LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR TOTAL ARSENAL DOMINANCE (LONG READ)
I don’t normally write end-of-season reviews, but the summer transfer factory hasn’t really kicked in, so I thought it was worth seeing if I could navigate some thoughts.
My view in August last year was that Arsenal were playing a medium-term game when it came to building out the club's future success.
To be specific, I wrote this:
Arsenal aged down their squad this summer. As painful as it is to hear, the underlying strategy of our recruitment policy is to be ready when City lands a brutal shock to the system (Pep leaving)... if this season was about the jugular, we'd have signed 28 yr old machete players. Does that mean we're trying not to compete? No. Does it mean we can't win the league this season? No. But it does mean you have to contextualise
1) Why Arteta broke down what felt like a winning machine
2) Why he's moving towards formational fluidity
3) Why he's taking risks so early on with heavy rotation. We topple City by investing in better ideas. Our idea last season was the same 13 until they broke. It was too predictable and too prone to breaking down. This new idea is wild unpredictability against anyone. That'll take time to hone.
Breaking what seemed like a winning machine was brave. If Wenger had our squad from last season this summer - he'd have kept Xhaka and renewed everyone. 'One or two special players' was Wenger's promise for years and it didn't work. Arteta and Edu are trying to create a winning machine that can do it for a decade. That requires some short term pain - but longterm, we'll be more Manchester City than Liverpool (who rapidly declined after winning the league because they had an old starting 11).
No one will complain when we arrive at the promised land - but there will be bumps along the way. Mistakes will be made (loads today), there will be shit performances, and there will be terrible experiments that won't work. But I think we've seen enough from Arteta to know he'll get it right in the end.
I had three hopes for last season.
Navigate the changes to the squad with as little pain as possible
Cope with the Champions League better than Spurs did when they returned under Conte
Push Manchester City beyond April and be within spitting distance come the end of the season
Overall, looking at the season in totality, it’s hard to avoid the truth: it was a big success.
Think about some of the pain we navigated.
Big Gabriel Focus
The Brazilian clearly had his head turned by a mega Saudi offer, and he was benched for the season's first three games. That decision could have been very problematic for Arteta. The player could have totally switched off, and we could have damaged our central defensive partnership for the season. The impact of dropping him was the opposite - it focused him and took his game to the next level. At one point, he looked like our best centre-back.
The Exit of Xhaka
Some folk told me that Arteta backing Xhaka would end his career - they were wrong. They also said he’d flop elsewhere - he just won the league (invincible)/cup double with Leverkusen and went to a European final. Granit was a big player for us; losing him in the summer was huge for the dressing room, and most clubs would have felt more pain.
Late Keeper Flapping
Steve Round lost his head for popping off at Arteta over the Ramsdale exit from the starting 11. Bringing in David Raya was a big move - it happened late in the window after Ramsdale had signed a new deal. Fans were unhappy. Some were even delusional - remember people falling over themselves to imagine that Arteta was about to change the keeping tactico game by subbing GKs off depending on the game state? Wild. Disregarding those insane thoughts - Arteta chopped out his number 1 in September. It took about 10 games to really click. There were lots of tears in the base, particularly from my dad. But who is crying now? No one (my dad).
Fallen Timber
Arteta and his coaching staff were extremely excited about the impact of Jurrien Timber. His ability to carry out instruction, to do wild things on the ball, and his overall leadership abilities had them purring about the added unpredictability he could offer our starting 11. That was all taken from us on the first game of the season. We lost potentially a player of the season. But we didn’t let it affect us.
Fitness Issues
Thomas Partey missed the majority of the season. Gabriel Jesus was rarely fit. Zinchenko and Tomiyasu saw large stretches out of the team. We dealt with a lot of peripheral injuries that could have rocked us - but this season, we had more depth to cope.
Champions League
Arteta has been pretty poor at rotating players during his short career. He puts his faves on the pitch over and over again, genuinely believes fatigue is a state of mind, and it has stung him over and over. There were quite a few of us very worried about how a squad known for breaking down in key moments was going to handle playing 3 big games a week from September.
Those are some pretty chonky variables to be dealing with and it wasn’t always perfect - but overall, it’s hard to be too critical of where things ended up.
Going up against Pep Guardiola is extremely difficult because you have to match him for innovation. There were a lot of folk in my GCs saying we shouldn't have changed anything - what we had the season prior was nearly perfect, so why not go again?
… because Pep is always changing. If you don’t innovate, he will kill you. If it wasn’t good enough the season before, it wasn’t going to be good enough the season after. It was a Wenger mindset to make incremental improvements and not face up to painful truths like:
We’re never progressing with a slow striker like Giroud.
We’ll never progress if our players don’t press
We’ll never compete in Europe without tactics that consider the opposition
Players that are always injured are a danger to our future success
No way Wenger would have added Declan, Kai, and Raya after the season we’d had.
The first three months of the season saw us lose to Crystal Palace, drop points against Fulham, and lose in the Champions League to Lens in a freakish away day. The common complaint was that the football was boring and bit too pedestrian. The fans felt it in the ground, we went from having the most noise in the league, to fans writing op-eds about how the natural course of football is that fandom goes to shit when folk get used to living the high life (how wrong was that assertion btw?).
The reason the football was turgid is because Arteta made the transition to the new era fairly difficult on himself. The new model was about total control, less emotion, and more unpredictability. That required a new 6, a new 8, and a new keeper. Three players learning a totally new system with new teammates under the glare of extremely expectant fans.
I had been told at the start of the season that Declan Rice struggled at first with the demands in training. Kai Havertz arrived with a Chelsea shame bell in his hands, a lot of fans presumed failure, and his early performances didn’t really inspire hope. David Raya was a short man with good kicking, but people didn’t want to like him, because he killed a keeper that made us smile.
Learning to play for Arsenal is like being a fairly competent casual dancer and getting thrown into a Broadway musical and expecting to learn the part in real-time. Arsenal football is a different level to anything in the league outside City.
The big moment for Arsenal and the bold new era we were entering was beating Manchester City at home. There were two monsters under the Arsenal bed, Liverpool and City. Getting an early scalp pointed to a future of not shitting our pants every time we played them. The issue was that a loss to Newcastle fast-followed - it was under unfair circumstances, but that set the wheels in motion for 50 days where we’d get punished to the max for every mistake and we couldn’t score.
This was our defensive record from the start of December.
Forest: 3 shots on target, 1 goal
LFC: 3 shots on target, 3 goals
Fulham: 4 shots on target, 2 goals
West Ham: 3 shots on target, 2 goals
LFC: 3 shots on target, 1 goal
Villa: 3 shots on target, 1
Luton: 4 shots on target, 3 goals
Wolves: 3 shots on target, 1 goal
LFC: 1 shot on target, 1 goal
Ultimately, our season failed on our run in December. The West Ham game, where we peppered their goal but managed to lose, really did feel like a peak moment - Fulham away was also shocking. An abject performance for the ages.
So heading into Dubai, you had two schools of thought:
Bad luck in defence and profligacy in front of goal would rectify at some point.
Good players with a record of scoring, will eventually score from quality chances
The chances of conceding from every first chance with a defensive unit giving away next to nothing will eventually course correct.
We aren’t good enough and xG nerds don’t know what they are talking about
I’ve spent enough time with xG Gods to know that they always get their way in the end - and I’ve seen enough people be extremely wrong when they write off underlying numbers.
Did I expect the near-perfect run into the end of the season? No. But I was pretty explicit about the impending collapse of Liverpool and Spurs. Two teams overperforming to extraordinary levels. I was wrong about Unai Emery though, he managed to sustain the luck all season and sail Villa into Champions League which is probably the most extraordinary achievement in the Premier League since Leicester won the league.
The Arsenal players didn’t want to go to Dubai - organized fun is crap for footballers as well as accountants. But whatever went on in the sun seemed to work a treat. The players came back energized, focused, and determined to be part of the Premier League plotline right up until the last moment. The only major blip was the shock defeat to Villa at home. I think it’s widely viewed that the players were emotionally drained from the Munich game and couldn’t push through the second half.
When you’re going up against perfection, anything less than winning all your games isn’t good enough. That’s no sleight on Arsenal. There should be no soul-searching to find out what the issue was. We competed against the most brutal winning machine in history. City has been layering excellence upon excellence over the last 13 years. They have the best coach, coaches, sports science, data, scouting, and they do it all at an incredibly high-level. They’ve been doing it for over a decade, we’ve only really been going hard at it for 4 years. We’ve only been a CL club for a single season.
Toppling a monster will require patience, unfortunately.
But there are some positives on the horizon. The strategy of being ready for the demise of our competitors is looking like a sharp one. This summer, we’ll age down the squad again and add more quality, better tools, and more unpredictability. There should be less short-term pain next year because the core 17 has been established. We’re not adding first-teamers like we were last season.
Then you have to look at what’s going on around us:
United will likely be starting again or continuing with a below-average manager
Chelsea sacked Poch and they are putting Enzo Maresca in charge - more chaos
Newcastle is coached by Eddie Howe - there’s a limit on how far they can go, even with all the money in the world
Liverpool just lost a legend - even if the best manager in the world was going there, it’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be problems. Arne Slot is a data hire - that doesn’t always translate into greatness because greatness requires an X Factor you can’t put your finger on
Manchester City has a double threat. The biggest issue for them is losing Pep G. He is, as Americans would say, the MVP of Manchester City. His impending exit next season is going to be the story and as you saw with Klopp - players knowing ahead of time never works for the ‘one last job for the boys story.’ He should have left this summer if he wanted to do it properly. They are also about to get slapped by the Premier League. Don’t buy all the ‘there’s going to be an agreement’ or ‘the UK doesn’t want to jeopardise relations’… if they are found guilty of half of the offences, they will not be a Premier League side in September 2025. The Premier League is doing a very bad job countering the ‘it’s gonna be great for City’ PR. It’s not going to be ok. If everything was fine, Richard Masters wouldn’t have been at The Emirates for the last game of the season. If the slap comes, it’s going to be absolutely savage, because it has to be. Formula One lost 10% of its audience because of perceived unfairness. There is too much riding on those charges for the punishment to be a softball. Cheating needs to be dissuaded at all costs - and fines are not a deterrent to nation-states.
That leaves an opening for Arsenal. It gives us a chance to dominate. It could be our era.
How exciting is that? Very.
So, to conclude, this season has been great for the fans, great for the players who have built out title-chasing IP, and it’s been great for laying the foundations for a golden Arsenal future.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about some of the things that went right in a little more detail.
P.S. For the podcast freaks. We’ll be recording bits all this week. Back on the bike as they say. I’ll also be introducing paywalled Le Grove content this week. I have an introductory price for that content and it includes all the podcasts + bonus content advert free for £3.50 ($5) p/m.
P.P.S. Make sure you check out our Arsenal Therapy Session with Frank Warren. We are quite chuffed to get someone on like that!