2 hours ago
4
1.96 points per game
©TM/IMAGO
Arsenal were forced to work for all three points in Bilbao on Tuesday night but will still be elated about picking up an important win in their first game of the new Champions League season. In a hard-fought tie that Athletic Club certainly had their chances in, the breakthrough came in the 72nd minute, when substitute Gabriel Martinelli broke beyond the defensive line to fire the ball into the back of the net. Then, 15 minutes later, a deflected shot from Leandro Trossard doubled Arsenal’s lead and confirmed the win.
Alongside being a good victory for the North London club, it was also a significant match for Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta. Tuesday night’s win was the Spaniard’s 25th game in the Champions League as Arsenal manager, who now boasts a record of 15 wins, four draws and just six losses since his first game in the European competition with the Premier League side back in September 2023. But how does that compare to Arteta’s contemporaries and, perhaps more importantly, to Arsenal’s greatest ever manager?
To no great surprise, few managers have enjoyed the stability that Arteta has had at Arsenal over the course of the last two or three seasons and as such very few have actually coached as many games as the Spaniard in Europe. When we filter out all head coaches that have overseen less than 15 games in the Champions League and compare their points per game average to Arteta’s, the Arsenal boss comes in third place among them all with an impressive return of 1.96 points per game. As we can see in the table above, only Simone Inzaghi (2.09 points per game) and Carlo Ancelotti (2.22) have enjoyed better records than Arteta in that period.
Remarkably, Arteta’s European results even compare rather favourably to none other than Arsene Wenger too. Although many fans of the club would consider the Frenchman to be the club’s best-ever manager, his first 25 games in the Champions League with Arsenal were anything but easy. In total, Wenger won eight games, drew six and lost six, giving him an average of 1.60. That, as we can now note, means that Arteta has enjoyed a better start to life as an Arsenal manager in the Champions League than Wenger did back in the late nineties.
Of course, when Wenger was calling the shots at Highbury, Arsenal were by no means the financial behemoth that Arteta now leads and certainly didn’t have the financial muscle that the North London club now have. The Gunners have always been a big club, but on Tuesday their squad cost more than fifteen times that of their opponents when we tally up the transfer fees that were spent assembling both clubs. Wenger simply never had that kind of dominance over European foes. But that shouldn’t take away from what Arteta has accomplished and while Arsenal may not be the obvious favourites for this season’s competition, they will certainly have a chance as long as their Spanish head coach can continue the record he’s amassed from his first 25 games in the competition.
