Why do Arsenal keep giving up golazos amid trophy chase?

Arsenal’s disastrous trip to Wolverhampton Wanderers ended with a few familiar crises to haunt Mikel Arteta and his players. Not just those increasingly justifiable questions over whether the league leaders have the hearts and stomachs of winners, but an altogether more fiddly issue — why do so many of their opponents seem to save their goal of the season for the day when they line up against the Gunners?

File Hugo Bueno’s whipped strike into David Raya’s far post alongside Eli Junior Kroupi’s pearler in January, the best of Dominik Szoboszlai’s many excellent free kicks, Matheus Cunha’s bender into the bottom corner and/or the howitzer from Patrick Dorgu. You wouldn’t make Bueno’s the pick of the lot — not when that’s your list of nominees — but as first Premier League goals go, it’s not one to be sniffed at.

Some of the goals that have beaten David Raya this season are not quite the sort that would have coaches demanding their players what they’re doing with that step back, one-legged, do you practice that shot in training nonsense. They’re not a million miles from it either though.

If it feels like everyone is pinging in their best goals against Arsenal this season, well, maybe there’s something in it. Six of the 20 they have conceded in the top flight have an expected goal (xG) value of 0.04, shots that you would expect to be scored once in every 25 attempts. All of those low xG shots have come from outside the box and while eight teams have conceded more long-range efforts than the Gunners, only Brighton get anywhere close to Arsenal’s 30% of goals conceded coming from outside the box.

Low xG, high scoring

Those six less than 0.04 xG goals conceded are the joint-most of any team in the Premier League, and most of the rest of the division has a lot more volume to work with. Expand the criteria out to shots worth less than 0.1 xG and you end up with half of the goals this team have conceded. Do so and you’re throwing plenty more unlikely goals into the mix. Center back Daniel Ballard charging up the gut to hit a peach of a drive over David Raya, Trevoh Chalobah’s brilliant flick over nearly half the outfield players, Tolu Arokodare turning the shot of a Wolves teammate into a goal of his own.

All that for a team who has allowed just 19 shots and five goals from shots worth 0.2 xG, both by far the most impressive marks in recent Premier League history. One regular goal against Arsenal. All I ask for. Will never infrequently happen.

It is worth noting that Arsenal’s total concession is broadly in line with their expected goals tally, 20 against from 207 shots worth 18.08 xG. However something a bit strange happens when you look solely at the xG value of the shots that Arsenal have let in.

The 20 shots have a combined xG value of 3.15. Maybe there is nothing particularly too where the goals are conceded, just the fact that they are broadly in line with the trend of the total volume of shots faced, but it is still the case that no Premier League team since the start of the 2020-21 season has a six times overperformance between their goals conceded and the xG value of them. Indeed, prior to that, no team had seen a four-and-a-half times overperformance.

In short, the way it feels is reflected in reality. Arsenal goals against are golazo-heavy. And doesn’t Arteta know it. Unprompted, he made reference to the xG value of Bueno’s goal. “To predict somebody with an 0.02 expected goal shot [sic – sorry but Opta has it at 0.03] … nobody can really understand that.”

Searching for trends

Asked if this run of low probability goals was chance or something he might be able to address on the training field, Arteta was curiously unequivocal. “Probably a bit of both,” he said. “I think we’ll have to go goal by goal.

“Somebody from a really low scoring position can put the ball in the top bins, what are the odds for that to happen? I don’t know. It depends on the players here in this league. They have a lot of quality as well. So, that’s a clue.”

Perhaps we should start, as Arteta wishes, by going through those goals conceded to see if any patterns emerge. Starting with Bueno’s there is one trend that does pop up on a few occasions. When a half cleared corner eventually comes to the Wolves left back, Piero Hincapie’s instinct is the right one. He wants to show his man down the flank and bait the cross, which will go into an area where Arsenal have a host of bodies that should have no problems getting rid.

Hincapie’s problem is that he is just too slow to get out to Bueno, who doesn’t really have to adjust to anything the defender is showing him. The Arsenal defender has given his man so much space that by the time Bueno checks inside and shapes to shoot, it is too late. 

There were similar issues when Kroupi struck for Bournemouth, who had nicely manouevred Arsenal around the pitch when once more they won the second ball off a corner. Hincapie was too slow to follow Kroupi inside as Bournemouth gave and go but he is hardly the only player who could just have done with registering the problem a bit earlier.

Arsenal have a six-on-five advantage in the backline when the ball is played into Kroupi in space but no one comes out to cover for Hincapie. That probably left the Gunners even more vulnerable, given Kroupi would have been as much of a threat to slip a through ball into that gap between Martin Zubimendi and William Saliba. No one in the visiting team really took ownership of the situation and with that they found themselves having to ride out a deeply uncomfortable final 15 minutes at the Vitality Stadium.

You could offer similar critiques when Cunha bent one in to silence the Emirates last month. Having turned Declan Rice, the Manchester United forward found himself driving into altogether too much space with Gabriel perhaps feeling unable to push up as Benjamin Sesko attacked the space in behind him. It is also, possible, however that he defaulted to what has been one of the defining traits of Arteta’s excellent Arsenal sides, that they defend the box better than anyone else. 

There might be an issue for Arsenal when it comes to pressuring long range shooters. Within their own penalty box, the Gunners are outstanding at limiting touches and shots. When they do come, this team blocks shots like they’ve got Hakeem Olajuwon as their anchor. Outside the area, they don’t swarm with quite the same ferocity. In all 47.3% of the shots they’ve allowed from those spots this season are what Opta terms low pressure shots. That’s not the worst in the league but it’s below average and it’s rare to find a defensive metric where that is the case for Arsenal.

Sagging off shooters might also explain why Arsenal have allowed 23 outside-the-box goals from 16.58 xG over the four seasons of their title contention. That is a 38.7% overperformance by their opponents, above average if we look only at the ever present teams in that timescale. Look at the players who have scored those goals — more than one for Kevin De Bruyne and Marcus Rashford with smatterings of Bruno Fernandes and Szoboszlai in the mix. Those are the sort who convince Morgan Rogers that his xG when shooting from range is “a whole load of nonsense”, who justify Arteta’s comments that it “depends on the players here in the league”. It is probably, for instance, not worth giving Cole Palmer much daylight when Chelsea rock up to the Emirates next week. 

The derby beforehand? *Checks Tottenham’s injury list* Yeah, you’re probably good.

It is, of course worth reaffirming one particular truth about Arsenal. This is a defense that has become the best in the world in no small part because of its ability to keep the other team from getting into the penalty area. If that means giving up long shots, then everything we have learned from the analytics movement is that that is a trade-off you make 100 times out of 100.

Maybe if you are so focused on plugging the gaps in your box, you have to be prepared to ride some shooters’ luck from range. Arteta, unsurprisingly for a man who arrived in north London intent on his side excelling in every single of the sport, sees it differently. Why not be the best perimeter defense too? “That’s what we want,” he said. 

“There are certain margins there in terms of when we approach the player, the space that you cover in relation to the defender and the keeper. So, there are things that we are constantly working on and try to improve them.”

Is the goalkeeper a problem?

There was one other factor in Arsenal’s problems with long range shot that was consistently mentioned by supporters when I noted just how many worldies were going in their net this season. Like a single, successful and attractive man in his early 30s, all I was hearing was Raya.

And while it is rarely wise for a case to be constructed on evidence compiled from Arsenal fans on social media after a bad result, maybe there’s something here. After all, there’s no denying that of all the goalkeepers to have played in the Premier League since the start of 2023-24, the 6ft 0in Raya is the shortest. Does the average sized shot stopper in their division, all 6ft 3in of him, get a glove on Bueno’s goal? Quite possibly, going off the image below.

Maybe this exact moment reflects the problem with not discriminating for height in goalkeeper recruitment but it is hardly like this has been a problem all through his career. Raya concedes 0.21 goals from outside the box per 90 minutes. The average Premier League goalkeeper concedes 0.23. In his two seasons prior to this he had an 83% success rate at saving shots from range. Again, that is above average.

Arsenal’s crisis against long shots?

As for this season. Raya’s success rate has cratered but has he become an inferior goalkeeper by any other observable facet? Not really. He remains an outstanding sweeper keeper, instinctively excellent when shots are fired his way from close range. 

It is just that this season when Bueno has took a swing from 20 yards out, he has contrived to hit a shot 6ft 1in outside his reach. You could pick faults in Raya’s positioning for Cunha’s goal but it’s still a spectacular finish to punish a goalkeeper for being half a step too far to his right. Dorgu, Szoboszlai? Put two keepers in the net and those shots aren’t getting stopped. Then you round out that sample with Zubimendi giving the ball to Richarlison to lob into an empty net. A few players not timing the ball quite so perfectly and Arsenal’s difficulty with long rangers would go unnoticed.

There might be some difficulty there. A long trail of xG suggests this is a team conceding a few more than it ought to from range. In all that time though Arsenal have been the best defense in the sport. There is no obvious sign that that has changed since the turn of the year when all these shots have been flying in from range. So why do teams keep scoring wonder goals against Arsenal? Because sometimes random events have the feel of a confluence.

How to watch Tottenham vs. Arsenal, odds

• Date: Sunday, Feb. 22 | Time: 11:30 a.m. ET
• Location: Tottenham Hotspur Stadium — London
• TV: USA | Live stream: Peacock
• Odds: Tottenham +480; Draw +290; Arsenal -175