It was at this stage of last season that Arsenal took the opportunity to decamp to Dubai for a week of warm-weather training and the results were spectacular, even if still not enough to beat Manchester City to the title. After ending 2023 with consecutive defeats against West Ham and Fulham, Mikel Arteta’s side dropped only five points in the remaining 18 Premier League matches and secured eight straight wins at the start of the year, scoring 33 goals.
Twelve months on, Arsenal know that after starting 2025 with a convincing victory at Brentford, they will need to be almost perfect again to stand a chance of overhauling Liverpool, who lead by six points with a game in hand. With a demanding schedule of nine matches in January and injuries mounting, this time Arteta does not have the luxury of a mid-season break to reset his squad for the challenges ahead.
The scheduling of their game against Brentford on New Year’s Day means Arsenal have had significantly less time than Brighton, who played on Monday, to prepare for their meeting at the Amex on Saturday evening, and the sickness bug that caused Kai Havertz to miss the trip to west London has given Arteta another headache in a season plagued by misfortune.
First it was the new signing Mikel Merino dislocating a shoulder in his first training session, then Martin Ødegaard being ruled out for 12 matches after injuring an ankle playing for Norway. Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli, Oleksandr Zinchenko and Riccardo Calafiori also missed games after returning injured from international duty. Now, the hamstring tear sustained by Saka against Crystal Palace is expected to keep him out for another two months at least.
That is in contrast to the previous campaign when Jurriën Timber was the only member of Arsenal’s squad to sustain a major injury, and several players including Ben White, William Saliba, Gabriel Magalhães, Declan Rice, Ødegaard, Martinelli and Saka were virtually ever-present in the league.
This time around, data released by the website Premier Injuries shows that by mid-December, Arsenal had sustained 16 injuries – only behind 17 for both Brighton and Ipswich – that caused a player to miss one or more games, with a total of 406 days lost, the fifth-highest in the Premier League.
At the end of last January Arteta described Arsenal’s squad as one of the “thinnest” in the division after not signing any players during the winter window. He repeated that claim last week and it remains to be seen whether Arsenal decide reinforcements are needed, although it appears they must make do for now given financial constraints. “OK, so what do we need then?” Arteta said. “If we are the thinnest, what do we need? And really dig into that and make sure that we utilise every player in the best possible potential. Everybody has to feel part of it.”
That approach was exemplified by the team that started against Brentford, with Ethan Nwaneri making a long-awaited full league debut at the ground where he became the youngest Premier League player in September 2022. The 17-year-old showed why Arteta let Emile Smith Rowe move on last summer by providing the crosses that led to the goals for Merino and Martinelli after starting in Saka’s usual spot on the right. He will have competition from Raheem Sterling when the former England forward returns from a knee injury and it seems unlikely Sterling’s season-long loan from Chelsea will be cut short given the lack of players at Arteta’s disposal.
Myles Lewis-Skelly – another teenager – has proved a capable deputy for Calafiori at left-back in the absence of the Italian and Zinchenko, and the academy product is in line to return for the first leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final against Newcastle on Tuesday. That looks as if it could be one competition too many given the strain on Arsenal’s squad but with Arteta keen to build a winning habit by collecting a trophy, he may rest more players for the FA Cup meeting with Manchester United the following Sunday before testing league fixtures against Tottenham and Aston Villa in the space of four days.
Arsenal could lighten the load before their final Champions League fixture against Girona by almost guaranteeing a top-eight finish with a win over Dinamo Zagreb on 22 January. That will be a fifth successive home game in a sequence that means Arsenal will play only once outside London between their 5-1 thrashing of Sporting on 26 November and a trip to Wolves on 25 January. Not everything, at least, has been against Arteta.
The transformation in Gabriel Jesus has come at the right time, with the striker finally showing the goalscoring form that eluded him for so long. The Brazilian maintaining that and Arsenal finding goals from other sources than set pieces will be crucial to their chances of reeling in Liverpool and Jesus adding to the four Premier League winners’ medals he won at City. “I’ve already been there, but I can see this team is experienced now,” he said after the Brentford game. “We have amazing players, and I’m sure we can fight for the title.”
