Arsenal return to action against Leeds on Saturday with a defeat to explain away and a wider question to answer. Before the international break, Mikel Arteta’s side were beaten 3-0 at Brighton, a result made more jarring by the fact that they had won every single game prior to it this season. The timing of the loss, immediately before an extended break, has made it easier to forget that context.
Arteta was generous about the opposition afterwards. “Brighton were really good,” he said, and Fabian Hurzeler had earned that praise by refusing to take a pragmatic route against the reigning champions. Arsenal are rarely outclassed to that degree, and the manner of the defeat left an uncertainty hanging over the break.
Understanding what went wrong requires understanding how far this team has travelled. Arteta took over in 2019 a side in need of new life and won the FA Cup in his first season by playing defensive football, unafraid to use a back five. Later, Arsenal became free-flowing and attacking, most vividly in 2022. Then came a version built to reduce the variance of a match: maximum control, physically difficult to compete with, and ultimately good enough to win the Premier League title, finishing seven points clear of second-placed Manchester City and without losing a single league game by more than one goal.
Freed, perhaps, by that trophy, Arteta is reinventing the side again, taking more gambles in personnel and tactics. An increased appetite for risk cuts both ways: the wins can be greater, and so can the losses.
Midfield is where the change is clearest. Last season the heart of the team had Martin Zubimendi at its base with Declan Rice in a more box-to-box role to his left. Arsenal lost momentum as the campaign wore on, but the surprise deployment of Myles Lewis-Skelly in holding midfield reinvigorated them and helped them over the line. Arteta has continued to trust the 20-year-old in that key role.
This season Arsenal have used a 3-1-6 shape in possession, with Rice dropping deep rather than pushing on as he did earlier last season, forming a back three alongside Ezri Konsa and Gabriel Magalhaes, and Lewis-Skelly operating as the single pivot linking the back part of the team to the front. With William Saliba absent, Konsa offers a capable ball-playing presence at centre-back, while Rice’s passing and carrying quality means that facing forward with time and space maximises his strengths and reduces the time he spends in small spaces with his back to goal, a relative weakness for a player of his frame.
Calling the rest a front six oversimplifies the roles involved. Riccardo Calafiori, Ben White and Martin Odegaard take turns dropping deep, becoming a fifth player at Arsenal’s base and turning a 3-1 into a 3-2 or a 4-1. Because those arrivals are sudden, opponents do not always track them; when Odegaard dropped deep against Sunderland, he went untracked, giving Lewis-Skelly an easy passing option and Arsenal a route up the pitch. The effect is to outnumber opponents, play around them and progress the ball.
Lewis-Skelly has made the link position his own through calmness under pressure, hold-up strength, the ability to dribble past opponents one against one and a willingness to take risks, whether by carrying the ball or playing directly into his attackers. His effectiveness there has been noticed beyond north London: during this international break, England boss Thomas Tuchel emulated Arteta’s use of him, with Elliot Anderson taking up the Rice role in England’s back three.
Part of the explanation for Arsenal’s difficulty against Brighton is that it was Bruno Guimaraes, not Lewis-Skelly, occupying the holding position. Hurzeler has drilled his side to play with high intensity on and off the ball, and playing around such a press demands superb technique, correct positioning, well-timed movement and an awareness of where team-mates will be. Guimaraes will get to grips with those demands given the time Lewis-Skelly has already had in the role, but being asked to do it against an effective man-to-man press was always going to be a difficult challenge.
Brighton forced Arsenal into hesitancy on the ball and into decisions they would not normally make. Arteta’s own diagnosis was blunt: “You could see from the first throw-in, it was so clear. We put ourselves in trouble one, two, three times. We need to get out much quicker than that, and that’s one of the biggest lessons we have to take from the game today.” Loose passing followed, and a side known for its duelling was beaten by opponents who swarmed around the ball. Even when Arsenal pushed Brighton deeper and expected the familiar pattern of dominating possession in the opposition third against a low block, Hurzeler’s team had other plans: from a settled defensive shape they picked their moments to spring into a man-to-man press, using a back pass to Gabriel Magalhaes as the trigger, with Hurzeler directing the switch from the touchline. Arsenal were left without an unmarked player to find, unable to create the conditions they like to play out of.
There is precedent for Arteta solving a problem of this type. In last season’s Carabao Cup final, Pep Guardiola’s zonal 4-2-4 allowed Arsenal’s defenders to keep the ball while blocking access through the middle of the pitch; Manchester City won the trophy. City’s new boss, Enzo Maresca, redeployed the same set-up against Arsenal in this season’s Community Shield, and this time it did not work. Arsenal, having had time to prepare, found numerous solutions through their technical and versatile players in build-up. Beating a man-to-man press as well executed as Brighton’s is difficult, but Arteta’s track record suggests he will find ways to minimise its effectiveness.
His side’s evolution is not only reactive. This season Arsenal have also encouraged more asymmetrical and fluid play, particularly down their right. Kai Havertz has consistently moved to the right touchline, White has arrived high up the pitch from right-back, Bukayo Saka has appeared on the wing or attacking centrally, and Rice and Odegaard have come across to offer for the ball. Built on small-space combinations, fluidity and numerical overloads, the approach has given Arsenal new answers to an old problem in the low block. Dragging opponents to one side of the pitch to find players in space in the middle or on the far side has produced goals, with rotations among White, Havertz and Saka against Chelsea underlining how quickly positions can change.
All of it points to a manager willing to move away from what worked in previous seasons in pursuit of new solutions, hoping to outrun a league trying to close the gap. That kind of reinvention brings teething problems, as Brighton exposed. But for a side trying to stay at the top, failing to reinvent may be the greater gamble. The next chapter begins at home to Leeds on Saturday at 12:30 BST.