Arsenal's Dominance: Arteta's Squad Depth on Display
Mikel Arteta walked away from Arsenal’s opener against Coventry City with everything a manager could want: three goals, three points and barely a bead of sweat from his players.
Arsenal strolled to a 3-0 win, swatting aside Frank Lampard’s side without ever needing to hit top speed. It was routine. Comfortable. So comfortable that nobody inside the club seemed to dwell on the three heavyweights missing through injury: Bruno Guimaraes, William Saliba and Jurrien Timber.
That silence said plenty about where this squad is now.
A squad bursting at the seams
Arsenal’s depth is no longer a theory. It’s visible on the teamsheet. Arteta has two high-level options in almost every position, and against Coventry he still fielded a side that looked capable of going deep in any competition, even with Guimaraes, Saliba and Timber sidelined.
From the outside, it looks like the dream scenario. From Gary Neville’s point of view, it’s also a headache.
Neville, speaking on Sky Sports, praised the scale of what Arteta has built but warned that the Arsenal manager has created a “real problem” for himself. Not on the pitch. On the bench – and beyond it.
With the Premier League still restricting clubs to eight outfield substitutes, someone has to miss out every week. At a club with Arsenal’s depth, “someone” quickly becomes “several very good players”.
Neville drew a straight line back to his own days at Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson. Ferguson, he said, always insisted the hardest part of the job wasn’t picking the team. It was looking top professionals in the eye and telling them they were nowhere near it on matchday.
“He has created a real problem for himself in the sense that, actually, Sir Alex Ferguson used to say, the hardest thing was leaving those players out every week,” Neville said. “He’s going to have to do the same. I said to him off camera, what a squad he has built here. If he puts another forward into that, (puffs his cheeks).”
The admiration was obvious. So was the warning.
Big names still to come back
The Coventry game underlined the point. Arteta named a powerful squad, one that barely needed to shift out of second gear to control the match and kill it off. Yet even within that group, a few players will soon be squeezed to the fringes.
Guimaraes will return. So will Saliba. Timber is on his way back. Ezri Konsa is also expected to come into the fold. When all four are ready, they don’t just walk into the squad – they push others straight out of it.
Those “others” aren’t academy hopefuls making up the numbers. They are full internationals, players who performed, players who did nothing wrong against Coventry and still face the prospect of spending a weekend at home.
That is where the tension lives in a super-squad. Every training session is sharp. Every internal game is fierce. But the Premier League’s matchday limit does not bend, and Arteta knows it.
He has already called on the league to expand the number of players allowed in a matchday squad. As it stands, the decision-makers show no sign of moving. The rules stay. The cuts keep coming.
So the Arsenal manager is left with an unavoidably brutal choice: keep everyone, manage the egos and accept that some will be unhappy, or trim the squad before the transfer window shuts.
Neville believes the pressure will only grow as the season wears on. Performances like the 3-0 over Coventry will become the norm, expectations will rise, and players left in the cold will not quietly accept it forever.
Arteta has built one of the strongest squads in Europe. Now he has to live with the consequences.
