A slingshot full of rocks

Arsenal’s attack has been a significant discussion for several seasons now. For a while, the attack didn’t change very much. Saka and Martinelli were at the club when Mikel Arteta arrived. Gabriel Jesus arrived in 2022 and briefly changed our lives until a succession of knee injuries curtailed, first, his availability and then his effectiveness.

Lacazette’s contract ran down with no effort to extend it, Aubameyang left acrimoniously. Nico Pepe did not exactly to conform to Arteta’s vision for a wide player and arguably the Premier League was never a good fit for him anyway and the less said about the Willian experiment the better.

Prior to this season, Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz were really the only meaningful attackers Arsenal had added under Arteta who had any sort of long-term impact. The irony there is that Trossard was very much a Plan B signing after a bid for Mykhailo Mudryk failed and Havertz was primarily bought as a midfielder (even if I think Arteta anticipated using him further forward on occasion).

My own theory for this is that transformative attacker just hasn’t become available on the market for Arsenal. I am certain that fans will debate that and I don’t know intimately enough who Arsenal have passed up on over recent seasons to say it ‘with my whole chest’ as someone younger than me might say.

In the summer of 2025, I think Arteta and Arsenal knew they had reached the stage where they simply could not wait for the porridge to be juuuuuust right in the market anymore. The truth is, I think they took on three transfer windows worth of work to reinforce the final third of the pitch.

I am pretty certain that Arsenal could have signed Viktor Gyokeres a summer earlier if they were absolutely itching to get the player in the way they were for David Raya and Declan Rice. I think it just came to a stage where they realised going into a season with Havertz and Jesus, both in varying states of medical distress, was not tenable so they had to shit or get off the pot.

Noni Madueke is a good winger with a Premier League pedigree. He was not and never likely to be a genuine ceiling raiser. What he was and is is better than the 2024-25 version of Raheem Sterling and he has room for development and growth. Arsenal didn’t immediately raid Crystal Palace for Eberechi Eze, they seemed happy enough for Spurs (lol) to sign him up until Kai Havertz was injured on the opening day of the season.

Six days after that season opener, Eze was paraded on the pitch as an Arsenal player. That deal was probably there to be done a little earlier in the window. All of this tells us, that in the absence of truly outstanding, league winning quality, Arteta wanted quantity (and a little more chaos). A strong selection of really good players but perhaps, with the possible exception of a fit Bukayo Saka, lacking a stone-cold killer.

Many teams that win the league really do have that one outstanding attacker that will win you big points across a season. Haaland, Salah, Drogba, Rooney, Aguero, Henry, Cantona etc. When those players stay fit for the majority of a season, they will take you a very long way. Arsenal don’t have that- especially with their injury situation this season.

What we have seen this season, instead, is a sort of ‘special teams’ approach. In the absence of a bazooka, Arteta has a slingshot of rocks and the intention is to pepper them at the opposition. If it’s not Trossard’s day, then Martinelli comes on in the hope that it’s his. If it’s not Havertz’s day, on comes Gyokeres. If it’s not Eze’s day, on comes Odegaard. If we are really desperate, we’ve got a kid who has yet to sit his GCSEs we can throw on. Mikel Merino has been a real miss in this sense too.

This approach is variable in terms of its success. It’s a little like hoping to land enough body blows to grit out the full 12 rounds and win on points rather than delivering a solid uppercut that sends the opponent sprawling to the canvas in the 9th. That approach has worked more often than not but there have been days where it hasn’t.

At West Ham last weekend, I think we saw great evidence of the approach working when Martin Odegaard came on for Eberechi Eze. As I have written a few times this season, there is an enormous divergence in profile between Eze and Odegaard and how they interpret the advanced midfield position.

Odegaard is your million body blows guy, Eze might dance from foot to foot for a few rounds without really jabbing but he also might deliver that knockout blow. At West Ham, it wasn’t an ‘Eze day’, his impact on the game against a Nuno Espirito Santo low block especial was limited. So on came Odegaard.

And he poses a totally different problem. Sometimes that divergence in profiles is unsettling, it changes the rhythm and intonation of the team in a way that’s disruptive for Arsenal. Sometimes it changes the rhythm and intonation of the team in a way that is disruptive for the opposition. Thankfully, at West Ham, we saw the latter come to fruition.

Oh, you can handle the guy that might get the shot? What about the guy that might find the pass? You have handled the guy who tries to find positions off the ball? What about the guy what will follow it around like a Golden Retriever? I think this is the dance that Arsenal have done for most of the season with their front line.

With a cleaner bill of health for Kai Havertz, I think we would have seen plenty of toing and froing between the striker that does everything brilliantly except shooting at goal and the guy who can’t really do anything except shoot at goal brilliantly.

Injury to Bukayo Saka has probably meant Noni Madueke has had to be a solid, reliable starter which might not have been the intention and probably doesn’t suit him yet. As more of an impact player, introducing Madueke into the fray is a bit like a wasp flying into the car when you’re driving on the motorway.

In short, in an attacking sense Arsenal have tried to win the league in aggregate. They have a back section of the team capable of guarding the face while the attack works the opposition torso. However variable the success of it, last season Arsenal started a Champions League game with a front three of Sterling, Tierney and Merino and that situation could not repeat.