How Arsenal have made club history with winning start to 2024

Mikel Arteta was completely justified in ranking Arsenal's final match of 2023 as "our worst game of the season".

On a "really tough" and "sad" afternoon on the banks of the River Thames, Arsenal limped to a 2-1 defeat at Fulham's Craven Cottage. Sitting top of the Premier League table on Christmas Day, the Gunners saw in the new year from a lowly fourth spot.

Despite the despair, Arteta offered hope with a sense of perspective. "If we play like we played in the other 19 games we will be up there," the Arsenal boss insisted. "If we play like today we will be nowhere near."

Arteta's side have gone beyond rediscovering their form, storming into 2024 playing their best football of the season. A 5-0 thrashing of Burnley on Saturday afternoon was Arsenal's fifth consecutive league win to begin the new year - the best top-flight start to any calendar year in the club's entire history.

Here's how Arsenal have dramatically disintegrated the dark cloud hanging over the team at the end of last year.

Arsenal's winning start to 2024

Much-needed R&R

Arsenal began 2024 with defeat to Liverpool in the FA Cup third round but the green shoots of improvement were already visible. After watching his side create an abundance of chances, Arteta was not alone in believing that Arsenal were the better team "merit-wise".

However, the week-long warm weather training camp thereafter offered a clean break to rest and reset. Bukayo Saka was particularly grateful.

"I needed the [rest] to be honest," the overworked England international admitted after the Gunners returned to action with a 5-0 victory over Crystal Palace. "The break came at the right time. We're all hungry to push strongly until the end of the season."

Saka has scored six goals during Arsenal's winning sequence, as many as he could muster across the first five months of the Premier League season. While the minuscule sample size should dampen any decisive takeaways, Saka's xG has doubled in 2024 compared to last year, with the reinvigorated winger taking more shots and touches in the opposition box thanks to a streamlined approach.

Arteta has been adamant that Saka should be able to start as many as 70 games in a single season but the durable 22-year-old has clearly benefitted from Arsenal's lightened schedule. The team's five-game winning run has been spread across 40 days. Arsenal crammed ten fixtures into the 40 days before this sequence started.

The Champions League knockout stages will bring a return of midweek football but with Arsenal already out of both domestic cup competitions, they should have a relatively sparse schedule for the rest of the season.

Quick start

Arsenal didn't score a goal inside the opening 15 minutes of any Premier League match until December. Coming up against increasingly compact backlines wary of Arsenal's attacking might, matches invariably turned into a grind until the Gunners either broke the deadlock or were caught on the counter.

Arteta highlighted Arsenal's struggles when the score - or game state - is level for so long at the end of November.

Game state is a big thing," he said. "Last year we scored a lot of goals in the first minutes of the games, and then the game becomes different.

"The opponent becomes more open, the opponent has to do many other things and we haven't been able to do that that often." No longer is that the case.

Against Palace, Liverpool and Burnley, Arsenal scored before the quarter-hour mark, forcing the opposition to creep out of their shell. On each occasion, the Gunners have made full use of the newfound space opening up between the loosened stitching.

Martin Odegaard crisply rattled Arsenal ahead against Burnley after just four minutes.

"We managed to break them down early in the game," Arteta noted. "Obviously, that made it look a little more comfortable."

Set-piece supremacy

Arsenal needed a pedestrian 32 minutes to break the deadlock at the London Stadium against West Ham earlier this month but William Saliba's opener came via a familiar route to goal.

The Gunners have excelled at dead balls since poaching the specialist coach Nicolas Jover in the summer of 2021 - boasting an unrivalled 16 set-piece goals as well as a league-high eight penalties this season.

Crucially, these carefully choreographed routines have gotten that all-important first goal for Arsenal in three of their five league games this year. With the deadlock broken by a dead ball, the Gunners have been able to release the handbrake, racking up an aggregate score of 21-2. Arsenal have already scored five or more goals in more games this year (three) than they managed across the entirety of 2023 (two).

Flexible number nine

Arteta's reverence for Gabriel Jesus ensures that he will start whenever fully fit. That was how the year began, with the Brazilian's quick-thinking deciding the trip to Nottingham Forest's City Ground in January - Arsenal's tightest game of this sequence.

Yet, Jesus' patchy injury record has forced Arteta into alternatives. Rather than turn to his most obvious replacement in Arsenal's squad, Eddie Nketiah, Arteta has deployed Kai Havertz and Leandro Trossard through the middle. Both players have operated closer to a second attacking midfielder alongside Odegaard rather than an out-and-out number nine.

Jurgen Klopp, despite coming up against this approach in the FA Cup, was flummoxed by Havertz's evasive movement when Liverpool travelled to the Emirates in February, with the German and Odegaard combining to leave the visiting backline in ribbons for Saka's opener in a deserved win.

Trossard has filled the fluid role over the past fortnight, befuddling the backlines of West Ham and Burnley by refusing to stick to a fixed position. Despite taking almost as many touches in the middle third of the pitch as the final 40 metres, Trossard has scored four goals in 2024.

It all feels a long way from the doom and gloom of December but Arteta was determined to extent this winning streak beyond five game.

"We have momentum now," he beamed before warning, "and we have to maintain it."

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