The Magic Formula for Mikel Arteta
Background
Praise
Early this season after a fantastic mini trophy haul of the FA Cup & Community Shield, Arsenal’s recently dubbed ‘Manager’ has come under high praise throughout the start of the 2020/21 season. This was in part because of early wins against Fulham, West Ham, Leicester, and Sheffield, but mainly because he had “sorted the defence”. This was a true claim as even now we have the joint 4th best defence in the league, even after our 3–0 loss at home to Aston Villa.
Not that good
What these platitudes ignored from the start though were warning signs of large collective shortcomings in spite of our improved defence. Just because your defence is good, it doesn’t mean you’re good as a whole. In fact, teams with a good attack & bad defence tend to do far better than those with the reverse. A reason we tend not to notice this, is that aside from rare 0–0s, you have to concede to drop points, and even if you concede because of a lack of threat going forward allowing the opposition to apply more men and pressure up the pitch, people will likely still view the goals you concede as individual defensive errors almost every time.
As I’ve remarked on twitter before; the Premier League is home to the highest level of domestic competition football in the world, yet somehow 90% of goals are dubbed as defensive errors. It’s just how people watch the game. It’s wrong, but it’s how the game is digested here. A failing to see it as a holistic battle between two systems of 11, instead of ‘scorers vs tacklers’. Either way, I digress…
Downfall
After our hot spell of form in the cup last season, we signed Gabriel, Willian and Partey, and Mohamed Elneny returning from loan at Besiktas offered Arteta an extremely ‘low-risk’ option to add to another area of his team. The first two of these went straight into our Premier League starting XI & have been mainstays since, to very contrasting successes. The second two have come in later and have since become our midfield pivot. The low-risk, low-reward nature of the two more follically-endowed of the four proved too tempting for Arteta who since started them consistently, benching Dani Ceballos, Nico Pepe, and eventually Granit Xhaka as well.
These two have been taking up two starting spots in our league XI for a lot of the season now, which considering the profile of the other key attacking players in this XI (Aubameyang, Lacazette, Saka), need to be creative and/or penetrative players, as these others — as good as they are — will not create openings for themselves. Mohamed Elneny & Willian Borges Da Silva however are far from this, and it has completely murdered the ability of this Arsenal 343 to threaten goal at all.
Arsenal are currently 11th in the league in points, expected points, non-penalty expected goal difference, non-penalty expected goals created, actual goal difference, and 13th for expected goals created.
You can see this in their game as well. When the two large-haired Volkswagen Passats start, cruising smoothly and safely through the game, seeming to rarely place a foot wrong, but also adding far less than nothing to the gunners’ game, and creating an extremely ugly spectacle for anyone watching, you can see the entire team sapped of any penetration whatsoever. Appearing to largely do little wrong but toothless, turgid, and a light training drill against which to defend.
This is simply because of who the players are. Elneny in his role the first half of the campaign so far, as a box-to-box player next to Xhaka — as a deep #8 — is a good foil for a defensively or athletically frail #6, but not to be relied upon to create anything. It’s Mohamed Elneny… we should know this. Later on as Xhaka was phased out of the PL side, the Egyptian was used as more of a #6, which in theory works but has been clumsy in practice due to his stiff passing, despite Partey’s brilliance next to him. Ceballos as the #8 was even more ineffective, as should be expected without the quality of Xhaka’s passing from deep. One of the midfield 2 needs to be good at collecting from the back line — Elneny is not.
Willian is a highly reliable winger who however offers no threat off the shoulder of the defence nor any creativity in front of it, with either dribbles, clever movement, or passing. A signing Arsenal should never have made, let alone benched Nico Pepe for, who has inevitably proven to be a match-winner this year since Unai Emery’s departure in November 2019. A signing that looks even worse when you consider we couldn’t afford Houssem Aouar in the summer, despite signing the Brazilian to a 3-year £35m deal earlier on, due to his agent Kia Joorabchian’s clear influence. The world-class frenchman would have cost no more than £50m, with affordable wages after his last contract signed in 2018 only being worth £1.3m salary per year (26kpw basic) was recently raised to pay him £3m per year (60kpw) at Lyon.
Solution
Arteta style of play
Mikel Arteta, despite the huge struggles this season, has got Arsenal playing some extremely promising football, mostly before lockdown. After the strict limitations on vertical passing put in place by Unai Emery for 18 months, the team was completely out of ideas on the ball, but Arteta coached in some really high quality passing infrastructure, in addition to a defensive transition that was easily Champions League level. He also added the deep block we’ve seen lots of this season as well. Even after lockdown you could see the clear style of play is possession football with on-the-deck build-up & rigid positional structure even in the final third. It doesn’t look like it at all currently, but this is not completely incompatible with a turnaround, it just needs some philosophical changes.
Players
One of the options for Arteta is to maintain the existing rigid positional structure but to use creative & penetrative players within it. This would be similar strategically to Guardiola’s City in that the system’s rigidity compensates for the defensive frailties incurred by fitting many creative & technical players into the team.
This would be best done using midfields of Xhaka-Partey, Xhaka-Ceballos & Partey-Willock behind front 3s of the following combinations:
RW: Pepe, Nelson, Maitland-Niles
CF: Nketiah, Aubameyang, Lacazette, Martinelli
LW: Aubameyang, Willian, Nelson, Saka, Martinelli
An additional solution is reinstating Mesut Ozil in any variant of the #10 role which would solve all the issues we currently have without altering the system or the playing philosophy.
System
Another way for Arteta to solve the current creative problems, if he really wants to retain Elneny & Willian in the lineup, is to alter the system. A front 3 of Lacazette Aubameyang & Willian can only work with Willian on the left, pushing Aubameyang to the right. The false #9 variant can also work, but is far far better with Ozil over Willian to enable the front two.
Additionally these players could be part of a functional setup if the system was changed for a more attacking one. Swapping one of the back 5 for a 3rd midfielder or a #10 in 433 or 4231 solves these issues on its own. Bringing in Joe Willock or Mesut Ozil for the current LWB, or just using Saka more efficiently as a LCM ahead of a conventional back 4 with the current lineup.
Remember, the current back 5, even sans the LWB, is a back 4 in its own right. The extra man hugging the touchline with Tierney already there is almost completely redundant, especially with Aubameyang wide too. This was highlighted nicely by @theflawedfoot after the Villa game in the below heatmaps of Teirney, Saka & Aubameyang.
Saka could even be retained as a LWB if the system used the extra width this creates to get Aubameyang into more central positions, as currently it does not. I pointed this out during the City game:
I’m not sure why Aubameyang has been doing this, but it is the coach’s responsibility to get his players in the right positions. Especially, his best ones.
More generally speaking, the more attacking players you get closer to goal, the less you have to worry about scoring goals. Our current system vastly inhibits that, creating primarily through balls in behind to the fullbacks.
Man Management
Even discounting ‘the erasure of Mesut Ozil’, Arsenal’s problems this season would largely not be there if better players had been on the pitch in the league. Pepe, Willock & Nelson, 3 players who both should be very much in our setup, and would have gone a long way to avoiding the problems we have had, have had 1 start in the league this season between them.
At best, Mikel Arteta is temporarily benching them to leverage a higher training intensity to reinstate them at a later date, as Mourinho has appeared to do with Tanguy Ndombele. But even then, when you don’t win in the meantime, the incentive for a change in application from these players disappears. “They’re benching me and losing, they still need me as I am”. If you ask me, Jose was lucky that this has worked out for him. I would say a lot of it owes to the huge level of belief in him, more than the quality of the strategy itself, and in any case has cost him an entire season of results playing Winks instead & finishing 6th — Spurs’ 12th season without a trophy & 29th year with no better trophy than the League Cup.
At worst though, Arteta either doesn’t see that these players perform better for us on match day, or is prioritising training performance or personality over the team winning.
This would have to stop for us to survive as a European club. You can’t pick fights with this many of your own players and succeed when you need them like we do. It’s an over prioritisation of values from which you can’t reap the rewards if you no longer have a job. Work should always be done to get your best players on the pitch, and the priority has to be with winning games of football — that, should be the only non-negotiable.
Chance creation
Lastly, whatever the system or personnel, having the quality to create & score goals is born from players with technical superiority in distribution, and quality movement off the ball from players to receive. Whatever Mikel’s next move, to become a club at the top of the table — where we need to, and should be — this needs to be prioritised by our team when we have the ball.
Conclusion
In any case it’s not currently good, though there is a glimmer of hope in the brainy Spaniard at last admitting to the existence of a problem on his part, when digesting the Villa game. After insisting he was happy with the team’s direction ever since the loss at Manchester City, he finally spoke about a reevaluation on his part as well as the team’s:
Here’s to a fresh start after the international break!
