The Numbers Behind Arsenal’s ‘Time-Wasting’ Against Manchester City

With 10 men and a 2-1 lead, Arsenal defended doggedly against Manchester City. They very nearly held on to the win. But just how much did they rely on the dark arts to manage the game in the second half?

Everyone knew what was coming. You knew it. Your dog knew it. Pep Guardiola knew it. Mikel Arteta definitely knew it.

With Arsenal leading 2-1 at half-time away to Manchester City and down to 10 men after Leandro Trossard’s red card, there was only one thing for it. Get all nine outfielders behind the ball in the lowest of low blocks and defend for your lives. With 12.4% possession and just 29 completed passes in the entire second half, Arsenal did just that. And it very, very nearly worked.

The fact that Arsenal came seconds away from surviving an onslaught of Man City pressure with 10 men is testament to how well they defended. William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhães were once again fantastic. Jurriën Timber was a physical match for anyone in sky blue. Kai Havertz, who didn’t complete a pass all game, put in a tremendous amount of work off the ball.

But as well as defending stoutly, Arsenal certainly did employ some of the darker arts during their second-half display to burn as much time as possible and to disrupt City’s momentum. Going down with cramp, taking their time over goal-kicks, the lot. The whole playbook came out. Just as you’d expect from a side trying to hold on to a slender lead away from home against the best team in the country.

But how much were they able to get away with? And how much did it actually impact the game? Let’s investigate.

The first thing to say is that, contrary to what you might think, we saw a lot of football in this fixture. In total, the match lasted 109:17 minutes. That made it the longest game so far this season in the Premier League, eclipsing the 109:08 minutes in Aston Villa vs Wolves a day earlier. The ball was in play for 63:28 minutes overall – the fifth-longest total in a game so far this season.

Overall, that means the ball was in play 58.1% of the time. That’s by no means an abnormal figure, given the Premier League average for 2024-25 is 56.8%. We saw more football than on average. But this was no average game.

Dissecting things by halves gets more interesting. Given the way the game panned out, and the way Arsenal played, you’d have expected the second half to see a lot less ball-in-play action.

But the opposite is true.

The first half saw the ball in play just 51.7% of the time – only five games have seen a lower mark in the league this season – while in the second period that figure rose to 64.4%. Only two second halves have seen a higher percentage, and both of them were other Manchester City games (against West Ham and Brentford).

Surprising on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you start to see the trends that tell us our eyes weren’t deceiving us.

Manchester City basically had the ball for the entire second half (87.6% possession). And whenever the ball went out of play, they were very quick to restart. On throw-ins, for example, they took just 9.5 seconds to get the ball back in play, way under the league average of 16.2 seconds.

Conversely, Arsenal took every opportunity to slow things down. On average they took 42.7 seconds to restart the game after being awarded either a corner, goal-kick, free-kick or throw-in. As you can see below, that’s the second-highest average of any side in a game this season.

Before the weekend, they’d previously held the record of 41.1 seconds against Brighton – a game in which they were also down to 10 men.

Because they were defending for the majority of the game, Arsenal’s main source of delaying the game came through goal-kicks.

David Raya had 12 of these, and took full advantage each time. Each one took him 45.3 seconds on average to complete, meaning that in total Raya wasted over nine minutes of the game on goal-kicks alone.

That is comfortably the most time spent taking goal-kicks in a game this season, and is almost a minute longer than the next highest entry.

Aside from goal-kicks, the Gunners also took their time over their own free-kicks. Each one took them 43.3 seconds to take, 30% longer than the average across the Premier League so far.

Aside from that, Arsenal didn’t really have much of an avenue to delay the game. They had just five throw-ins and two corners. In fact, such was City’s dominance that Arsenal had just 32 opportunities to delay the game in possession, the third-lowest total for any side in a game this season. Of course, they did try to disrupt City’s set-pieces when they could. Gabriel Jesus, for example, was booked trying to delay a corner.

The two games where teams had a lower number of delay opportunities were also both games involving Man City (Ipswich – 29 and Brentford – 31). Perhaps this is an underrated and overlooked benefit of monopolising the ball so much when you are the better team. You really limit your opponents’ ability to kill time.

Arsenal’s approach to the game has been met with some criticism, not least from City’s players. After the game, Bernardo Silva was quick to deride the way Arteta set his team up:

“There was only one team that came to play football. The other came to play to the limits of what was possible to do and allowed by the referee, unfortunately.”

And when quizzed on how the rivalry compares to that of City and Liverpool, he said:

“Liverpool always faced us face to face to try to win the games, so from this perspective the games against Arsenal haven’t been like the ones we had and have against Liverpool.”

John Stones, who scored City’s last-minute equaliser, was similarly unimpressed:

“It was a difficult afternoon for both teams, how they stop the play, how they use the side of football that not many teams do.

“You can call it clever or dirty, whichever way you want to put it, but they break up the game, which upsets the rhythm. They use it to their advantage, and we dealt with it very well.”

Easy to say when you are the side that’s one man up and pushing for an equaliser. But it was hard to see what other option Arsenal had but to try and hang onto the lead. Would any side have done anything different?

Pep Guardiola even alluded to that fact in his post-match interview with Sky Sports, saying with a wry smile: “Maybe I would have done the same, you have to admit that”.

We covered Arteta’s José Mourinho streak on these very pages recently. It’s clear he is willing, and his side more than capable, of relying on their defence to grind out games. It should provide the platform for another thrilling title race, and if this was merely a polite rivalry in recent years, this weekend showed us there is some needle developing as well.

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