In the 2023/2024 season, Arsenal scored a record 107 Premier League goals and picked up 88 points… but still finished runners-up to Liverpool.
As we head into my fourth season as Gunners manager, there is plenty of reason for optimism. We have largely kept the same squad that pushed Liverpool so close, and after beating the Reds in the Community Shield, it feels like the 2024/2025 season might be the one where it all comes together.
Emile Smith Rowe is ready to bring the Premier League title back to North London. Can we now start the season as we mean to go on?
RESULTS: AUGUST TO DECEMBER 2024
PREMIER LEAGUE
Well… we did get off to literally the perfect start. Eddie Nketiah took just two minutes to break the deadlock at St James’ Park, and then we tore Newcastle to shreds by going 4-0 up within 13 minutes! Bukayo Saka finished the rout late on with his third goal of the game – more than the winger scored in the whole of last season!
We then followed that up with a couple of solid 1-0 wins over Liverpool and Chelsea, and a Reiss Nelson double at Leicester continued our excellent record against the Foxes. That made it four wins from four – Arsenal’s best start to a PL season in 20 years!
After that… I’m afraid it all went horribly, spectacularly wrong.
- Norwich (A) – 16 shots, 5 on target, 1.45 xG. LOST 0-1. Nick Pope.
- Tottenham (H) – 12 shots, 4 on target, 1.06 xG. DREW 0-0. First time we’ve failed to beat Spuds at home in this save.
- Brentford (A) – 30 shots, 8 on target, 3.41 xG. DREW 1-1. Brentford scored in the 86th minute; Balogun equalised in the 90th.
- West Ham (A) – 26 shots, 12 on target, 2.19 xG. LOST 0-1. West Ham had a player sent off in the 79th minute.
- Bournemouth (H) – 25 shots, 13 on target, 2.85 xG. DREW 1-1. Bournemouth’s Ecuadorian keeper had the game of his life.
That’s TWO goals from 10.96 xG, with a shot accuracy rate of 38% – and a shot conversion rate of a whopping 1.8%! How the hell did a team who scored over 100 league goals last season suddenly turn into a bunch of Yaya Sanogo tribute acts?!
To be fair, we did get ONE win in the middle of that horrible run – 1-0 at home to Manchester City, thanks to a header from Emile Smith Rowe. I really don’t understand Football Manager sometimes.
After taking a breather, I retweaked my tactics, and we won our next four games without conceding. Unfortunately, we soon found ourselves struggling with injuries, the worst of which saw us lose Nketiah for a few weeks – straight after scoring a hat-trick at Sheffield United.
This meant Folarin Balogun had an extended run of starts, and he couldn’t really handle it. Despite getting us a 2-0 win at Manchester United, Flo lost his flow three days later as Leeds beat us 1-0 at the Emirates (just as they did last season).
Nketiah returned just in time to salvage a draw at Everton, and then he inspired us to an incredible result at the Etihad. Putting four goals past Manchester City showed that we’d finally figured out how to handle the big teams… we’d just forgotten how to beat the smaller ones.
And so, after a peculiar first half to the season, we sit in 3rd place – eight points off the leaders with a game in hand. Sure, we have the best defensive record in the league, but that doesn’t really matter if you’re struggling to kill off teams like Bournemouth and Brentford in the same ruthless manner as Liverpool and City.
So a league title this season looks some way off, and we could even drop out the top four again if we’re not careful. Manchester United may have had some shocking results, but it’s surely only a matter of time before Erling Haaland and co are back to their best. West Ham and Chelsea also have the firepower, if not the defensive stability, to go on a second-half surge.
CHAMPIONS LEAGUE
I never said this group would be easy, and it wasn’t. It started with an admirable but frustrating 0-0 home draw against the holders Bayern München, in which Martin Ødegaard had a penalty saved by Manuel Neuer.
Ludogorets didn’t cause us too many problems. Though it took us 70 minutes to break the deadlock in Bulgaria, we comfortably thrashed them 6-0 at home thanks to a Balogun hat-trick.
The decisive matches came against our other opponents Nice, who snatched a 1-1 draw in France after a mistake by Daniel Ballard. Things almost got even worse at the Emirates, where Nice led 1-0 at half-time and looked like knocking us down into 3rd. Thankfully, we responded strongly in the second half, with a William Saliba double and an Nketiah strike earning us three crucial points.
Having qualified with time to spare, top spot was decided at the Allianz Arena. We had our moments, but Bayern struck the killer blow early on – Leroy Sané scoring from a cross by Joshua Kimmich (who else?) after 14 minutes.
Finishing 2nd in the group wasn’t a disaster, but it meant we would likely face a trickier test in the first knockout round – against another big European giant like Real Madrid or Juventus or AZ Alkmaar…
…or Barcelona. It had to be them, didn’t it?
Well, at least we get a nice early chance at vengeance for the Europa League Final. We also get to pit our wits against Barca’s new £43.5million left-back Nuno…
…wait, what? Nuno Tavares? That loser couldn’t defend a bag of chips when he was playing for us, and now he’s wound up at bloody Barcelona?! Does he have the same agent as Martin Braithwaite?
EFL CUP
More bad news. I’m afraid that Arsenal will not be winning the EFL Cup for a third year in a row.
After battling past Bristol City (and making Nigel Pearson miserable again), we hit Birmingham for SIX. Marcelo Flores led the way with four assists against his former loan club, and the young forward’s confidence was sky-high… until he broke his ankle at Nice a week later and was ruled out for three months. Lovely.
Anyway, we faced Leicester in the Quarter Finals for the second straight year – but this time, the Foxes got their revenge. Two excellent crosses from 19-year-old right-back Jeremie Labuthie gave us a 2-1 lead, but some sloppy defending handed Leicester a late equaliser that took the game to penalties. At 4-3 down, Tyrick Mitchell missed our fifth penalty, and our cup defence was over.
TACTICS: TWEAKS AHOY!
Let’s start with the positives… I think I’ve found a way to beat the other big teams.
Our Achilles heel last season was that we only took four points in six matches against the rest of the top four, all while smashing up nearly everybody else. Over the summer, I tweaked to my 4-3-3 ‘Fullerball’ system to help us become more defensively solid while making attacks just a little more potent.
Something is clearly going right, as this tactic has already beaten Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City twice and Liverpool twice. The only blip against another ‘Big Six’ team was a 0-0 draw with Tottenham.
The first change was to lower our risk-taking by switching from a ‘Positive’ mentality to ‘Balanced’. I also turned off the ‘Pass Into Space’ instruction and have instead asked my players to shorten their passing.
I found that while instructing your players to ‘Regroup’ after losing the ball can be very effective at shutting out counter-attacks, it can also play into the hands of possession-hungry teams like Liverpool and Manchester City. Losing 6-3 at Anfield on the opening day of last season showed what can happen if you allow those elite teams to hog the ball. I’m not suddenly asking my players to gegenpress like a Klopp team; I just want them to put the opposition under a bit more pressure.
Another change I’ve made more recently is to play the lone striker as a Deep-Lying Forward. While Nketiah’s pace makes him most effective as an Advanced Forward, he is also intelligent enough that he can draw out defenders and free up space for the midfielders and wide attackers. This may reduce his firepower, but if it helps get his team-mates involved a bit more and makes our attacks more fluid and less predictable, I’m all for it.
Of course, this isn’t great news for the right Inverted Winger, who needs runners to latch onto his crosses. One idea to get more out of Saka or Harvey Elliott would be to switch them to an Inside Forward, though this would compromise their crossing abilities (IFs are hard-coded to ‘cross less often’). Another idea would be to keep the AF and the IW, but flip the tactic around like this…
This would involve changing the roles and/or duties of nearly half our team in the middle of the season… but I think it can work. Shifting the attacking CM to the right would put him in a better position to run onto any crosses from the IW, who can also pick out the AF’s runs. Our playmakers Ødegaard and Charlie Patino are both left-footed, so having one of them on the left side of midfield could make them more effective too.
Having an attacking Wing Back on the same flank as an Inside Forward would give the latter a bit more support out wide too. My only concern is what impact playing the IF on Support would have on the output of Smith Rowe or Nelson, who can each be potentially devastating on an Attack duty.
And what about the 4-2-3-1, which served us so well against the lesser teams last season? Unfortunately, it’s rather gone to pot, because… well, basically, I tried to fix a tactic that wasn’t broken.
One of my biggest weaknesses as a Football Manager is that I’m a bigger tinkerman than Claudio Ranieri. Though this 4-2-3-1 system did a great job of breaking defensive buses last season, I wanted us to assert ourselves over the opposition even more. I wanted more possession, and even more goals.
Whenever we faced a ‘weaker’ (especially a team that was also playing 4-2-3-1), I tried pushing up our defensive line and our line of engagement, turning off ‘Counter Attacking’, and lowering the tempo. I should have known that most of our opponents would continue to sit back and defend with a low block. Instead of playing everyone off the park like Guardiola-era Barcelona, we would create lots of poor-quality shots that our rivals had no problems defending against.
The results say it all. Last season, we dropped just eight points in matches against teams from outside the ‘Big Six’. Halfway through the new campaign, we’ve already squandered 15 points against the ‘Other 14’.
STATISTICS
So, now you have a better idea of why we had that six-game league run where we scored only THREE goals from 121 shots. This wasn’t a case of me “being FMed”, or just having a rotten run of luck. I got my tactics horribly wrong and got exactly what I deserved.
That awful autumn was devastating for our ‘expected goals’ statistics. At one stage, we were EIGHT goals behind our xG. Though recent results have repaired some of that damage, we still have an xG deficit of 4.6 and are only scoring from 10% of our total shots.
Also note that we are top of the ‘expected points’ table (despite playing one game less than Liverpool), but are underachieving on that stat by 1.8 points. The fact that both Liverpool and City are more clinical in front of goal explains why they’re leading on the only table that really matters.
One piece of good news is that we’re still watertight at the back, massively overperforming our xGA and conceding only around 5% of opposition shots. Even when we’re firing a dozen shots straight at opposing defenders, at least we aren’t “one shot, one goal”-ing ourselves in the feet.
There’s more source for optimism when you look at our Hale End boys’ stats. While I’m not expecting Nketiah to have another 40-goal season, to already be on 15 goals after 22 matches is still pretty bloody impressive. I just wish Balogun shared his confidence in front of goal.
Saka continues to excite and frustrate on the right wing, but Smith Rowe has been truly sensational on the left. The 24-year-old is already closing in on double figures for both goals and assists, and a 7.32 average rating shows a player who is finally hitting top form after his leg break in April 2023.
Flores showed a lot of promise on the left wing too before breaking his ankle. As soon as he recovers in January, I’ll look to loan him out to a Championship club, so he can regain his sharpness. Another loan spell might also be on the horizon for teenage right-back Labuthie, who played so well in that EFL Cup defeat to Leicester.
And finally… we have a player in FIFA’s World XI! Yes, our talismanic playmaker Ødegaard has officially been named one of the world’s top footballers!
Despite only having 7 goal contributions so far this season, his remarkable productivity last term gave him a year-long average rating of 7.55! Putting that in context, Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé were the only players in that World XI with a higher AR!
Oh… er… and please don’t mention that guy next to Martin in midfield.
Well, then. That half-season pretty much encapsulates our love-hate relationship with Football Manager, doesn’t it?
This story will continue on Friday. Can these young Gunners get our title charge back on track before it’s too late… or will I continue my slow descent into xG-induced insanity?
Fuller FM 
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