It has been an iffy start for Arsenal to this season’s Premier League campaign as they started with three humiliating losses, finding themselves at the bottom of the league table with three matches played. Since then they have staged a comeback (kind of) against two relatively easier sides in Burnley and Norwich.
However, the Gunners have only scored 2 goals on the course from an xG of 6.1. Now, it might seem they’re massively underperforming on their xG — which is true — but that doesn’t mean they’re creating enough.
In this article, I look into the underlying numbers behind Arsenal’s early-season offensive performance and in particular looking into the reasons behind their lack of goals — which has usually been unknown territory for the Gunners.
All the data stated are taken from Fbref.com until mentioned otherwise and is valid for Gameweek 5.
Looking at Arsenal’s offensive numbers, the Gunners rank 11th for xG created behind the likes of Southampton, Wolves, and Brentford. While Wolves just tip them as the poorest finishers in the Premier League with the Gunners sitting second from the bottom for non-penalty Goals – xG (-4.1).
So Arsenal are not just accumulating fewer xG than they should be, but they’re also doing a poor job of converting that xG into goals.
Creativity has been Arsenal’s Achilles’ heel ever since Mikel Arteta took charge and the trend persists for the Gunners even with the likes of Emile Smith Rowe and Martin Odegaard introduced to the first team XI.
This season the Gunners have registered 58 key passes, which is an impressive 5th highest in the Premier League, however, they have only recorded 4.0 xA which is only 13th highest this season. It seems while the Gunners are creating more chances this season, however, they aren’t of high quality in regards to resulting in a goal.
The observation is backed by Arsenal’s shot data, they are averaging more shots per 90 this season (14.8) than last season (12). However, they’re recording fewer non-penalty xG per 90 this season than last season, which concludes that they’re taking poor quality shots that are resulting in frequent shot assists aka key passes.
Though, it’s not as if having better final-third operators like Emile Smith Rowe and Martin Odegaard haven’t assisted the Gunners’ cause. This season, they’re making considerably fewer passes into the final third (25.2) than last season (34.7), yet they’re getting more passes into the penalty box (10.2) than last season (8.95), which signifies the greater level of competence in the Arsenal midfield to penetrate the opposition box.
Now it may seem odd for Arsenal to be getting more passes into the penalty box and recording more key passes and yet recording underwhelming xA and xG values — that’s where the eye-test comes to save the day for data analysis.
Arsenal’s lack of chance creation is primarily down to their lack of attacking patterns and inability to execute clinical counters, which allows opposition time to recover and defend their box in numbers, not leaving enough space for Arsenal to create genuine goal-scoring chances consistently without an extraordinary effort.
This tweet was made a few weeks ago, and it still sums up Arsenal’s situation perfectly.
Long-running problem of Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal: it takes a lot of things to go right for them to score a goal, but only one tiny thing to go wrong for them to concede. They rarely score out of nothing, but they regularly concede out of nothing.
— Sam Dean (@SamJDean) August 29, 2021