A number nobody expected from the champions
Arsenal spent the summer chasing a left winger and never landed one. Vinicius Junior, Morgan Rogers, Bradley Barcola, Julian Alvarez: every name floated, none arrived. Christos Tzolis came instead, cheap and largely unknown to most Premier League supporters.
Opta’s numbers, published a few days ago, suggest the miss might not matter.
Across the opening Premier League rounds this season, Arsenal have taken 47.5% of their attacking-half touches down the right flank and 27.4% down the left. Both figures are the most extreme in the division, and not by a small margin. No team in England leans harder on one side.
This is not new, only sharper. Last season Arsenal attacked down their left less than any side in the league, with 31.8% of their opposition-half touches arriving in the left third. The right accounted for 41.7%. Only West Ham, funnelling everything through Jarrod Bowen, went right more often.
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Saka is the reason, but not the only one
Bukayo Saka is the obvious explanation. He is also an incomplete one. When he missed a chunk of last season through injury, Arsenal did not rebalance. Noni Madueke and Max Dowman took the shirt and the ball kept going the same way.
The pattern held again in the Champions League win at Napoli. Martin Odegaard drifted so far across that he read like a right winger, and he and Saka found each other with their passes more than any other pairing on the pitch. Arsenal generated 4.05 expected goals that night, their highest in a Champions League match since Opta records began in 2012-13. Odegaard’s winner came at the end of a 29-pass move involving ten players, and Tzolis supplied the assist after drifting over to the right himself. Saka had already been substituted.
Kai Havertz does the same thing domestically, pulling wide right to overload the flank, sometimes standing wider than Saka. Against Chelsea he came infield from exactly that position to equalise.
The left still works, just differently
Riccardo Calafiori averages 39.6 touches per 90 in all competitions this season. Only David Raya, Havertz and Viktor Gyokeres touch the ball less often. Ben White, on the opposite flank, averages 68.4. That gap is the argument in a single line.
Yet Tzolis has four assists in his first five competitive appearances and Calafiori has two. Between them, Arsenal’s left flank accounts for six of the nine assists registered by Arsenal players in all competitions. Fewer touches, more end product.
The open question is what happens when an opponent shuts the right down, or when Saka or Odegaard picks up a knock. Nobody has managed the first yet.
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