Arsenal’s 1-0 win at Manchester United on Sunday may not have been the most thrilling match but as far as much-anticipated matches go, the opening weekend fixture at Old Trafford provided plenty of food for thought for two teams chasing upward mobility.
The Gunners may have pulled from a familiar playbook with Riccardo Calafiori’s set-piece goal but there was a newness to each team on Sunday, both in terms of ideas and personnel. Each side started a pair of high-profile fresh faces, United going with Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha, Arsenal lining up with Martin Zubimendi and Viktor Gyokeres, while some new tactical ideas also took center stage at Old Trafford. Arsenal may have left Manchester with all three points, but United showed a composure that was rarely apparent last season, offering signs of encouragement at this early stage of the season.
That said, Sunday’s match was perhaps more notable as a unique showcase for both teams’ imperfections. Perhaps the players are still shaking off the rust of preseason but neither side appeared to be at their best, especially in attack. The glass-half-full look is that Sunday’s match is an important indication of where room for improvement lies, and that the issues are fixable over the course of a long season.
Here are three takeaways from Arsenal’s win at United on Sunday.
United show signs of progress
It took United almost no time to establish the holding pattern of the match, one in which they dominated possession and did well with their build-up play, doing what they could to generate quality goalscoring opportunities along the way. Arsenal’s 13th minute goal did what it could to disrupt the Red Devils’ early momentum but that rhythm was restored well before halftime and became the defining aspect of the match. They may not have ended the match with a goal but they had 61.1% of possession when all was said and done, taking 22 shots to Arsenal’s nine and generating 1.59 expected goals to the Gunners’ 1.05.
Manager Ruben Amorim rolled out a different attacking approach to start his first full season on the job, opting against starting a natural striker but utilizing Cunha as the most forward player and valuing play in wide positions, with Mbeumo pitching in on the right and Patrick Dorgu playing more as an out-and-out wingback on the left. It was not always perfect but the players were effective, Cunah and Mbeumo demonstrating a proficiency that was lacking last season but exemplified the major takeaway from Sunday’s match. Improving the midfield was foundational to Amorim’s reinvention of the team, as he discussed post-match.
“We were more aggressive than last year,” Amorim said, per NBC Sports. “We sprinted more. We were more brave. We went one-v-one all game. And then with the ball we had quality. When the stadium makes some sounds, we continued the play the way we play. We lost fewer balls in the buildup compared to last year. And then the small things we talk about in the beginning of the season — players like Cunha and Bryan can elevate the stadium. I think the most important thing — we were not boring.”
United are still a work in progress
Amorim was right to single out United’s improvements from last season but he might have gotten a little ahead of himself by claiming his side were not boring. They got enough right in build-up play but were unable to translate that into meaningful goalscoring opportunities, opting for a quality over quantity approach. Some of that comes down to the inherently uninteresting task of playing against Arsenal, a defensive juggernaut that knows how to stifle opponents’ attacks, but there is only so much entertainment value in watching a team come up with low-quality chances.
United only put seven of their 22 shots on target, oftentimes resigned to shooting from distance or tough angles. Only five of their shots were valued at 0.1 expected goal or more and the highest one came in at 0.2, when Cunha’s hit forced a save out of David Raya in the 89th minute. New No. 9 Benjamin Sesko did not make much of an impact off the bench, either, taking just two shots in his 25-minute shift. The Red Devils also appeared unbalanced in attack, either having too few or too many people in attack and failing to take advantage after making their way into the attacking third.
What truly cost them, though, was a defensive mistake that was a classic reminder of last season’s chaos. Goalkeeper Altay Bayındir, who played in Andre Onana‘s place on Sunday after he spent the bulk of preseason dealing with a hamstring injury, was outbodied during the corner and essentially left his goal unattended. Set-piece defending has been a consistent weakness for United in recent years and is arguably a big reason why he is the fastest manager to reach 15 defeats in the Premier League since 2009, and demonstrates that his side have a lot of unforced errors they need to clean up.
Arsenal’s surprise off day
Calafiori’s goal is straight from Arsenal’s tried-and-true playbook on set pieces, which afforded them their greatest goalscoring opportunities on Sunday. That was where the attacking approach began and ended for the Gunners, though, who were fairly ineffective otherwise and were on the wrong end of a few surprising statistics when all was said and done.
They were faster than usual but perhaps traded their speed for precision, Calafiori’s goal making up the bulk of their 1.05 expected goals. The Gunners’ attacking efforts really dropped off in the second half, when they did not manage a single shot on target and came up with just 0.25 expected goals from four shots. Viktor Gyokeres, the No. 9 they lined up this summer to solve their goalscoring problems last season, did not register a single shot in a nondescript Premier League debut.
Those were not the only categories in which Arsenal strung together a surprisingly paltry performance, either. The 22 shots they conceded were the most since a 2-2 draw with Manchester City in September 2022, while they also posted their lowest pass completion rate (76.8%) since that match. The performance was an outlier in the Gunners’ record in recent years, their style almost down to an exact science these days, so it is far too early to question their title credential but it was undoubtedly a weird outing for Arsenal.
