Mikel Arteta must find a way to get Eberechi Eze and Martin Odegaard on the pitch together to unlock their true attacking potential.
A remarkable stat perfectly illustrates why the Arsenal manager faces one of his most intriguing selection decisions of the season – through ball rate.
Strikingly, Eberechi Eze comes out as the best through passer in the league, while his positional counterpart Martin Odegaard is second.
But the Arsenal captain notably has a significantly higher volume of total passes, suggesting he offers both elite creativity and a level of control that few attacking midfielders in Europe can match.
Only Rayan Cherki and Bruno Fernandes come near him in that upper-right quadrant — both players highly touted for a team of the season spot.
🤔 Who starts the Champions League final in the number 10: Eberechi Eze or Martin Odegaard?
So essentially, Arsenal have the two best through passers in the Premier League. Or at least, the two that play through passes at the highest rate.
They are both at Mikel Arteta’s disposal and are both capable of unlocking opposition defences in different ways.
The question is how the manager gets them both on the pitch at the same time.
How Arteta could line up to get the best out of Eze and Odegaard
Odegaard’s cameo against West Ham reminded everyone exactly what he adds to this Arsenal team — dropping intelligently between the lines, finding pockets of space in a deep block, and threading the pass that set up Leandro Trossard’s winner.
When Odegaard is fit and firing, Arsenal are a different team. That’s without even mentioning his influence out of possession.
Eze, meanwhile, has made the #10 role his own, providing a strong goal threat alongside Viktor Gyokeres who has visibly improved in recent weeks.
An obvious solution is to shift Eze out on the left, where he has shown he can dictate attacks much like Bukayo Saka does on the right, albeit in a different kind of way.
But that takes away his central goal threat, and it’s in those pockets behind the striker where he has been most dangerous.
Also, Trossard is in the kind of vein of form where it’s difficult to justify leaving him out.
If Leandro Trossard isn’t Arsenal’s most clutch player, who is? 🤔
One solution that makes sense is keeping Eze at ten where he has been thriving, having Declan Rice as the defensive anchor, but shifting Odegaard into a deeper number eight role — a Bernardo Silva-esque position where he can drop, get more touches and offer Arsenal the kind of control and creativity that makes them so hard to stop.
Having the two operating in complementary positions with the freedom to interchange would make Arsenal far more fluid in attack and would help solve their open play creativity issues.
Arteta will be cautious about experimenting at such a critical stage of the season, and it’s highly unlikely he will field it in the Champions League final against PSG.
But Monday’s home game against Burnley is as good an opportunity as he will get to try it.
A team with this much attacking quality will surely blow Burnley away, and with the defensive foundation of Rice, Saliba and Gabriel behind them, there is little risk in trying something like this.
The data says these two players are too good not to play together. Over to Arteta to make it work.
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