Conversion

The under discussed issue as Arsenal aim to improve against low defensive blocks

Clearly Arsenal had an issue with low defensive blocks last season. The signings of Mariona and Rosa Kafaji are an attempt to inject greater fantasy and unpredictability into Arsenal’s approach play. It is definitely true that their play against such teams last season was often a little stiff and stodgy.

I do believe that Kafaji and Mariona can help with this, as well as a fully fit Leah Williamson and a fitter, stronger Beth Mead. There were positive signs in this respect against Southampton on Saturday. The ball moved a lot more quickly than we saw for spells of last season, players took one and two touches, players moved from their positions to create combinations and 1-2s. We didn’t see enough of this last season.

And yet, I still have one concern from the game. Since it was a friendly there is no publicly available data but I am pretty uncertain that the three goals Arsenal scored represented an under performance on their XG on the day. Arsenal were one of only two WSL teams to underperform their XG (West Ham were the other) across the season.

To put that into some perspective, the last time that Arsenal won the WSL in 2018-19, they overperformed their XG by 25 goals. As much as Arsenal did have creative issues last season, the biggest issue was chance conversion. In the 1-0 defeat to Liverpool on the opening day, they beat Liverpool on XG 1.7 to 1.0. In the 1-0 defeat to Spurs, they beat Spurs on XG 2.5 to 0.4. In the 2-1 defeat at West Ham they created 1.9 XG to West Ham’s 1.1 (0.7 of which came from a penalty).

Even an average conversion rate in these matches would have seen Arsenal take at least seven points from those matches as opposed to 0. (They finished five points behind champions Chelsea). There is an inherent irony that Arsenal’s second worst XG performance of the season was a 3-0 home win against West Ham in November in which they created 0.8XG. Frida Maanum’s slightly over hit cross and Beth Mead’s long range effort gave Arsenal a commanding early two goal lead which altered the game state.

Arsenal didn’t need to create much more after that so they sat back and West Ham roared back, creating 0.9XG themselves and hitting the woodwork twice in the process. That performance was one of only two ‘XG defeats’ for Arsenal in the WSL last season (the other being the 3-1 defeat at Chelsea which finished 2.9 to 0.5 in Chelsea’s favour). The 3-0 home win over West Ham was actually one of the poorer showings of the season but the run of the ball went Arsenal’s way that day.

All of this is a long way of saying that while creativity was certainly an issue, conversion was a bigger issue and that remained an issue against Southampton, who were opened up by a long range effort from Kyra Cooney-Cross after a close range chance had been squandered and two setpiece goals. Setpiece goals are a critical area for improvement this season, which Arsenal have acknowledged by letting previous setpiece coach Patrick Winqvist go and replacing him with Chris Bradley.

When you look at Manchester City’s attacking data between 2022-23, when they finished 4th, and 2023-24, when they finished 2nd, setpiece conversion was really the only notable area of change and improvement. Their finishing sharpened up a little, they probably went from having a bit of bad luck to a bit of good luck in front of goal across the two seasons but they clearly worked on improving from setpieces.

Obviously data doesn’t translate this neatly but if Manchester City can leap two places in the league with slightly improved finishing and clearly improved setpiece conversion, the same leap for Arsenal would be an incredibly pleasing result come May. But I still felt issues around chance conversion persisted in the Southampton match.

Adding Beth Mead back to the mix should help that and Russo is now taking up far more goal scoring positions, that allied with the increased creativity of Mariona and Kafaji should lead to improvements. But Arsenal do need to improve when it comes to completing the final action.