Almost any way you measure it, Arsenal got better this season.
Sure, they finished runners-up to Manchester City for the second year in a row, but their points total went up from 84 to 89, which would have been good enough to win half of the Premier League titles in the past decade.
Under the hood, their goal difference rose from 45 to 62, matching City’s figure for that metric, while their expected goal difference shot up half a goal per game to 48.9, and was comfortably the best in the league.
Arsenal are no longer just contenders — they are now genuinely elite.
The interesting thing about Arsenal’s rise is that, broadly speaking, their football didn’t change all that much.
For all of this season’s tactical experiments and new faces at key positions, by most high-level stylistic measures the Arsenal of 2023-24 were still following the winning template established last season — they just did it better.
Advertisem*nt
On the ball, they still play a slow, positional style in a 4-3-3 that is narrow at the back and wide in the final third, forming sort of a reverse funnel. Off it, they favour a suffocating 4-4-2 that cuts off passing options with a high defensive line and aggressive man-marking in the middle.
And that’s all familiar enough.
Instead of a sea change, the story of this season was a subtle but important shift in the balance of power. Manager Mikel Arteta’s decision two summers ago to move central defender Ben White out to right-back, where he could push up in support of Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka, was a turning point.
This season, with Arsenal’s left side comparatively diminished by injuries and absences, the brilliant Saka-Odegaard-White triangle pulled the team’s centre of gravity sharply to the right.
The explosion of bright red in this season’s heat map above shows Arsenal took far more touches than other teams in the attacking right half-space, which is where Odegaard and Saka link up. When you’ve got two of the league’s brightest young talents playing off each other, like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in the Chicago Bulls’ NBA heyday, it’s probably a good idea to feed them the rock.
The bigger story wasn’t just about quantity, though, but what they did with it.
Arsenal’s possession already leaned a little towards Odegaard and Saka last season, but the creative engine was over on the left flank, where Oleksandr Zinchenko, Granit Xhaka and Gabriel Martinelli punched through back lines to put in crosses for runners arriving from the right.
This season, that changed in a big way: not only did Arsenal play more passes from their right, but those passes were also much more threatening than those coming from the left wing.
The story of the above chart is again told mostly in colour: red arrows highlight areas where Arsenal’s passes were more threatening than the league average, measured by their expected goal difference in the next 30 seconds after a pass. Arsenal’s right wing became a lot more dangerous this season while the left wing sank toward the yellowish league average.
Advertisem*nt
On the left side, that change can probably be explained by the names on the team sheet: Xhaka departed for Bayer Leverkusen, while Zinchenko, Martinelli and the left-leaning Gabriel Jesus all spent less time on the pitch. But on the right, where the names of Saka, Odegaard and White are carved in stone by now, the change is more intriguing.
One clue lies in the average passing angles shown by the arrows in the chart above.
Look closely at the right half-space — the third and fourth columns from the right — and you’ll notice a change in direction since last season. Passes from those zones used to be aimed generally toward goal, but lately they’ve spun inside-out, toward the corner of the box.
Instead of recycling play from the wing to attack through the middle, Arsenal use the middle to circulate possession back out to the wing.
There’s an interesting philosophical difference taking shape here between Arteta and his mentor, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, who once claimed that the secret to all team sports is to “overload on one side and draw them in, so that they leave the other side weak”.
Arsenal have other ideas.
Instead of circulating from sideline to sideline in the attacking half to stretch the defence, their midfielders will often recycle the ball back up the same wing it just came down.
“We’re really big on playing ‘same side’,” Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice explained to The Athletic’s Stuart James in his recent My Game In My Words interview. “We’re going to have an overload because there’s two players here…. That fake to initially go one way, ready to take it back the other side, it shifts everyone. So that’s why you see us as a team do that quite a lot.”
It’s easy to see the difference in the two teams’ signature pass pairs — the sequences of two passes that they use more than the rest of the league. City’s style features a lot of wide circulation across the attacking half, but this season Arsenal have dialled back those sideways passes in favour of more short combination play around the corners of the penalty area.
Pumping the ball back up the wing allowed White time to push on along the sideline to combine with Odegaard and Saka, working little passing triangles until they could slip a pass behind the defensive line. Arsenal’s trademark attacking pattern this season was a through ball to a runner on the right side of the box, who looked to pull it back from the goal line to a trailing runner in the middle.
Wide, through, cutback, shot. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The shift shows up in Arsenal’s assists from open play, which often travelled from left to right last season but in 2023-24 came overwhelmingly from the right.
It also changed individual players’ roles in the attack.
Last season, Odegaard had more non-penalty expected goals (10.0) than expected assists (8.4), but this season his role changed from finisher to creator, with about half as many non-penalty expected goals (5.8) as expected assists (9.6). On the left, Leandro Trossard’s numbers have flipped the other way, going from a goal and 10 assists after his mid-season transfer from Brighton to 12 goals and one assist.
Advertisem*nt
Overloading the right wing didn’t just transform the team’s creation from open play. Playing a lot of short passes in close quarters on the wing also made it easier to swarm lost balls and force corners and attacking throw-ins. A healthy share of Arsenal’s goals this season came from inswinging corners delivered into a packed six-yard box and a clever throw-in pattern along the goal line that caught opponents off-guard.
Counter-pressing on the crowded wings was a key part of Arsenal’s much-improved defending: trapping opponents in the corner forced them to counter through the middle, where Rice gobbled up transitions, or hit hopeful long balls over the top to a waiting Gabriel and William Saliba. As a unit, Arsenal conceded just 29 goals this season, the lowest number in the Premier League, down from 43 in 2022-23.
The defensive improvement wasn’t just about high pressing, where numbers were down across the league this season as teams placed more emphasis on building from the back. Arsenal did slightly less high pressing this season, as measured by the likelihood that an opposing player’s touch in their half would lead to a turnover within five seconds, but the one area where their pressure improved was on their right wing — another testament to the strength of those wide overloads.
All told, this season was a leap forward for a side now firmly established as one of the best in Europe.
The shift to the right wing put more responsibility on their best players and gave them roles better suited to their talents. An emphasis on “same side” circulation created wide overloads that bolstered performances on and off the ball, with better set-piece production to match.
The icing on the cake is that they’re still getting better.
Arsenal’s average age this season, weighted by minutes played, was just 25, making them the seventh-youngest team in Europe’s top five leagues. Of their 15 top players by minutes played, only two — Trossard and goalkeeper David Raya — are older than 26.
This squad is still years away from its prime.
Arsenal are still finding new ways to improve, but next season they might have to do it as title favourites.
GO DEEPERMartin Odegaard's passing playbook: Carousels, scoops, chips, clips and more(Photo: Clive Rose/Getty Images)
John Muller is a Senior Football Writer for The Athletic. He writes about nerd stuff and calls the sport soccer, but hey, nobody's perfect. Follow him at johnspacemuller.substack.com.
