Arsenal have posted the most lopsided flank distribution in the Premier League this season, and the gap between their two wings is now too wide to treat as incidental. Across their first three league games, 47.5% of Arsenal’s attacking touches came down the right flank against just 27.4% down the left, according to Opta data reported by Opta Analyst. Those figures are described as the highest and lowest respective shares of any side in the division this term. What follows examines whether that split reflects a genuinely repeatable team structure, built independently of any single player, or simply a function of Bukayo Saka’s return to full fitness – using only the match-level detail and season figures available from that reporting.
Arsenal’s Right-Flank Possession Profile
The current split is not a new phenomenon so much as an intensification of an existing one. Last season, Arsenal had 41.7% of their touches in the attacking half down the right third of the pitch, against 31.8% down the left – already the most right-skewed distribution in the Premier League bar West Ham, whose own reliance on Jarrod Bowen produced a similar shape.
What has changed is the degree of separation. Arsenal have effectively widened an already significant gap: last season’s 9.9-percentage-point difference between right and left has stretched to 20.1 points through three league matches this term. A grouped comparison of the two seasons – right-side share against left-side share, 2025-26’s attacking-half touches against 2026-27’s attacking touches – makes the trend visible even allowing for the different metric bases and small early-season sample.
It is worth flagging that “touches in the attacking half” and “attacking touches” are not identical measures, and the season-on-season comparison should be read as directional rather than a precise like-for-like. Even with that caveat, the direction of travel is unambiguous: Arsenal have doubled down on their strongest side rather than diversified away from it.
The Right-Sided Structure Beyond Saka
Saka remains the most obvious reason defenders are drawn that way, but Arsenal’s own history undercuts the idea that he is the sole author of the pattern. When he missed a significant stretch of last season through injury, Arsenal did not shift their attacking emphasis toward the left – Noni Madueke and Max Dowman simply inherited the right-wing brief, and the flank stayed the focus. The same logic held after his withdrawal against Napoli, when the right-sided approach persisted without him on the pitch.
The Chelsea game illustrated how far the overload extends beyond the widest player. Kai Havertz repeatedly drifted right to help stack that side, at times standing wider than Saka himself, before coming inside from that exact zone to score Arsenal’s equaliser. That is a nominal centre-forward vacating his central starting point to reinforce a flank overload – a rotation only sustainable within Martin Ødegaard’s right-half-space role, since his positioning between the lines allows Havertz to abandon central duties without leaving the middle empty.
Against Napoli, that relationship showed up directly in the passing data: Ødegaard and Saka found each other more often than either found any other teammate on the pitch, in a match breaking down Arsenal’s 1-0 win that generated Arsenal’s highest recorded Champions League expected-goals total, 4.05, in data stretching back to 2012-13. Ben White’s involvement underlines the structural weight on that side – he started all five of Arsenal’s opening fixtures and averaged 68.4 touches per 90 in all competitions, comfortably the busiest output among the right-sided unit.
Left-Flank Contribution and Recruitment Question
The summer’s dominant Arsenal transfer narrative was about absence rather than acquisition: with Leandro Trossard and Gabriel Martinelli both departing, much of the discussion centred on Arsenal’s failure to land a marquee left-sided forward, with links to Vinícius Júnior going nowhere and moves for Morgan Rogers and Bradley Barcola lost to rival Premier League clubs. Instead, Arsenal turned to the far cheaper and largely unproven Christos Tzolis.
The early statistical return has been disproportionate to the fee. Tzolis has four assists in his first five competitive Arsenal appearances, and left-back Riccardo Calafiori has added two more from a redesigned attacking role that sees him tuck inside Tzolis to occupy something closer to a central presence when Havertz vacates his own. Between them, Tzolis and Calafiori account for six of Arsenal’s nine assists in all competitions this season.
Volume figures tell a different story to output, though, and the distinction matters. Calafiori is averaging just 39.6 touches per 90 in all competitions – the fourth-lowest of any Arsenal player, behind only goalkeeper David Raya and strikers Havertz and Viktor Gyökeres – while Tzolis sits at 52.9. Both trail White’s 68.4 by a wide margin, and only Havertz and Saka have made more high-intensity off-the-ball runs into the penalty area than Calafiori’s eight this season. The left flank is producing returns from limited possession rather than sustained control of it.
Comparative Analysis: Right Versus Left
Set side by side, the two flanks describe two different jobs rather than one dominant side and one neglected one. The right – 47.5% of attacking touches this season, up from 41.7% of attacking-half touches last season, when only West Ham used their right flank more than Arsenal did in the entire division – is designed to sustain and progress possession through repeated combination.
The left – 27.4% of attacking touches this season, down from a league-low 31.8% last season – is built to finish moves efficiently once the ball arrives there, via Tzolis’s width and Calafiori’s underlapping runs, rather than to generate sustained circulation. Half-space occupation on the right, principally by Ødegaard, is the connective tissue that makes the volume of touches translate into chance creation rather than sterile possession.
That framing matters for reading the numbers correctly. A higher share of touches on the right does not automatically mean superior quality of chance – it means the ball spends more time being progressed and recycled through that corridor before a finishing action occurs, wherever that action ultimately takes place.
Tactical Interpretation
The results so far justify the imbalance on output alone. Arsenal have won all five of their opening matches by an aggregate score of 10-1, with Chelsea the only side to genuinely trouble them at any point. Tzolis’s introduction against Napoli, drifting to the right rather than holding his own touchline, and then providing the assist that completed a 29-pass move for Ødegaard’s winner, is as clear a demonstration as any that the right-sided structure absorbs personnel rather than depending on any single one.
Two questions remain genuinely open rather than answered by the data available. First, no Premier League opponent has yet shown they can shut the right flank down entirely, so whether Arsenal possess a plan B if that lane is closed off is untested rather than disproven. Second, both Saka and Ødegaard have had injury interruptions in recent seasons, and Arsenal were measurably less fluent in open play during Saka’s last absence – meaning a simultaneous loss of the trio’s key connectors is the scenario most likely to expose the model’s dependence on personnel, even if the shape itself doesn’t change.
Whether elite opponents will design specific gameplans to congest that side, and whether the right-side share settles above or below its current extremes as the season lengthens, are open watch points rather than established trends at this stage.
Conclusion
The broader case here is less about Arsenal solving a left-wing problem and more about them never really having one in the first place. Tzolis is not going to sustain four assists in five games across a 38-match campaign, and Arsenal’s own reporting acknowledges as much, but the point is that they may not need him to.
A superstar left winger in the mould of Vinícius would have demanded the ball come to him and reshaped the entire structure around his output. Instead, Arsenal have a cheaper, functional wide option holding width on the side that was never the focus, while funnelling the bulk of their creative burden through a right flank that has already delivered a 10-1 aggregate return and a 4.05 xG Champions League performance inside the season’s first month.
