Arsenal’s ‘progress’ under Mikel Arteta
Mikel Arteta’s 50th premier league game match as the manager of Arsenal was a heavy 3–0 home defeat to Liverpool. He was brought into the club to replace Unai Emery, who was sacked after 51 premier league games in charge. So, after a similar number of games, are Arsenal better off with their new manager? And how have they progressed compared to the final 50 games of Arsene Wenger's reign?
With a similar number of games undertaken as manager, it is only natural to compare the numbers between Emery and Arteta. Both were tasked with trying to restore Arsenal back to the title competing (and winning) club that it was with Wenger in charge. Despite the height reached by Wenger, towards the end of his tenure there were questions raised about whether he should have still been in the job. His final 50 premier league matches as manager can be compared against Emery and Arteta to further see how Arsenal have developed since his departure.
Underlying statistics that cannot easily be recorded or seen, are often disputed. Something that is not ambiguous though, are the results of a match. Many people believe that what matters is the result and nothing else. In this line of thought, we can visualise (using a waffle chart) the results from the last 50 games for each manager. Note that, for each figure, Unai Emery has 51 games as this represents the entirety of his time at Arsenal and including the extra game doesn’t affect the data in a significant way.
We can see that not only does Arteta have the lowest number of wins, but he also has the highest number of losses too. Wenger has 1.76 average points per game, Emery had 1.73 and Arteta has 1.5. This is quite a large decrease. But what has happened within the games in terms of goals scored, conceded and clean sheets kept?
Firstly we can look at goals scored.
(This by itself is a poor visualisation, with no indication as to the exact values for the bars. I have tried to improve all graphic and incorporate them all together in a graphic that can be viewed on my Behance or at the bottom of this article).
We can see again, a seemingly significant decrease from Wenger and Emery to Arteta. At times, new managers will look to build a solid basis for their team, in the form of a solid defence, before focusing on the attack. We can see whether there might be any truth to this by checking to see the number of goals conceded over the given period.
With the least amount of goals conceded over his 50-match period, Arteta has had the most successful defence. The number of goals conceded isn’t significantly different from manager-to-manager, but maybe the ways in which they were conceded were. To try and see this, we can look at the number of clean sheets each manager had in the given period.
With the most amount of goals conceded, it is little surprise that Emery has also had the least clean sheets. Arteta, with the least goals conceded, still has 3 fewer clean sheets than Wenger.
This data doesn’t give any context or information as to the underlying statistics that accompany these figures. As such, it is hard to infer which manager has performed better in their respective 50-game period, and impossible to suggest whether Arteta is guaranteed to succeed or fail — purely based on this data.
I combined these figures into a graphic that displays all the data at once whilst also (hopefully) being more aesthetically pleasing. It can be found in a higher resolution on my Behance.
