For much of this season, it has been easy to dismiss the vitriol sent in Arsenal’s decision as what it often is performative nonsense on the internet. Mikel Arteta’s league leaders get hate online because most everything gets hate online. It’s the internet’s default reaction. For instance, there’s this football writer who works for a U.S. site but is based out in London, and I swear half his posts must be snarking on about how awful Oasis and their meat and potatoes, leaden-footed, dodgy photocopies of Beatles songs are. What a nerd. Where does he get off?
Wednesday night, though, felt rather different. There is no great animus between Brighton supporters and the team from north London. They don’t particularly like the way Leandro Trossard maneuvered himself to the Emirates Stadium, and they’ve taken understandable glee in spoiling a few title charges in recent years, but that didn’t seem to explain the vituperative energy of the Amex Stadium. Spurred on by Fabian Hurzeler’s withering assessment of the Premier League leaders, Brighton fans howled at every free kick that went Arsenal’s way and roared their disapproval when restarts were delayed.
It was several levels up from the “second again, ole, ole” chant that has followed Arsenal around for months now, but it was of a piece with that more mirthful warning. The rest of the Premier League really don’t want to see Arsenal sat at the top of the tree come May 25. Arsene Wenger’s Invincibles have become Mikel Arteta’s Intolerables.
For Arsenal’s direct rivals, it is easy to see why a Manchester City triumph is more appealing. When Pep Guardiola wins trophies, every club that is not owned by a nation state has a ready made explanation for why it was them, not us. That there are over 115 charges hanging over City, all denied by the club, makes it even easier to rationalize why your team can’t win the league. If Arsenal do, there’s nothing about what they’ve done that is particularly beyond the realms for the rest of the so-called Big Six. When Arteta was appointed, the Gunners ranked below all the other five in terms of revenue and were desperate to trim back their wage bill, not add to it.
With glory in their sights, Arsenal have spent heavily, but in net terms Manchester United and Chelsea have put more into their squad for less returns. Whatever might be thought of their football, more on which later, Arteta, Edu and their employers delivered a blueprint in how to revive a sleeping giant.
Arteta feels the love
That that goes largely unremarked doesn’t seem to bother Arteta, who was in a mischievous mood Wednesday night when Hurzeler’s post-match diatribe was put to him. Asked if he felt any sense of external anger towards his team, he said, “I think they love our players, and every time they talk about our players, I think they’re the most loved ones in the country.” The 43-year-old is not always the easiest Premier League manager to get a read on, but more than six years since our first press conference together, I’m not sure he was being entirely serious. Just a guess. I think it was that little grin and shrug at the end that did it.
Arsenal aren’t in a popularity contest and if the prize at the end of this season is a Premier League title, then the ends justify the means. At the outset, it is worth stating that those means include more goals per game than any team in the division other than Manchester City, about as many penalty box touches as their title rivals and Liverpool, the second most goals from open play and an awful lot of one-goal margin finales to delight neutrals and terrify their supporters.
When this team plays in Europe, they are the great entertainers with nearly three goals a game. Arteta would love if Premier League games were as open as Champions League ones, as much as he “would like to play with three extra players in my own half to get some beautiful football against the free man, but that’s not the reality of football.” Arsenal didn’t forge this new tactical meta of man-to-man defending. Two years ago, they were not that dissimilar to Pep Guardiola’s idealized version of City, just with the defensive dial turned up a smidge.
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Now they have adapted to the games in front of them. They might be the greatest scorers of set pieces in the land but the value of them was affirmed when they were bullied by Brentford on the opening day of the 2022-23 season. Wednesday found themselves continually hoofing the ball long against Brighton when it became apparent their tired legs and minds couldn’t navigate a man-to-man press. Their 61 long balls were the most Arsenal tried in a Premier League game since the 2-2 draw at Anfield nearly three years ago. That was more than Arteta wanted but it was also a function of his team reading the occasion and concluding that they were best off hunkering down.
It was not quite true, as Hurzeler claimed afterwards, that only one team had “come to play.” It’s just the other team had come to play a game where they trusted their defense, where Gabriel continually to block an unholy proportion of shots (14% of shots on Arsenal’s goal this season have hit the Brazilian when he has been on the pitch) and they went direct on the counter. That it didn’t work particularly well offensively until Kai Havertz came on — Bukayo Saka’s 0.01 xG goal was the only shot Arsenal had in the first half — doesn’t mean Arsenal didn’t develop a vision for how they were going to win the football match. That a great deal of reliance on their ability to quell the opposition is nothing to be apologetic for. After all, Brighton ended this game with just 0.82 xG and 11 shots, the last of which came in the 68th minute. From then onwards, they had just four touches in the opposition box. Arsenal had nine.
Masters of the dark arts?
There were other matters over which Hurzeler was aggrieved. You could understand why he was miffed at David Raya’s multiple injury stoppages when, for instance, the Arsenal goalkeeper made a smart save low down to his right and needed treatment on his left shoulder. Maybe something painful did happen there — Arteta dodged questions about his No.1 — but given the preponderance of goalkeepers in the division who seem to be exaggerating pain, you could see why the Brighton manager was riled up.
“One game you play 60 minutes, and then when you play against Arsenal, only 50 minutes, then it’s 10 minutes difference, so is this for what the supporters are paying for?” asked Hurzeler.
Arsenal took a long time in total to get the ball back into play on Wednesday night but perhaps the reason why there was so little football being played is that it was interrupted by the 14 fouls committed by Brighton players. Arsenal committed 12. As Opta noted, an average of 31.4 seconds per stoppage to get the ball out barely scratches the top 200 instances of a team taking long to get the ball back in play. Compared to the Premier League’s average, Arsenal have the ball in play more than most this season.
Perhaps the most incendiary line from the Brighton manager had come a little earlier in the press conference. “If the Premier League, if the referee allows everything, then it’s difficult, then they make their own rules. At the moment, I have the feeling Arsenal are doing their own rules, no matter how they are playing. That’s why I think it’s difficult to judge that,” he said.
Whatever rules Arsenal are playing by, it is hard to see Premier League officials having concluded that they are breaking the ones they are supposed to be playing by. So far this season, they have received seven bookings for time wasting. Five teams have received as many or more. That’s a table you would expect Arsenal to rank even higher on. They’ve had winning positions to protect by fair means or foul in 24 of their 30 games so far.
Arsenal are yet to be penalized for a dive. Only they and Manchester United have received one booking for dissent this season; everyone else in the league has at least three, with an average of nearly six. Broaden it out to the last five years and Arsenal have 77 yellow cards for time wasting, dissent and arguing. The average for the league’s ever-present? 85.
Hurzeler seemed to have an answer for that last, too.
“I said it to [referee Chris Kavanagh]. It’s difficult for him, so I won’t complain about the referee. Do you want to send off the goalkeeper with two yellow cards for wasting time? This will never happen, so what should he do? That’s the thing, that’s why I think you need rules, you need limits, because that’s also what he admits to me at half-time. I didn’t talk even about the penalty we might receive before the half-time, we just talked about how can you reduce the time of waste, and he says it’s even difficult for him,” the coach said.
And yet referees have found ways to sanction Arsenal for time-wasting before. Kavanagh memorably and reluctantly gave Declan Rice a second yellow for time-wasting before Hurzeler’s very eyes at the Emirates Stadium last season. Three weeks later, Trossard got the same punishment. In the last five years, the only other occasion a player has been sent off for time wasting in the Premier League was Anthony Gordon in the 94th minute of Newcastle’s win over West Ham.
None of this is to claim that Arsenal are not a team willing to play at the margins. Talk to sources close at the club and they will acknowledge that this is a club not afraid to indulge in a few of the dark arts in pursuit of victory. That has been the case for a while, long enough that if they were really stretching the limits, it would start to show in the data. What you see instead is a team that might run down the clock a bit more than most when it suits them, who take their sweet time on corners but who will still look to keep the ball in play.
Do Arsenal care?
That’s the Arsenal you see. The Arsenal you hear about are the mustache-twirling grand villains of the Premier League, the Dick Dastardlys whose nefarious schemes everyone expects to be foiled at the last. And the players hear the same things, too.
Asked whether the discourse was getting to him and the team he captained last night, Saka said, “The noise is all external. It’s mainly social media, pundits and stuff like that. It’s not easy [to deal with], but there’s quite an easy solution, don’t go on it … Naturally it will come to you. You have to be mentally strong. It’s a battle we face, this generation of players.”
Arteta too did nothing to hide from the suggestion that Arsenal were live to the noise.
“You can just go back to the previous games and you will find a lot of comments,” he said but the indifference with which he responded to such a scathing assessment of his side was telling. He understands that Arsenal didn’t create the circumstances they find themselves in now, where parity is so pronounced that the 20th team in the table can take seven points from three games against Arsenal, Aston Villa and Liverpool.
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Consider the sheer bulk of teams at or around league average for xG for and against, as well as the presence of just one clearly bad team in attack and defense. You’ll find precious few banker three points on your fixture list this season. Then look at what it was like in the image below from back when Arsenal were first challenging for the title.
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That is an awful lot of teams, which is probably impolite to call awful. That’s also a lot of games on the fixture list where the better team can really cut loose, playing a front-footed attacking game with no fear of repercussions. Try doing that against 2025-26 Leeds United and see where it gets you.
Arsenal certainly aren’t the cause of this parity in the Premier League, nor the fact that the ever-increasing financial heft of the league means it can secure all the athletes and technical wizards that mean that even the worst teams in the division can cover ground and defend space in a way they couldn’t a few years ago. They are just the team that has found the best way of dealing with it.
That might be what makes them so infuriating. So many other teams have been slogging their way through the season and these guys in red just keep on finding ways to win games on the margins: a Gabriel header, a Gabriel block, something unrelated to Gabriel, I guess.
It might not be fun to watch, but right now it is the most effective way of accruing points that a Premier League team has found. That it is driving so many of their rivals mad in the process? That should only make Arsenal’s success all the sweeter.
