🔍 Arsenal's Attacking Anomaly

Someone build Thierno Barry a statue outside the Emirates. One of my favorite things about football is how stubbornly it refuses to be brought to heel. It is endlessly unruly and disrespectful and unapologetically defiant. No matter how hard we try to build a narrative around it, a well-formed three-act plot that meets our expectations, football has a wildness etched into its soul.

For example: the Premier League title decider was supposed to be Arsenal’s visit to Manchester City, not quite three weeks ago. Mikel Arteta’s team losing that day was, we decided, the point at which the momentum shifted inexorably in Pep Guardiola’s team’s favor. That afternoon was, we supposed, the denouement.

It felt right, inherently satisfying: a showdown between the two contenders, a league game that was actually a cup final, winner-takes-all. That is how we feel things should work. But football does not have any truck with should, not really. And so, 15 days later, City went to Everton – a game that had been dismissed as a check-box exercise – and, out of nowhere, stumbled.

The most significant intervention in the title race, it turned out, had not been made by Rayan Cherki or Erling Haaland or even Gianluigi Donnarumma, but by Barry, scoring his seventh and eighth goals of the season. No scriptwriter would do that; it would be like pinning the crime in some tense detective drama on a random character never even shown on screen. But then football does not have a script. And that, deep down, is why we watch.

Viktor Gyökeres had been toiling for an hour and a chunk of change, performing the grinding, unglamorous legwork that occupies the bulk of his working life. He had run channels. He had contested duels. He had acted as a decoy and a launchpad and a backboard. He had clawed and scrapped and tussled, and he had done it all very well.

This is the irony with strikers. In most football cultures, the most high-profile position on the field. It is, in the early years, what the majority of children dream of becoming; nobody, as Gary Neville once said, grows up aspiring to be a full-back. It is, for the lucky and talented few, where the rewards are greatest. Strikers, as a rule, get not just the most attention, but the most money, too.

And yet they are, more often than not, peripheral figures to a game. They spend much of their time just out of shot, undertaking some vital and strategically necessary task that fans in the stadium do not notice and those watching home cannot see. They drift in only occasionally, laying the ball off or winning a header, and then they fade once more into the background.

It would be wrong to say they are waiting and watching; they are, instead, manifesting. All of that work is done with the aim of wearing out, wearing down a defense, probing and then exploiting whatever weakness there might be, so that at some point – in theory, at least – they have one single, perfect moment in the spotlight.

And so it was for Gyökeres, 65 minutes or so into Arsenal’s Champions League semifinal with Atlético Madrid on Tuesday. Piero Hincapié broke free down the left. The big Swede, his opponents exhausted by all that gruntwork, burst through the middle. The cross was perfect. He stretched out his foot. The right touch would beat Jan Oblak, secure the game, seal the tie. Gyökeres would be the hero, the star, the deciding factor. 

He missed.

Every season has what I think of as its “Discourse Player.” Sometimes there is more than one. For a long time, no matter how many others could lay claim to the crown, one of them was literally always Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Yes, he had created more goals than any other Premier League defender. And yes, Jürgen Klopp kept saying that his attacking output made up for his defensive shortcomings. But, still: did his attacking output make up for his defensive shortcomings? Please tweet us at ScreamingRadio or text us on 666999. (Alexander-Arnold is about to become the first player to miss out on a World Cup exclusively because of the discourse.)

Now that he is out of the way, though, his role has been filled by Gyökeres. He fits it perfectly. Arsenal spent $87 million to acquire the Swede last summer on the grounds that he was a plug-and-play striker. The one thing Mikel Arteta’s team had lacked, it was generally agreed, was the semi-mythical 20-goal-a-season forward; Gyökeres, having spent the previous two years scoring an agricultural number of goals in Portugal, was identified as the ideal candidate. He was, those inside the club acknowledged, not one for the future. He was, as the phrase goes, “win now.”

A glance at the most relevant data would suggest that the Swede has met the criteria. Arsenal sits top of the Premier League. Arteta’s team has made the Champions League final. The club is winning soon, at the very least. The forward has scored 21 goals this season. They have come in 39 starts. According to FBREF, he has scored 0.6 goals per 90 minutes, placing him fifth of all strikers in England’s top flight. Choose a metric and Gyökeres has been a success. Not a sensation, but a success. 

Why, then, does it not feel like that? In part, this is part of the existential reality of being a striker. Gyökeres played brilliantly on Tuesday. His most memorable contribution involved missing a chance. Both of those sentences are true. They are not mutually exclusive. Strikers are judged by those fleeting spotlight moments. That is why they are paid better than anyone else: not because they are more talented, but because their margins are finer. Gyökeres has scored 21 goals, but we have all seen proof that he could have scored more. 

But it is more specific, too. On this week’s podcast, I was really taken by Rog’s point drawing a distinction between process and output. His numbers are undeniably good, but the impression he has created in generating them has been less conclusive: he has, at times, struggled to impose himself on games; occasionally, he has given the vague impression of a farmhand stuffed into a tuxedo and told to attend the opera. 

I wonder, though, whether it runs even deeper than that, whether the issue is a tension between expectation and reality. Gyökeres was the signing many Arsenal fans had been demanding for years; the role he fulfilled, anyway, if not the player himself. He was the missing link, the final piece of the jigsaw. Arsenal needed an elite striker. Everyone knew that. An elite striker would make the team whole.

The problem, obviously, is that football does not work like that. To add one element to a team, another must be taken away, or at least somehow diminished. Strengthening one aspect invariably involves weakening another. Our assessment of Gyökeres has been harsher than is reasonable because we are comparing him to an unattainable ideal.

And that, in what we must refer to as the current climate, is dangerous. The hot-take industrial complex that surrounds football demands strict binaries; the attention economy does not place much of a premium on qualified praise or constructive criticism. Players are outstanding or they are awful. If a striker, in this case, does not match the standards set by Erling Haaland – almost the definition of an outlier – then they are a failure. There is no room for ‘good,’ while ‘fine’ has been recast as an insult.

This is the trap, more than anything, into which Gyökeres has fallen; that is the curse of the discourse player. His first season has been solid. He has done what was asked for him. He has fulfilled his remit. In doing so, he may well end up playing a not inconsiderable role in the greatest season in Arsenal’s history.

He has not been a failure, but nor has he been a bolt of brilliant lightning, shooting across the sky, transforming all of our lives. He has put in the hard yards, the donkey work and the graft. He has scored the number of goals he was required to score. He has been fine. Good, even. It is not his fault that is no longer an option.

This is becoming very Arsenal heavy now, for which I apologize, but still: there is something that I think needs to be stressed. Most Arsenal fans are adamant that all they care about is the Premier League. It has, they will tell you as soon as you give them an opportunity, been 22 long years since they last stood as champions of England. This is too long, for a club of that size.

And that’s fine and I cannot quibble with their lived experience, but a slightly more detached viewer could possibly point out that Arsenal is the biggest club in Europe never to have won club football’s ultimate honor. Every single one of the game’s other giants has at least one European Cup/Champions League to its name. Arsenal, from that point of view, is no more one of the aristocrats than Atlético, Roma or, um, Tottenham Hotspur.

Budapest, then, is a chance to address that historic anomaly. Whether it is a good chance comes down to where you stand on that age-old philosophical conundrum: when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, what happens? (This is a change from last year’s Europa League final, which pitted a stoppable force against a movable object.)

Rog and Rory break down Week 35 of the Premier League, as Arsenal reignite their title push with a 3-0 win over Fulham behind the returning Bukayo Saka, while Manchester United outlast Liverpool 3–2 in a chaotic classic sealed by Kobbie Mainoo. Down the table, Tottenham keep their survival hopes alive, West Ham wobble toward danger, and Ipswich Town return to the promise land!

Watch on YouTube or listen here.

This weekend brings the usual suite of Premier League storylines. I’ll be at Anfield to watch Liverpool and Chelsea scrap over a particularly pointless comb, but the real action is elsewhere: Manchester City has no choice but to beat Brentford, while Arsenal’s trip to West Ham is probably the greatest hurdle Arteta’s side has to clear to win the title.

It comes with one exquisite drawback: winning at the London Stadium would increase Tottenham Hotspur’s chances of staying up, particularly if Roberto De Zerbi’s team can beat Leeds United (now more or less safe) on Monday. 

But I’d say the two biggest games in Europe this weekend are elsewhere. Sunday is Clásico day in Spain, although to be honest the stakes are not as high as they might have been. Barcelona will win the title sooner or later; all Real Madrid can do, really, is make sure they do not have to watch it happen. Lose or draw at Camp Nou and Barça claims the crown there and then.

And then, in what is becoming a regular section, we have Scotland. Europe’s best title race currently has Hearts leading Celtic by three points, having beaten Rangers on Monday. Hearts play on Saturday, before the two Glasgow sides meet on Sunday. Rangers almost certainly cannot win the league now. All that is left for them is to make sure their hated rivals fall short, too. 

It’s safe to say that one Champions League semifinal seems to have caught the imagination more than the other. It’s only a week ago and already I’m not 100 % certain I could tell you who scored for Atlético Madrid in the first leg against Arsenal; Bayern against PSG, on the other hand, is the gift that keeps on giving. 

“While watching the Champions League games and hearing about PSG’s and Bayern’s quests for their respective trebles, it made me wonder about the significance of it in each league,” William Lee wrote. “But should their past accomplishments be as noteworthy as Barcelona’s, Inter Milan’s, Manchester United’s or Manchester City’s?”

To explain: William points out that both the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 not only contain 18 teams, rather than 20, but also are not nearly as competitive as the Premier League (or even Serie A and La Liga). “They’re only able to pull off the level of play they showed because they are essentially going to win their leagues, can rest players, and haven’t played as many games as Arsenal.”

This is, I think, basically true. PSG and Bayern are products of their environments. But then, I suppose, so is everyone else. Barcelona and Real Madrid have been gobbling up the bulk of Spain’s television revenue for years. And Arsenal can run a squad so deep it can go for the Premier League title and the Champions League because they have access to English football’s unrivaled wealth.

I don’t know if that means one accomplishment is worth more; my guess is it would be harder for an English team to win a treble than anyone else. But I do find it odd how eager the Premier League’s commentary class have been to point out Bayern and PSG’s structural advantages without acknowledging the colossal ones the English sides have.

That’s all for this week! If you’re enjoying this newsletter, why not forward it on to a friend? And why not tell them, at the same time, that they can email in any question or thought or idea they have to [email protected]. We appreciate every single one of them.

Take care,
Rory

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