Zisis Kardianos

LOCKED IN FOR THE QUARTER-FINALS 🔐

Arsenal are in fact capable of playing beautiful football. They just don't want to. I am not joking. And if you keep reading, I will prove it to you. They in fact are top scorers in the UCL this season with 60% of their goals coming from open play. In the EPL, they are also second on the list of teams that have scored open play goals this season. Here is something the best players in the world understand that most fans do not. A professional is not trying to show you everything he can do. He is trying to do exactly what the team needs, no more, no less. And the players who have truly figured that out are the ones who last the longest at the top. Take Casemiro for example. For years at Real Madrid, people called him limited. They said he was a destroyer - a player who just broke things up and passed it simple. But they were missing the point completely. Casemiro was not limited. He was restrained. When you play alongside Toni Kroos and Luka Modrić, two of the most creative midfielders of their generation, your job is to protect them and let them play. You do not need to attempt ambitious line-breaking passes when Kroos who can do it ten times better than you is sitting ten yards away. The moment Casemiro moved to Manchester United, a squad that needed more from him creatively, he started contributing goals and assists that had never been part of his game at Real Madrid . The ability was always there. The situation just never called for it. Harry Kane is an even better example because his situation can be numerically measured. For years at Tottenham, Kane was brilliant but he was predictable. He had the rep of a goalscorer. and that was it. It was José Mourinho that arrived and changed his role and how we saw him completely, allowing him to drop deeper, receive between the lines, and dictate play rather than just finish it. That season Kane topped the Premier League in both goals and assists, and Gary Neville went on television comparing him to Zinedine Zidane. This was the same Harry Kane people had watched for years. He did not suddenly develop new abilities. Mourinho just gave him a role that required him to reveal the ones he had been sitting on. And then there is Erling Haaland, who most people still think of purely as a goal machine. If you watch him play for Norway, you will see a completely different player. Without Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva feeding him chances Haaland creates, drops, links, and carries. The elite support structure at Manchester City means he does not need to do any of that domestically. So he does not. He conserves that energy and scores multiple goals a season instead. That is simpleprofessionalism. Now let's talk about Arsenal, because this is where the argument really lands. People have spent the last two seasons calling Mikel Arteta a pragmatic and ultra defensive manager who cannot coach attractive football. It is one of the laziest takes in modern punditry, and the numbers make it embarrassing. In 2022-23, Arsenal, under Arteta scored a club-record 88 Premier League goals and finished on 84 points, enough to win the title in almost any other season in league history. Their football that year was fluid, high-pressing, relentless, and genuinely breathtaking at its best. Saka, Martinelli, Ødegaard, and Gabriel Jesus playing together at full tilt was as entertaining as anything in Europe. And here is the corner argument, because I want to address that too. People act like Arteta relies on corners because he has run out of ideas in open play. That is completely backwards. Arsenal have scored 33 goals from corners since the 2023/24 season, more than any other Premier League side. Arteta moved ahead of the curve and deliberately poached set-piece coach Nicolas Jover from Manchester City in 2021, deliberately recruited tall, physically dominant players like Havertz, Rice, Merino, and Calafiori to execute the system, and deliberately built corner routines that opponents still cannot stop after years of studying them. He himself noted that 27.6% of Arsenal's goals have come from corners, and has expressed frustration that they have not scored even more. That is not someone who cannot do anything else. That is a manager who identified an underexploited source of goals in modern football, built an entire system around maximising it, and deployed it ruthlessly alongside everything else he does. And when like him, you have had near misses three times, you will find innovative and less risky ways to get the results you need- within the rules. That is what Arteta is doing. The beautiful football is not gone. Arteta just knows when to use it and when to use something else entirely. That is what champions do. My name is Ajoje and I am an International Sports Lawyer and FIFA Licensed Agent. I write on the Law and Business of Football- a lot. Repost and Follow if you want to read more posts like this.