Arsenal’s Overreliance on Bukayo Saka is Being Exposed, But Martin Ødegaard Can Help Solve the Problem

A blunt attacking display in defeat to Inter on Wednesday night highlighted many of Arsenal‘s recent problems. Martin Ødegaard’s return cannot come soon enough.

There are worse problems to have in football than being overly reliant on a player like Bukayo Saka.

It’s an issue that almost every other club in world football would love to have, and yet an injury-ravaged Arsenal are starting to feel the strain of their reliance on their star man.

In the absence of a key player in Martin Ødegaard and a lack of form from other attackers in Gabriel Martinelli, Kai Havertz and Leandro Trossard, Arsenal have leaned even more heavily on Saka of late, and both he and the team have suffered.

After limping out of England’s UEFA Nations League tie with Greece last month, Saka missed two Arsenal games due to injury – the 2-0 defeat at Bournemouth and a somewhat uninspiring 1-0 home Champions League win over Shakhtar Donetsk.

Since then, he has played all but five minutes in three Premier League and Champions League matches, and even came off the bench for 28 minutes at Preston in the EFL Cup.

Manager Mikel Arteta has previously insisted that Saka should aspire to be like “the top players in the world. They play 70 matches [a season], every three days and make the difference and win the game. If you want to be at the top, you have to be able to do that.”

There’s little reason to be surprised, then, that Arteta is happy to play Saka as often as he does. He demands a lot from Arsenal’s best and most exciting attacker, and understandably so given his ability and genuinely exceptional output.

In nine Premier League games this season, Saka already has three goals and seven assists. Only Cole Palmer, Mohamed Salah (both 12) and Erling Haaland (11), none of whom have been injured this season, have more goal involvements than him.

But with other key attacking players either missing through injury or lacking in form, the reliance on Saka has become genuinely problematic.

When Arsenal have other threats for the opposition defence to worry about, Saka is an incredible weapon. When those other players aren’t around or performing as well as they can, it is much more difficult for him to influence games.

He has been one of the players impacted most by Ødegaard’s absence. In the Premier League last season, Ødegaard passed the ball to Saka more times (322) than any other combination of non-defenders apart from Man City pair Mateo Kovacic and Rodri passing the ball to one another. And simply looking at that raw number doesn’t take into account the quality of the passes Ødegaard provides, or the areas he helps Saka get into. This term, Thomas Partey is the player passing to Saka the most, and he will be doing so from deeper positions than Ødegaard would take up.

Meanwhile, with Martinelli underperforming on the left flank, there is even more pressure on Saka to perform. In the defeat to Inter on Wednesday night, it was all too apparent that the game plan was just to get the ball to Saka and see what he could do, with Martinelli inept and ineffective on the opposite side of the pitch.

Arsenal have had problems in attack bubbling beneath the surface for a few weeks now. They have failed to score in three of their last six matches, and have particularly struggled to break teams down in open play. They have scored just 13 goals in open play in 10 Premier League games so far this season.

At San Siro, they lacked ideas and resorted to crossing the ball all too much, putting in 46 crosses overall. Their total of 33 in open play was their second highest in their 248 matches under Arteta (excluding extra-time), after the 37 they attempted in the 3-2 comeback win over Bournemouth in March 2023, when they were piling forward against a low block until finally finding a winner in the 97th minute.

Crossing isn’t intrinsically negative, particularly against a team like Inter who sat back and invited pressure. But it clearly wasn’t working on Wednesday and it was concerning that Arsenal were so clearly lacking in other ideas.

Seeing cross after cross go into the box, it was impossible not to think of Arteta’s words after a November 2020 defeat at home to Wolves, when Arsenal had attempted 33 crosses in vain.

“I think it is the first time in the Premier League that we put 33 crosses in,” Arteta said. “I am telling you that if we do that more consistently, we are going to score more goals. If we put the bodies we had in certain moments in the box, it is maths, pure maths, and it will happen.” He was widely ridiculed after saying that, and many would have thought before this week that that was an approach this new, improved, title-challenging version of Arteta’s Arsenal had left in the past.

But perhaps the approach and performance against Inter shouldn’t be all that surprising with Ødegaard absent. Since the start of last season in Premier League and Champions League games, Arsenal have averaged 9.3 open-play crosses per game when Ødegaard has played, compared to 13.6 per game when he’s been missing. That’s an increase of 46.2% in Arsenal’s crosses when the Norwegian isn’t playing.

That’ll be in part because Ødegaard is the main Arsenal player who gets on the ball between the lines in central areas, allowing them to attack through the middle of the pitch. He averaged more touches in the zone just outside the opposition penalty area – known widely as ‘Zone 14’ – last season (5.3 per 90) than any other teammate to play at least 1,000 minutes.

This season, Partey and Declan Rice – both defensive-minded midfielders – are Arsenal’s most prolific players in that crucial zone (min. 200 minutes played), and they are averaging just 3.8 and 2.9 touches per 90, respectively.

What’s more, with Ødegaard absent this season, Arsenal have needed more from Martinelli on the left flank to take the strain off Saka, but he hasn’t shown anything like his best, and so there has been an even greater reliance on the Englishman.

Last term, Arsenal created 43.0% of their chances down the right third of the pitch. That was a higher proportion than any other team in the Premier League, showing just how much they relied on Saka.

But this season, their imbalance is even more extreme, with the proportion of chances created down the right side jumping up to 51.4%, which is unsurprisingly the highest in the Premier League in 2024-25 by some distance.

A reliance on a player as gifted and threatening as Saka isn’t really a problem and hasn’t caused too many issues over the past few seasons, in which Arteta has turned Arsenal into genuine title contenders.

But without others taking some of the pressure for attacking output off Saka, Arsenal are suffering. Ødegaard’s return could not be better timed.

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