The transfer that never arrived
Vinicius Junior, Morgan Rogers, Bradley Barcola, Julian Alvarez. Four names, four leads, zero signings. Arsenal spent the summer hunting for a world-class left winger and came up empty. Trossard and Martinelli have gone. Christos Tzolis arrived, a name most fans had barely heard of.
Plenty saw that as a missed chance. The numbers tell a different story.
Arsenal were not really attacking down the left anyway. Last season the Gunners took 31.8% of their touches in the opposition half in the left third of the pitch, the lowest figure in the Premier League. They still won the title.
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47.5% right, 27.4% left, and the gap is growing
Across the first three league matches, the split is 47.5% on the right against 27.4% on the left. Both numbers are Premier League extremes, and not by a little.
Bukayo Saka is the obvious main reason. He is not the only one. Last season, when he was unavailable, the plan did not change: Noni Madueke or Max Dowman took the flank, and the ball kept going that way.
Against Chelsea, Kai Havertz drifted wider than Saka to overload the wing. That was the route he used to cut inside and level the game. Against Napoli, Martin Odegaard spent long spells looking like a right winger. He and Saka found each other more often than they found any team-mate.
The result? 4.05 expected goals. Arsenal’s highest total in the Champions League since 2012-2013. Odegaard’s winner finished off a 29-pass move involving 10 players. The assist came from Tzolis, off the bench and stationed on the right.
The left side exists, but it does not drive anything
Calling the left flank useless would go too far. Tzolis has four assists in his first five appearances. Riccardo Calafiori has two, plus eight high-intensity runs that ended inside the box, third-best at the club behind Havertz and Saka.
Then look at the touches. Calafiori averages 39.6 per game, fourth-lowest in the squad, behind goalkeeper David Raya and forwards Havertz and Gyokeres. Tzolis is up at 52.9. On the other side, right-back Ben White sits on 68.4 touches per match and is one of only four players to start all five games.
Five wins from five, 10-1 on aggregate. Only Chelsea have looked capable of bothering them.
One question is still sitting there unanswered. What happens the day an opponent actually shuts that flank down, or the day Saka gets hurt? Nobody has managed to test it yet.
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