The resurgence of Arsenal, why Arteta’s side is performing well in the league

Arsenal is flying in the Premier League, currently, one of the most exciting teams to watch. Mikel Arteta’s hard work seems to have paid off this season sitting on top of the league 2 points clear with a game in hand from arguably one of the best sides in Europe, Manchester City. The Gunners started their resurgence in the latter part of last season when they started to play good football and get consistent wins. This comes after many years of underwhelming and indifferent campaigns. Now they seem to be back in business with a rejuvenated side having the possibility to win the league after 19 years. But why this sudden change? we will be looking and analyzing various statistics and gaining insight into Arsenal’s performance.

Gathering/Cleaning Data

The first step is gathering the appropriate data, in this case, we would need to collect Premier League’s team statistics for the current season (2022/2023). The data was gathered from FootyStats API: https://footystats.org/api/, one of the largest and most popular websites for football statistics and analysis. In order to do the analysis I decided that python would be the most appropriate language to use. The requests package was used to collect the raw data from the API (JSON format) and the JSON package was used to convert the data into a python object. By using this API we were able to access the current season’s data for each Premier League team.

The received data had a lot of information provided by the API request made, this was hard to understand at first so it was quite necessary to create a data frame that contained all the statistics of interest per team. Furthermore, this initial data frame served as a baseline for the exploratory analysis. Fortunately, provided that the data came from a well-maintained website and API, the data cleaning process was a relatively easy process, where the majority of the part was parsing JSON and filtering the data of interest into a data frame.

Exploratory Analysis

In terms of measuring and analyzing a team’s performance, it’s quite hard to focus on one aspect of the game. We can start off by looking at the total goals Arsenal has scored and conceded in the league thus far:

But how does it compare to the other Premier League teams? To gain more insight into this, we need to visualize each team's Total Goals and Total Goals Conceded.

Based on the chart, Arsenal is in second place in terms of total goals with 51, only behind second place in the league, Manchester City (60). If you have been watching the premier league in the last few years it’s no surprise Manchester City is at the top of this list but Arsenal’s total goals have also a clear margin from the rest of the teams. Furthermore, Arsenal can be considered one of the best defensive lines with 23 goals conceded tied with Chelsea FC and only behind Newcastle United (15).

Although total goals give us a broad idea of how Arsenal is doing scoring-wise, it doesn't really tell us their goal or shooting efficiency, and how it compares to the other teams, especially Manchester City. In order to determine the shooting efficiency, we need to compare the average shooting per 90 minutes and the shot conversion rate (Total Goals/Total Shots on Target * 100). The result is given in the following plot.

We can see that Arsenal and Manchester City have relatively the same conversion rate with 35.9% and 36.1%, the two highest in the league. However, Arsenal has fewer shots per 90 minutes making it more efficient than Manchester City and the rest. Another interesting aspect of Arsenal is their strong performance in the first 20 minutes of a match. It is really key who scores the first goal as it gives the team a huge advantage and higher chances to win the match. Here we can see how Arsenal outperformed every team so far in terms of goals scored and goals conceded.

Conclusion

In this exploratory analysis, we explored why Arsenal is back in business, we concluded that they are the most efficient team in the league, beating the likes of current champions Manchester City and Manchester United who are in spectacular form lately. They have become a side hard to beat, starting their matches strongly where they only conceded 2 and scored 11 in the first 20 minutes. Arsenal is a solid and exciting team, becoming the favorite to win the Premier League after many years.

The limitations and challenges I faced throughout the process of this analysis were that the data and analysis is based only on the current season. To have more accurate insights it would have been better to look at different seasons and their stats for each team. This was not possible because the API was limited and required a monthly subscription to access the entire API. Furthermore, the data and visualizations may not be useful after a few days or weeks since the season is still ongoing.

The code for the exploratory analysis can be found here