. Arsenal last season were probably the best team in transition in the league, if not in the entire world. They would win the ball back absolutely everywhere. They would play immediate, quick, incisive balls, getting behind the opponent and score goals that way. The only problem with that, though, and almost certainly the reason they didn't go on and win the league, was they lacked the ability to really control games of football. Sometimes it was too open and too frenetic, and they would concede goals when they really shouldn't, and that's the difference between finishing second and finishing first. So that's the watchword for Arsenal this season. They are trying to control games a lot better. They're trying to see more of the ball. They're trying to have more possession. They're trying to have more territorial dominance. They're trying to not be as open at the back, and that is absolutely working for them. And if we look at their numbers this season, they have the third highest possession in the league. That's way up on last year. They've got the highest number of touches and the highest possession in the attacking third of the pitch. Nobody is penning teams in better than Arsenal are currently. They've even got the highest number of in the opponent's penalty area this season. So not only are they really good at boxing them in, they're really good at, I don't know, turning the noose, tightening the screw, whatever the phrase is. So that's great then. Surely they want to be a team that controls games better, and not only are they doing that, but they're controlling games in the best possible area of the pitch. So why are they not winning more? Well, and this is going to be the through line of the entire video, Arsenal create absolutely loads of chances now, but Arsenal don't create good chances now. So this is the boring statistical way of looking at all of this, right? First of all, put aside the set pieces. Arsenal are brilliant at set pieces. They score loads of goals from that, but set pieces aren't going to win you a league. It's the goals you make from open play that are. So from open play this season, Arsenal have created 450 chances. That's amazing. That is second in the league. Only Liverpool are creating more chances than them. That is title winning stuff. But in terms of open play passes that have led directly to a goal, so either they are the assist or they're the ball before the assist, they've only had 35. That is pathetic for a title winning side. That's 11th in the league. It sandwiches them between, I think, Forest and Crystal Palace. Like that is an absolutely enormous disparity between the amount of chances they're creating and how many of those chances are leading to goals. So what's problem? Is it just that they're not taking these chances? Are their strikers not very good? I think Jesus has only got like three goals in the league this season. Martinelli's only got two. Are they the problem? Well, if you want to answer that question, it depends absolutely on how much you care about XG. Arsenal's XG, which if you just haven't heard this term still, it's basically like a measure of the quality of the chance. And what is the probability you should score each and every one of them? And you total that up and that should tell you how many goals you should have scored. Their XG is 36.4, right? Now that's pretty low for a team with title aspirations. Puts them like fifth or sixth in the league. But crucially, it's bang on because Arsenal have scored 36 goals this season. So while it probably does feel easy to blame their strikers because they haven't scored a lot of goals, they're also not exactly being wasteful. Like if you really want to go down this XG route, then Martinelli and Jesus are pretty much bang on for their XG. They're slightly underperforming it. So they should maybe have one or two more goals this season based on the quality of chance, but not so much that's going to have made a massive difference. So the problem isn't the strikers. The problem is this level of control Arsenal are trying to have because it's changed who they are as a team. And as a result, it's changed how other teams play against them. And they're struggling against that style of play. But again, just to go back to last season, Arsenal were great in transition. They would get the ball, whether it was in their own third or in the final third. And straight away, they would try and play a killer pass. And it would make great chances as a result. It was so exciting to watch. I went back and I watched all of Arsenal's goals last season. And this one near the end of the season jumped out at me immediately. This is Zinchenko on the ball here. And what you'd probably say has become the quintessential Declan Rice position for Arsenal this season. They've made that box midfield. He's the deeper two and on the left hand side of it. And he's got the ball and nobody's pressing him. There's a probably a nice easy ball that plays it forward to Martinelli here, but he doesn't do either of those. He does this brilliant through the lines pass to Granit Xhaka that opens the whole game up. He immediately does one little layoff and all of a sudden, Arsenal have three or four players between the defensive lines. They're going at goal and they score from it. And that goal really jumped out at me because not only can I not really remember seeing that pass from Arsenal this season, I can also never really remember seeing it from Declan Rice. Like just to clarify here, this is not going to be a video where I say the whole problem with Arsenal is Declan Rice, by the way. He's an absolutely fantastic player. If you can't get a bargain at a hundred million, he absolutely was it. He's the reason they're so able to control these games like they want to now. But there are one or two things he doesn't do as well as they would perhaps want him to. I'm just going to show you all of his relevant FB ref numbers from this season in the Premier League here, right? And this paints a picture to me of one of the best central midfielders in the world. He's just fantastic in possession here. He passes the ball brilliantly. He progresses the ball brilliantly. He carries the ball brilliantly. You don't even need to see how well he wins the ball back because that's kind of like one of Declan Rice's big things. He's exactly who you'd want at the base of a midfield three if you're the kind of team that wants to control games. Two numbers that should jump out at you immediately as a problem here are these. Key passes and through balls. Now don't get me wrong, when you're in one of the deeper midfield positions, the onus of chance creating is absolutely not on you. I'm not saying you should have loads of assists or anything like that, but those are the two stats that probably best measure how incisive your passing is. Like, key passes is anything that leads directly to a shot. You effectively make that chance even if you're not necessarily laying it on. And through balls is just any pass that goes between the defenders and in behind. And those are the two things he's not currently doing. Like, they're the only two things he's not doing, I hasten to add. He does everything else superbly, but the problem is Arsenal really need somebody who's going to do that. Like, case in point, here are Oleksandr Zinchenko and Thomas Partey's numbers specifically from last season. But in through balls and key passes, while they're not drastically higher, they are definitely higher. They were doing that more. Inability or possibly reluctance to play that exact kind of pass makes life difficult for Arsenal. What ends up happening, and I've got Arsenal set up in their box here that they do when they're building out from the back, right? What ends up happening is instead of being able to find any of these five players when they've drifted between these two defensive lines, what happens is you play safe and you move up the pitch and the other team gets set into what's known as a low block. They get two tight banks of ball with no space in between. And what then happens instead is you end up in sort of like this situation where everybody spreads out to try and find a bit more room and you pen them into their half, hence why they're having all these touches and all of this possession. And what you do is just go from left to right. You pass it round in what's known as the horseshoe. You can't get any sort of, what's the word I want, penetration in this area of the pitch. So it goes left to right, left to right, left to right, waiting for something to happen. You see Man City do this every single week and they are brilliant at it. They use this opportunity to start moving players into different positions, they rotate, they move the defence around and eventually they find a gap and they get a goal from that. Arsenal are way, way, way too static to make that work right now. That's not their game at all. Players like to stay in their positions and yes they will run and yes they will make changes here and there, but not enough that it breaks down teams like Fulham, teams like West Ham. Without the space between the lines and in behind, Arsenal really do struggle to create good quality chances. And without a player at the base of the midfield who's going to make immediate, quick, incisive through balls, they can't get that space. But to put that another way, right, Arsenal are struggling because they're being forced to play like Manchester City this year when they are not Manchester City. What made them so good last year was all the ways they were different from Manchester City. And this, right, in my opinion, means that Mikel Arteta has a pretty big decision to make in January. Because this decision to control games better is actually working. Like they're not scoring as well and the results aren't really there, but they still have got the second best defence in the league. They don't look anywhere near as open as they did last year. So in that sense, success, sense, it's been a success, sense, success, what? But the problem is they're going to keep finding themselves in this situation and if you want to be the kind of team that can still score goals from here, you need a different kind of centre forward. Like Man City work the ball around brilliantly and they create a small chance for Haaland, who himself is occupying two defenders, creating space for his teammates and they get loads of goals that way. Gabi Jesus is a great, great centre forward, but he's not that kind of player. He will drop out of that space and try and link up that way, but you need a more central focal point. So he's either got to surrender a bit of this control in order to get the space back that they need or he's got to go shopping again. And I don't know if you know much about buying goal scoring centre forwards in the January window, but oh my God. So yes, I think that's the problem with, this is Stone Cold, what am I doing? This is the problem with Arsenal right now. They wished so hard to be a team who could control games, but they know what they say about wishing you should be careful of it. But I mean, Arsenal fans, you'll probably have a way better idea of all this than I will. I was barely even watching the Fulham game because Neil Morrissey came into the pub and we were like, oh look, there's Neil Morrissey. So let us know what you make of this whole situation in the comments below. 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