Transfers

Arsenal spent £73m on transfer this season; buying Leno, Guendouzi, Sokratis, and Torreira to give Unai Emery a completely new “spine” to his team. Arsenal sold only two players; Lucas Perez and Chuba Akpom. Perez was sold for just £4m, a total loss on the books for that one player of £14m. After sales, net spend was “just” £67m – the third highest net spend in the history of the club. The two previous highs were £82m in 2014/15 and £93m in 2016/17.

One fact that may have slipped by unnoticed is that Wenger’s final season at Arsenal saw massive turnover of players both in and out of the club. The board sold Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Theo Walcott, Olivier Giroud, Francis Coquelin, Wojciech Szczesny, Gabriel Paulista, and Kieran Gibbs while also doing a straight swap of Alexis Sanchez and Henrikh Mkhitaryan (which transfermarkt puts down as £30.6m each direction). Transfermarkt puts Arsenal’s total sales down as £141m in 2017/18 – the largest transfer out in the history of the club. As much as supporters have complained about not getting more for Alexis (rightly) this represents a huge clear out of Wenger’s old squad.

That money was used to fund the purchases of Aubameyang, Lacazette, Mkhitaryan, and Mavropanos.

This was the single largest gross spend and sales in the history of Arsenal football club.

(all figures from transfermarkt.co.uk)

Calamity defending

Arsenal’s defense, like all clubs, has been error-prone off and on. In 2015/16 Wenger seemed to have struck on a magical combination in midfield and at the back – installing “The Policeman” Francis Coquelin in midfield and adding “twelve points a season” Petr Cech in goal – which, along with Ozil keeping possession up top and Alexis creating chaos, resulted in an almost magical defense and offence.

We will get more into the defending below but for now let’s focus on the errors committed:

In 2015/16 Wenger’s Arsenal only conceded 1 penalty, allowed 3 own goals, and only committed 5 individual errors for goals. This brought the total “calamity goals” to 9 for the season.

In 2016/17 Arsenal bought Xhaka and Mustafi for a combined £77m. That season Arsenal conceded 15 calamity goals. And in each of the next two seasons Arsenal conceded 20 goals from penalties, own goals, and individual errors. Side note: Cech made 6 errors for goals in 2016/17 and Leno made 5 errors for goals in 2018/19.

It’s no surprise that the more error-prone the Arsenal defense has become, the more goals Arsenal have allowed per season:

But what did surprise me was that Arsenal now concede almost 40% of their goals from errors. In 2015/16 Arsenal conceded just 25% of their goals from errors.

Errors and sloppy defense lead to more big chances allowed

Big Chances are counted when an attacking player has a 1-on-1 with the keeper, gets a shot from very close range, shoots on an open goal, or gets some other type shot where the chance to score is very high. Since 2015/16 I have been keeping big chances stats allowed/created and in each of the last four seasons that number has looked worse for Arsenal:

Big chances created have stayed relatively the same over the last four years (though there has been a dip this season from last) but the Arsenal defense has progressively gotten worse each year and this season Arsenal have reached a zenith/nadir and conceded 84 big chances, that’s just two fewer than they created.

Arsenal also concede a lot of shots

Arsenal’s goals allowed is at a peak, Arsenal’s big chances allowed is at a peak, and perhaps not coincidentally Arsenal allowed more shots by the opposition than at any time since the year 2000.

According to my research, between 2000/01 and 2010/11 Arsenal conceded, on average 312 shots per season: 8.2 shots conceded per game. Last season, Arsenal conceded 498 shots, 13.1 – 10th in the League. This was an increase of 80 shots over last season’s 418 shots allowed.

Not all shots are created equal and that’s where we can use an “advanced metric” like expected goals (xG). Expected goals takes the average of all players scoring from certain shot types and then aggregates them into a number. The metric is a bit confusing because it doesn’t always match 1-for-1 with goals conceded or scored but it’s not really meant to do that. What it measures is the aggregate of shot quality allowed/created. So, for example, if team A takes 20 shots and 17 of them are outside the box (0.025 xG per shot) and 3 relatively mediocre shots (0.1 xG each) they would have an xG of 0.725 for that game. If their opponent took just 5 shots but 3 of them were big chances (0.6 xG each) and 2 were outside the box (0.025 xG), they would have an xG of 1.85 for that game. Team B might even score 3 goals in that game and of course so could the opponent.

It is possible to outperform expected goals – especially over short periods – but as a general rule, higher xG created and lower xG allowed over a season is considered better defending and correlates very well with goals scored and goals conceded.

It’s not just bulk shots allowed that account for the high xGa: Arsenal “only” allowed 51 more shots (total) this season than they did in 2015/16 and yet, they have a +19 expected goals allowed between those two seasons.

Simply put this occurred because Arsenal are conceding much higher quality shots now. Counting all shots, penalties, calamitous defending, and all other moments Arsenal allowed a whopping 84 big chances this season.

This is not all competitions, 84 big chances allowed just the Premier League – 2.2 per game. This is a huge reason for the end of season collapse as well: in the last 8 games of the season Arsenal allowed 27 big chances. A team simply cannot survive that type of onslaught.

Further evidence that this season has seen a (negative) spike in shot quality is that big chances allowed as a percentage of overall shots has increased even over last year. This season, 17% of all Arsenal shots were big chances. Last season 16.5%, the season prior 14%, and in 2015/16 – 7.4%.

Ok, the defense was worse. But maybe the attack got better? We won more points!

Emery recently said that what he tried to do this season was sacrifice attack for defense: “The balance is to reduce — but not lose — our capacity to attack, while getting better in defence.”

Emery didn’t improve the Arsenal defence but in one sense he succeeded in his cunning plan: he reduced Arsenal’s attack.

In terms of just overall shots created, Arsenal are at an all-time low:

And since Arsenal are taking fewer shots it’s not surprising Arsenal’s xG are down from last season:

But since we won more matches, surely Arsenal created better chances? Nope:

Ok, so what accounts for the massive drop in shots, basically the same shot quality as before, and yet relatively similar number of goals scored? Simple: scoring goals from outside the box at a much higher percentage. Here’s the overall finishing %:

That 14% finishing rate is buoyed by a few Lucky Strikes from outside the 18 yard box:

League average scoring rate outside the 18 yard box is around 3%. Arsenal scored at double that rate. Shooting from outside the box is excitiing and often wins goal of the season but if Arsenal took all of their shots this season (492) from outside the 18 yard box and scored 7.1% of them, they would have scored just 35 goals.

But Emery gained points and won games against other top six teams!

Arsenal finished 5th in 2018/19 with 70 points and finished 6th in 2017/18 with 63 points. That fact is indisputable. And we won’t even use this space to speculate on whether the players downed tools last season after they went to the press to reveal that they had had a meeting to plead with Wenger for help with the defense.

Folks point to the points total as proof of improvement at the club and there’s a truth to that approach. My only caveat is to point to where the improvement came from.

Arsenal lost two points in home matches, winning 45 points this season and 47 at home last season. So, what happened in the points total was that Arsenal gained 9 points in away matches over last season.

But those nine points came from a win over Cardiff (Arsenal lost to Stoke away last season), a win over Newcastle (same, a loss away last season), and a win over Fulham (they lost last season away to Swansea). Is that an improvement in points? Yes. Is that an improvement in the team? Yes, Arsenal won 9 points from relegation teams that they didn’t win last season. And all three of those wins came before November, during Arsenal’s run of 22 unbeaten in which many statisticians worried that Arsenal were vastly overperforming the metrics. So, given everything else that happened this season, is this really an improvement?

Conclusion

-2017/18 was a massive clearout of Wenger/Gazidis’s players. That project continued this season by rescinding the contract offer for Ramsey and letting Welbeck go on a free. Cech also retired. Emery also benched both Özil and Ramsey for large parts of the season.

-Arsenal spent the third highest amount ever on transfers, bringing in an entirely new spine of the team: new keeper, new center back, two new defensive midfielders, and a backup right back this season and two high scoring strikers last season. Plus there was a major swap of a dressing-room cancer.

-Goals conceded stayed the same as last season, the most goals conceded by Arsenal in a season since 1983/84 (when they played 42 games)

-Total shots allowed are up to an all-time PL high

-Errors for goals have remained the same since last year’s high

-Nearly 40% of Arsenal’s goals conceded were errors last season and this

-Big chances conceded are at an all-time high (since I started collecting) and look like a mid-table team

-Expected goals allowed are at an all-time high (since the metric was created) and look like a mid-table team

-Emery said that he would reduce attack and he did

-Arsenal relied more than ever on scoring from low percentage chances

-Unai Emery took the worst Arsenal defense in Premier League history, the club added £73m worth of new defenders, DMs, and a keeper, and somehow made it worse in terms of total shots and quality allowed, made it the same in terms of errors, and did nothing to the overall goals allowed. In attack, Philippe Auclair said “the notion of pleasure has been taken away from football basically. It’s been extracted surgically by Unai Emery and his players.” Arsenal had two 20-goal a season strikers and one of the top playmakers in Europe and somehow took fewer shots than in 18 years and relied on speculative pops from distance to win games against relegation bound teams.

-If I was the owner of Arsenal FC I would be very wary of investing in players under a manager with this performance record and would strongly consider a replacement.

Qq

