Arsenal backlash exposes limitations of Slot, Hurzeler and every rival bar Pep

It was Jurgen Klopp who predicted football’s evolution towards defensive solidity in 2018.

Perhaps wanting his head to reside somewhere other than his hands, Klopp brought in Alisson and Virgil van Dijk to correct Liverpool’s frequent errors at the back.

Looking back, he had spotted an opportunity. In the mid-2010s, football often resembled high-scoring basketball games, reckless to the point of devaluing goals.

Big games often resembled cavalry charges. Klopp calculated that strengthening Liverpool’s defense would lead to massive gains.

Winning both the Premier League and Champions League proved to be a shrewd move, typical of someone who is both European and (formerly) bespectacled.

Eight years later, Arsenal took Klopp’s logic to the nth degree and moral panic is almost universal.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to see The Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy replace Gary Neville in Sky’s commentary box, or the ghost of Mary Whitehouse appear on Match of the Day.

The gunners are seven points clear at the top of the Premier Leagueplaying a solid but hard on the eyes defensive style of football.

Mikel Arteta attempted to win the Premier League by playing Pepball, narrowly failing in 2023 and 2024. A move towards physicality and set pieces was an attempt to gain an advantage over his rivals.

Seeing corners celebrated like the birth of a first child remains destabilizing. And some of Arsenal’s play is rightly criticized.

But the melee of fans, pundits and managers trying to one-up each other with apocalyptic pronouncements for The Beautiful Game is getting tedious.

Ruud Gullit no longer watches football. Yaya Touré is “disappointed”. Paul Scholes believes the Premier League trophy should remain in storage until David Raya channels his inner René Higuita.

It was the same when Greece won Euro 2004, with no one able to understand how marking and set pieces were enough to beat France, the Czechs and Portugal.

It was the same at Euro 2012, when the debate over whether Spain’s Tiki Taka was great or tedious reached unprecedented levels of pretentiousness.

And, whisper it quietly, it was the same in 1966. Several observers claimed that England’s no-nonsense success had set the national game back 20 years.

In all these cases, as in that of Arteta’s Arsenal, the fault lies less with the winners than with the inability of their opponents to stop them.

It’s one thing for fans, partisan and powerless in equal measure, to cry foul. Which, of course, leads to Arsenal fans defending their club in an unpaid ambassadorial role 24/7.

But seeing several Premier League managers deplore the Gunners’ tactics takes the biscuit.

Arne Slot, Fabian Hurzeler and others have the power to stop Arsenal. Sadly, too many teams chose to follow suit and lament the results.

It’s not unlike buying clothes from ASOS and complaining that you don’t look like the model advertising it.

Imitation is a dead end to happiness. If everyone plays the same way, everyone charges the penalty area and prioritizes players based on their athleticism., the real opportunity lies elsewhere.

PSG and the Spanish winners of Euro 2024 have already mapped out the future for us. Both teams took risks, encouraged their wingers to run towards defenders and were less rigid in their overall setup.

But the pressure cooker of the Premier League discourages such imagination. It’s much easier to put up a low block than to engage in something more proactive and risk losing your job.

Only Pep Guardiola has shown his desire to innovate. Everyone else, to some extent, stripped off and joined Arsenal in the mud. After all, it’s about results.

History shows the limits of this method. Greece may have been a flash in the pan, but Spain were dethroned in thrilling fashion in 2014 when Chile squeezed them like a lemon and Arjen Robben ran at their exposed defense.

The English winners of 1966 were supplanted by Brazil four years later, but also by the exciting Dutch and West German teams of the early 1970s.

All three were renowned for their technique and celebrated for their movement. English football has suddenly become one-dimensional, playing Stone Age football in a futuristic world.

This is all relevant because Arsenal are not unbeatable. Their reliance on set pieces and poor attacking patterns reduces their margin for error.

But it will take courage to do things differently, not the massive collection of pearls we’ve seen recently.