As everyone is abundantly aware, for the first time since 1997-98 Arsenal will not be participating in the Champions League this season. Nicking a top four spot in the Premier League looks like it will be as tough as it’s been in years, making a Europa League title Arsenal’s best chance of making it back to the UCL. Desperate for some non-FA Cup hardware and to get back to the Champions League, the club is now forced to care about a competition that Arsene Wenger once publicly lambasted in the past:
“The UEFA Cup is a consolation prize and the Cup Winners’ Cup has been destroyed. Who plays in that now? Nobody. The fact is, the Champions’ League is all-important.”
Squad Improvements – The big need for any European competition but the especially-gruelling Europa campaign is having plenty of depth. Ahead of the EL Final last season, even Manchester United was forced to field a weakened squad in a league game against Spurs that still had top four hopes at stake.
Arsenal’s big summer signing of Lyon centre-forward Alexandre Lacazette for a club record £52 million should help in that regard. The 26-year old will give the Gunners some much-needed scoring power in place of fellow French international Olivier Giroud, who has always seemed to be a better hold-up man than dynamic scoring threat.
Otherwise, the squad largely remains the same at the moment. While Giroud himself has doubts he’ll be with the club at the beginning of the season, rumors are also swirling that Wenger is close to signing Monaco winger Thomas Lemar or Leicester’s Riyad Mahrez especially with the future of Alexis Sanchez still very much in the air. The latest news being of a big money move for the Chilean star by French giants PSG. Interestingly while both being linked with moves for Sanchez earlier in the year neither Chelsea or Man City have been reported on lately in connection to the striker so Arsene Wenger may be serious that he will not do business with domestic rivals when it comes to Sanchez. Or Wenger may indeed keep the player for the entire last 12 months of his contract as he has said he will and risk losing Sanchez for nothing.
If Wenger sees through one of the Lemar or Mahrez signings, Lacazette brings even a fraction of the form he’s had at Lyon the past three seasons (76 goals in 97 league matches), and Alexis Sanchez decides not to bolt, Arsenal should be poised for a deep run at the squad level.
Measuring the Competition – Most UK bookmakers, both and on the high street and online, assigned Arsenal as the favourite to win the competition at around 9/1 odds. According to the same books, their biggest challengers for the title will be AC Milan (12/1), Villarreal (25/1), Everton (25/1), and Athletic Bilbao (25/1).
Even though Spanish sides are always threatening in this competition and Milan and Everton have been splashing some serious dough this summer, on paper none of them appear to be more talented than Arsenal who have far and away the highest UEFA club coefficient of any of them. The Gunners could draw two of these clubs (Milan and Bilbao) in the group stage, which could be a curse or a blessing depending on how the rest of the group stage plays out on August 25.
Surviving the Schedule – No matter how it does, Arsenal will surely have to do something many of their players aren’t familiar with: the dreaded Thursday night away trip to a place like Baku or St. Petersburg, followed by a quick turnaround to play a Premier League match the same weekend.
In a horrendous run of scheduling luck, many of those return league matches will be on the road, too. Five of their six group stage matches will be immediately followed by a Prem road fixture.
The kind of toll this aspect of the competition can take on a domestic season is well documented, as evident by 2016/17 EL champions Man U finishing sixth and 2015/16 EL runners-up Liverpool finishing 8th that season.
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Despite this stiff scheduling, Arsenal more than has the talent, potential matchups, and yes—the manager—to win the competition.
However, we’ve heard that one too many times before.