Arteta’s triumphant fist raised in the Manchester air was a satisfying sight for any Arsenal fan.
The high of beating Manchester United away was duly savoured throughout the whole week and optimism was high ahead of the visit of Leicester City in the next game week.
If the United game was the high point of the season, the Leicester game marked a free fall that has not been arrested until now.
That winning penalty against United was Arsenal’s last in the Premier League until this point and the Gunners are currently on a three-game losing streak at home. Arteta is beginning to feel the heat.
Personally, I think that it would unwise to sack Arteta now but the nature of the environment within which top-level managers means that this kind of questions will be asked and rightly so.
The biggest issue for Arteta is that this was not totally unexpected. The underlying metrics were not very encouraging and once the drop off came, it hit hard.
An interesting theory that has been thrown about is that the currently-exiled Mesut Özil’s playmaking skills would be a panacea for Arsenal’s offensive issues.
There are many issues with those notions, which are however not completely false and merit further consideration.
It is very clear how Mikel Arteta wants his side to attack. Precise patterns and combinations which when they do come off can be very exciting to watch.
They have not been working but Arteta still sets up his side in a structure that seeks to play in that way. This slow and ineffective ball progression systems stranded Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang because Arsenal was not getting the ball into the final third enough times. Only 35% of Arsenal’s possessions ended up in the final third.
That ranks them 14th in the league, a worrying stat for anyone looking to get attacking players involved in open play.
For that particular reason and a few others, the Aubameyang move to centre forward that many were clamouring for was not going to have much of a difference because the ball was not reaching Arsenal’s final third nearly enough times.
It was not a surprise that Aubameyang was mostly a passenger against both Leeds and Wolves matches in which he started at centre forward.
Bringing back Mesut Özil into the conversation, he is very much a player who depends on getting service in order to make the final pass or affect play in the offensive phase.
These numbers that Arsenal is putting up in terms of ball progression will most likely leave him stranded and unable to make any sort of impact on the game.
Many managers set up tactical systems that they believe will be effective in the short term and will guarantee success in the long-term.
Many times the players at the disposal of the manager do not allow his vision to be fully realized, and so he enters the transfer market to bring in players that will facilitate his plan, not players that will necessitate a major change in the manager’s desired way of playing.
As this passing network from Piotr Wawrzynów shows Arsenal have prioritized trying to build from wide areas, often switching from one side to another when space is created through their combination and movements.
This was the main reason why Arteta persisted with Aubameyang out wide for so long despite the calls for him to be played centrally, he believed he had created a system that would be able to get him into goalscoring positions while evading the constant attention of opposition defenders.
Mesut Özil has played out wide at periods in his career but recently he always finds joy by drifting into the centre to affect play. Özil will need to offer more out wide if he is to slot into Arteta’s setup without major changes being made.
Mesut Özil is a player who has been guilty time and time again of ghosting through games when the conditions are not ideal for him to perform. He showed immense desire and was posting some higher numbers for distance covered during his last run in the team and that will be an encouragement for those in the Free Özil camp.
These numbers however will do the opposite. In 2015-16, Özil was having 45 touches per game in the final third. By 2018-19, that had fallen to 28. Similarly, Özil’s assists per 90 minutes dropped from 0.56 in 2015-16 to 0.10 in 2018-19.
Of course, these can be attributed to his reduced involvement and the fact that he did not get a consistent run of games under Unai Emery. This does not mean that Özil is finished, not by any means but it does show that for a myriad of factors the German is on the decline.
All of this does not seem to make a concrete case whether the singular act of including Mesut Özil in the team will solve Arsenal’s creative problems and that is the point.
The inclusion of a single-player into a struggling setup that is not all tuned to the limits of his strength to impact he can have.
The unfortunate aspect of this whole situation is that regardless of all this theoretical talk we do not get to actually see Özil in action so that we can make an accurate judgement as to the impact of that decision.
For whatever reason, we are being deprived of watching one of the most gifted playmakers of his generation even try to help a team which is definitely struggling in a department in which he has so often excelled.
The Arsenal situation will only get better if multiple pieces are shifted but the fact that one piece does not even get a chance to try and affect the situation makes it just a bit tougher to understand.
Football is more than what happens on the field and there are some things we will simply never know but regardless of all that we just want to see Mesut Özil one more time.