“Nothing is logical in football,” said Luis Enrique, reflecting on how his Paris Saint-Germain side had survived a precarious league phase and an early Arsenal onslaught in a semi-final second leg in Paris to make this season’s Champions League final.
It was a sentiment also expressed by his counterpart Mikel Arteta, who spoke of tears in the away dressing room and his mix of pride, upset and annoyance at the 3-1 aggregate loss.
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Arteta believed the probabilities had somehow evaded the natural end-result by progressing the French champions rather than his Premier League team. Luis Enrique disagreed. Just because Arsenal were able to play in the way they wanted, he argued, did not mean they were superior.
But Arsenal created seven big chances (which Opta defines as “a situation where a player should reasonably be expected to score”) across the two games against PSG, three while being beaten 1-0 in the first leg at the Emirates Stadium and four in the Parc des Princes return, outperformed PSG on expected goals (xG) in both matches by a margin of 1.7-1.2 and 3.0-1.7 and dominated territory.
The tides of a two-legged tie contain more nuance than numbers can capture, but they reinforced the sense that Arsenal had delivered part of the performance required to overturn that single-goal deficit from the home leg. The only things missing were the finishes.
“When you analyse both games, who has been the best player? The MVP has been the same player — the goalkeeper (PSG’s Gianluigi Donnarumma),” Arteta said.
“The Champions League is decided in the boxes and it’s won the game for them because obviously today after 20 minutes, and what happened in London as well, the result should have been very different.”
It is rare for Arteta to accept that Arsenal did not do enough to win a game. Based on the logic of statistics, he sees his team dominate most phases of most matches and believes falling on the wrong side of fine margins is what is keeping them at the gates of major honours.
Luis Enrique may believe nothing is logical in football but it was surely obvious to him that the difference between the two teams was the superior end-product of PSG’s players.
Arsenal lack a killer striker, a lesson they were taught by Newcastle United and their front man Alexander Isak in the Carabao Cup semi-finals earlier this season. But they also lack end-product on the wing and in midfield, too, a lesson they were taught by PSG.
Does Arteta recognise that second lesson? Given he believes no team has been better than his in the 2024-25 Champions League and that this setup and personnel delivered a performance worthy of beating PSG, can he diagnose where they are still lacking when his assessment suggests such limited room for improvement?
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In the wake of the limp defeat against Bayern Munich at the quarter-final stage last season, there was an acceptance that Arsenal, even with Kai Havertz up front, lacked an edge in attack at the top level.
Yet they did not then purchase a striker, wide player or creative midfielder last summer. Arteta instead chose to spend heavily on a left-back in Riccardo Calafiori and a duelling midfielder in Mikel Merino. Merino and Havertz, who was signed the summer before, were both brought in to solve the left No 8 problem but neither looked like the right fit there once they arrived and only improved after moving to a striking position by sheer happenstance.
They can be seen as a misdiagnosis by Arteta, who now appears to have settled on Declan Rice as that left eight, a player initially brought in as a holding midfielder and then shifted to another role too.
Merino has been used as a makeshift forward (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Recalibrating rather than sticking to a failing plan is positive and a sign of humility, but it is understandable why these final few tweaks and additions are proving to be testing.
Arsenal are a side of few sharp joins, which makes pinpointing fault lines difficult. When a squad of hybrid players has been built to fit hybrid roles, how easy is it to identify the missing piece of the jigsaw? Is there even just one piece missing, or are there two or three?
What should have been the final-build phase of the team last year now rolls into another summer, which becomes a critical juncture for Arsenal.
Arteta cannot allow the impressive European displays, or the harsh red cards and injuries that have dogged their Premier League season, to cover his team’s shortcomings. He must accurately diagnose what is preventing Arsenal from taking the final step.
He has done an exceptional job in reshaping an entire club over the past five years but the danger with being chief architect for so long is the potential to become blind to the flaws in your own engineering, unable to see past the original vision.
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When Kieran Tierney leaves this summer, every player in the squad bar Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli will have been given their senior Arsenal debut by Arteta. How they defend and attack, and who does it, have been entirely shaped by him.
His default over the last two years has been to reinforce the defence and strengthen in midfield rather than indulge in flair and imagination at the top of the pitch. Perhaps it was a natural overcorrection to how this squad’s first tilt at the Premier League title collapsed two years ago on the run-in, but he must surely recognise Arsenal need more incisive players across several positions.
There is a gap up front, and in other areas of attack, where Arsenal do not stack up compared to rivals such as Liverpool and PSG, but they will not be able to address every flaw or upgrade all areas where there is headroom in one transfer window. Completing this team will be a question of prioritising, and diagnosing issues correctly.
Rice looks rueful as Ben White shakes Donnarumma’s hand after the final whistle in Paris (Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images)
The singular conclusion drawn whenever Arsenal are outgunned by another team is that they are missing a striker.
But whether they had a better No 9 or not was not a prescient point in this Champions League elimination.
The opening 25 minutes in Paris, until the sucker-punch of Fabian Ruiz’s deflected goal to make it 2-0 on aggregate, was as perfect a display from Arsenal as Arteta could have hoped for. Bar one or two turnovers and shots left on the shelf, they had PSG in a daze.
Even without a natural striker, Arsenal dominated Real Madrid in the quarter-finals and then created enough big chances to beat PSG. But those opportunities, barring Leandro Trossard’s one-v-one miss in the first leg, did not fall to the player who had been deployed up front.
Some will argue this is an indictment of what they are missing and that a better striker would have provided the movement and link-up play to get on the end of more chances, but the ones Arsenal did produce against PSG should have been enough. It was the individual execution of their supporting cast — plus an inspired Donnarumma — that has stopped them making the final against Inter on May 31.
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Trossard and Martinelli — playing in wide forward roles — missed two one-v-one chances in that 1-0 defeat last week. Then in the opening eight minutes on Wednesday, Rice saw a back-post header shave the post, Martinelli had a volley parried away and a Martin Odegaard shot from the edge of the box was terrifically pushed wide by Donnarumma.
In the second half, Saka had a curling shot destined for the top corner tipped over and, after scoring to give Arsenal hope of a comeback, he was unable to convert a golden chance when Calafiori’s cross flashed into his path, although Donnarumma’s dive made it a much harder task to keep the ball down.
There will be many who believe that if Arsenal swallow the magic-striker pill, they will automatically become trophy winners again. No doubt, an elite player up front would elevate the team, but football is not as binary as that and the issues with creation and conversion that have arisen over the past two seasons stretch beyond just one position.
Additional firepower is clearly needed but how Arteta diagnoses and treats that requirement will be an interesting sub-plot to the arrival of new sporting director Andrea Berta, who will have developed his own thoughts on the make-up of the squad in recent months.
Perhaps it’s part psychological, though, and now is the time for the signing of a couple of elite specialists in attacking positions to convince the rest of the dressing room that goals are inevitable.
(Top photo: Ibrahim Ezzat/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
