Maximising Martinelli
Martinelli's so-called stagnation is much maligned. But could he be the key to levelling up Arsenal's attack?
There’s been a long lasting idea within the (chronically) online Arsenal fanbase that Gabriel Martinelli might be in need of replacing. Our attack has become too focussed on the right side, they say, and Martinelli is not providing enough on the left to be truly dangerous. This came to the fore over the recent international break on Bluesky (yes, not Twitter, I’ve escaped), where Adam Rae Voge of Cannonstats pointed out that Martinelli’s underlying numbers are Fine, Actually, prompting a discussion of whether Martinelli has stagnated while the rest of the team has improved around him.
That #discourse got me thinking: have we truly outgrown Martinelli, or are we simply not making the most of him? And if we aren’t making the most of him, what can Arteta do to change that?
Let’s take a look.
How did we get here?
In the 2022/23 season, Martinelli was Arsenal’s joint-top goalscorer in the Premier League with 15 goals in 2,789 minutes. Here’s a lovely comp where you can watch all of them (and the assists too):
A season later his output shrank to just 6 goals in 2,029 Premier League minutes. So how can we explain that rather drastic drop-off?
The obvious answer is that he had an unreal finishing season in 22/23 that he couldn’t sustain. He scored 15 goals from 9.1 xG in 22/23, and 6 goals from 6.8 xG in 23/24. If I was feeling boring, I’d end the analysis there, but I think there’s more to this story than finishing variance.
Let’s compare Martinelli’s open-play shot-maps from those seasons, courtesy of Understat:
One thing that immediately catches the eye is the drop off in close range shots - In 22/23, he had 5 shots inside the six-yard-box and 7 shots just outside of it (mostly to the left), scoring 4 goals from them. The season after that dropped to just two shots just outside the six-yard-box and none (0) inside of it.
So what’s going on here?
Two things: player dynamics, and a change in opposition approach.
In terms of dynamics, in 22/23 our left hand side was set up pretty nicely to get Martinelli in front of goal. We had Granit Xhaka at left eight, who was very good at playing lovely through balls for Martinelli to cut inside & run onto - made easier because his left-footedness lends itself to playing inside from the left side of the pitch. Up front, Gabriel Jesus was being his lovely floaty self, frequently drifting wide to the left and combining with Martinelli and others. Both Jesus and Xhaka (and Zinchenko, the left back) were more than happy to hold the width on the left and allow Martinelli to come inside and occupy the half-space or even the space between the posts. So Martinelli had guys around him happy to swing out wide and let him come inside, as well as Xhaka ready and able to play him in behind whenever the opportunity came up.
In 23/24, we lost that. Kai Havertz became a key cog in the team, and almost always played either as in the left eight slot or up front. At the 8, Kai didn’t have the confidence or passing technique for the interplay with Martinelli that Xhaka did, and the striker was Eddie Nketiah who just isn’t the same link-up monster as Jesus (to be fair, nobody is). When Kai moved up top, he tended to drift right - great for Saka, but leaves Martinelli on a bit of an island - and Declan Rice moved to the 8, who also doesn’t have the juice for those lovely threaded through balls into space. We went from a fast, fluid left hand side that allowed Martinelli to frequently access central spaces, to one where he was often isolated on the wing without the right players around him to facilitate him coming inside.
The change in opposition approach can best be summed up as “teams started treating us like the elite side we are”. Many of Martinelli's 22/23 goals came in transition - either a big boy transition across the whole pitch, or a kind of half-transition, where the opposition is moving from a mid-block into box defending. In 23/24, teams started to naturally allow us less space in transition and sat in their defensive block more frequently. That meant that Martinelli was no longer able to receive the ball in space and run, but rather had to receive it wide and take on the opposition full-back or recycle.
He wasn’t alone in this, to be fair. Bukayo Saka had to do a lot more, too, but where Saka is a technical wizard able to dictate attacks with the ball at his feet, Martinelli needs spaces to attack - spaces that were no longer being afforded.
So we changed the players around Martinelli to guys less suited to his play style, and teams were no longer giving us the space he thrived on exploiting. So no wonder he’s not producing at the same level as before.
Except - hang on - he kinda *is*.
An Interesting Wrinkle
Let’s take a look at the Bluesky post which prompted all this.
According to the underlying numbers [from FBRef], Nelli was even providing *more* expected goals in 23/24 than 22/23 - only 0.02 xG more, but still more. What’s also true (but Adam has cropped out of the screenshot) is that he was getting a very similar number of shots per 90 - 2.55 in 22/23, 2.59 in 23/24 - and exactly the same xG per shot (0.12).
The *fuck*?
Well, let’s pull up those shot maps again.
We can see that as well as those nice, high-value chances close to the goal that we talked about earlier, Martinelli also took a lot more shots from outside the box in 22/23 than in 23/24. In fact, he took over double - 14*, compared to 6. Those outside-the-box shots are worth barely any xG, as shown by the dots in the graphic being small, and as such will be bringing his average xG down.
So in 22/23, Martinelli was taking more high-value shots from closer to the goal, but also more low-value shots from further away - whereas in 23/24, almost all of his shots come from between the 6 yard line and the 18 yard line, roughly in the middle. This means when you add them all up and take the average across the seasons, they’re coming out at about the same, even though he got on the end of more high-value chances in 22/23.
Those high-value shots are where the money is. If Martinelli is to stay in the team, the aim should be to get him the ball in those areas more often - oh? What’s this?
Two shots & two goals from inside the 6 yard box already this season?
(And another one in the Champions League against Sporting whilst I was writing this article?)
Lovely stuff. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
* If you're counting with me, and missing one, it's hidden between the “i” & “n” in "Martinelli"
Spreading The Threat
So we’ve established that the way to get the most (read: 22/23 form) out of Martinelli is to get players around him that he can Do A Dynamics with, and get him access to central spaces as often as possible. But is getting the best out of Martinelli the way to get the best out of the team?
It’s not hard to make the argument that the team was better for moving away from Martinelli in 23/24. When you’ve got players of the quality of Saka and Ødegaard, it makes a lot of sense to get them on the ball whenever possible, and when they’re both predominantly on the right side of the pitch then the left is of course going to suffer. Martinelli was at times reduced to a touchline winger role last year, and with Trossard’s strong form he was even relegated to the bench during our strongest period of the season. You can’t take too much issue with the result: 15 wins, 1 draw and 1 defeat.
But despite our strong form, it wasn’t a foolproof plan. We’ve spoken previously on the pod about the importance of Spreading The Threat - if you can attack dangerously down both sides of the pitch it is much harder for the opposition to stop you, firstly because it’s harder to predict how you are going to build attacks, and secondly because if one side of the team isn’t on form then you can pick up the slack elsewhere.
The first half of this season is a great example of the problems that can arise when you don’t spread the threat. In Ødegaard’s absence, Saka had the entire creative burden of the team on his back, all while at best half-fit himself; opposition sides had no reason not to stick about three guys on him at any given time, and in doing so almost completely blunt our open-play threat. This was made very obvious against Forest last weekend - you could argue Ødegaard’s most significant attacking contribution was drawing defenders away from Saka, leaving him free to bully Alex Moreno to his heart’s content. If our left hand side carried more of an attacking threat, it could have helped to lessen that burden when Ødegaard was out.
Is it possible, then, to spread some of our threat over to Martinelli’s side, without taking something away from Ødegaard and Saka?
Yes, and I’d argue we’re putting the wheels in motion already.
The New Kids
The left-hand side was the major focus of the summer transfer window. We were linked to Martinelli replacements, and we were linked to the kinds of players that might help Martinelli impact games more. In the end we got two of the latter: Calafiori and Merino.
You don’t need me to tell you that Calafiori is kinda unreal. He’s all over the place in the best way possible: centre back, left back, a #6, #8 and #10, often all in the same game, positional rotations are second nature to him. Even with his stuttering, injury-hit start to the season, the left side is visibly more fluid when he’s on the pitch, because he just pops up wherever he needs to to make things happen.
Merino has struggled a little bit more, but has shown great stuff in flashes. Our Alex has described him as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none; a 7/10 merchant (complementary). I’ve heard good things about the verticality of his passing, and he should have the incisiveness to play the Xhaka balls in behind for Martinelli to run onto. He’s also a runner himself - one thing we’ve definitely seen from him is a willingness to run in behind, where Nelli can either play him through or move into the space created. On paper, he’s somewhere between Kai Havertz & Granit Xhaka - Arteta’s ideal mould for the left 8 position.
In theory, Martinelli, Merino & Calafiori are a group of players that can match the fluidity of the other side of the pitch. You can imagine Merino pulling wide left and Calafiori underlapping to make space for Martinelli to cut inside across the back line, like Saka, White & Ødegaard do all the time in various combinations. The problem is it’s still in theory - it’s nearly December and, due to a variety of caveats you’ll be painfully aware of, we’ve hardly seen the three players on the pitch at the same time (about 72 minutes total, and they haven’t yet started a game together). In our most recent game at time of writing, against Forest, we saw two of the three with Trossard out wide instead of Martinelli, and it looked great - but that’s without Martinelli! Only time will tell if these dynamics come together in practice as nicely as they do on paper.
Exploiting the Space
Improving the dynamics on the left isn’t the only way to get more out of Martinelli, though. He can also make use of one of the things that’s been causing him problems: our overloading of the right hand side.
Everybody’s heard the short blanket analogy in football: there aren’t enough players to cover the whole pitch at once, so you have to choose where you cover and where you leave space. If we overload the right wing with Saka, Ødegaard, Timber/White & the striker drifting over, it forces the opposition to put the majority of their players over there as well, and opens up space on the left. Space that Martinelli should be able to exploit - and has done already this season:
The best part, as seen above, we seem to know that advantage is there to be taken - and have done so a couple times already this season. It can also be taken advantage of through earlier switches, which could leave Martinelli facing a more favourable 1v1 rather than being isolated against two or more defenders.
Martinelli is best when moving into space. With Saka and Ødegaard drawing the majority of the opponents’ defensive attention, the space will be there for him to move into. We’ve just got to find him in it, and he’ll get lots of high-value chances.
But what about Saka and Ødegaard?
To quote me from earlier in this article, “When you’ve got players of the quality of Saka and Ødegaard, it makes a lot of sense to get them on the ball whenever possible.” And that is true, to an extent. But football is a team game, and sometimes (in fact, almost always) getting the most out of the team is not the same as getting the most out of just one or two guys.
To explain what I mean, I’d like to borrow a little from the Double Pivot Podcast’s latest episode about Manchester City’s struggles.
Manchester City are fine-tuned to get Erling Haaland shots, and you’d think that a part of their recent drop-off has been a drop-off in Erling Haaland’s shooting stats - but it isn’t. Haaland had 7 shots against Spurs, 7 shots against Brighton, and 5 shots against Bournemouth, for a sum total of 3.1xG across those three games. He scored one goal, and City lost all three; a bad finishing run, sure, but everybody has those sometimes.
The problem is that nobody else is shooting. Their 2nd top goalscorers in the league behind Haaland’s 12 are Josko Gvardiol & Matteo Kovacic with 3. It makes total sense to maximise the number of shots you can get out of the best striker in the world, but if he is literally the only guy getting on the end of chances, you’ve got a problem.
Now I’m not saying we’re anywhere near that level in terms of trying to force everything through Ødegaard and Saka. But I do believe that we can get a big improvement out of Martinelli without experiencing a big drop-off from either of them - and the entire team can benefit.
Ødegaard had his most productive attacking season (15 goals, 7 assists) in 22/23, at the same time Martinelli produced his best work. Saka got the same total number of goal involvements (25) in 22/23 as 23/24. There is of course some xG overperformance in there, as there is with any talk of Arsenal attacking output in 22/23 - but the point remains intact. An increase in use of Arsenal’s left side when attacking does not necessarily mean a drop in output from the right.
Conclusion
Gabriel Martinelli reminds me in a way of 22/23 Granit Xhaka, because it feels like some people are way too confident in our ability to upgrade on him in the transfer market. His work rate alone makes him almost singular as a rapid, transitional wide forward - anybody better than him on the ball is more likely to be a passenger out of possession in my opinion, and that’s without even getting into his game-breaking speed. There’s a reason why he’s been the one (near-)constant in a left side that has undergone a lot of change in the past few seasons, even going back before we started competing at the top of the table.
With that in mind, I think it makes a lot of sense to tweak our attacking dynamics a bit with him in mind. It’ll help us to spread the threat, making us less predictable and less reliant on Saka & Ødegaard, and I think any potential decrease in Saka or Ødegaard’s numbers would be more than made up for by an increase in Martinelli’s.
Maybe there are players who could bring superstar quality to our attack from the left in the same way Saka does from the right. But I can’t think of many, and Nelli’s no slouch. With a couple tweaks, and a sprinkle of confidence, I think he’ll be more than pulling his weight - and the best news is we’re already moving in the right direction.
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Absolutely beautiful read.
Detailed as usual. Thank you for this. I totally loved it.
Very balanced and insightful. I admire how the utilization of data brought out your points, negating the impulsive banter. Thank you.