Martin Odegaard Transforms Arsenal's Attack This Season
Martin Odegaard is a different footballer this season. Same left foot, same calm exterior, but everything else feels sharper, quicker, more ruthless – and Mikel Arteta knows exactly why.
The Arsenal captain decided another big European night on Wednesday, smashing in the only goal in a 1-0 Champions League win at Napoli. Four days after burying the clincher against Chelsea in the Premier League, he did it again at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, this time at the end of a 29-pass move that summed up Arsenal’s authority.
Four goals in five games across all competitions. That from a player who found the net just once in an injury-ravaged 2025/26 campaign.
Arteta sees a simple starting point.
“First of all he needs to be available and last year he missed so many games through injuries,” the Arsenal manager said afterwards. A fit Odegaard is one thing. A fit Odegaard in a new role, surrounded by new weapons, is something else entirely.
A captain pushed higher
Arteta has nudged his captain into more advanced areas, and the numbers tell the story. Odegaard’s touches in the opposition box have leapt from 2.5 per 90 minutes last season to 4.3 per 90 so far this term. He is arriving in the danger zones more often, and with a different mindset.
“He’s got that edge and different relationships around him as well and that helps,” Arteta explained. “He can start to go by different heights in the team, especially in the attacking phase, and when we get him into those positions he’s a really dangerous player.”
The “different relationships” are already obvious. Christos Tzolis, a summer signing, has four assists to his name, three of them for Odegaard goals, including the cross that led to the winner in Naples. The understanding between the pair is growing fast, but they are not alone.
“We have a lot of players that can take the ball there and progress the ball much better than we did in the past,” said Arteta. “When that happens, [Odegaard] needs to take different heights and angles and positions in order to disorganise the opponent and he’s done that really well.”
So Arsenal’s technicians drop deep, carry and combine. Their captain steps up, finds the blind spots, and finishes.
Arsenal’s attack purrs in Naples
The scoreline looked tight. The performance was anything but.
Arsenal racked up 26 shots – their most on record in the Champions League since data collection began in 2003/04 – and generated an expected goals tally of 4.05. On another night, the margin would have been brutal. Napoli were hanging on.
The threat came from everywhere: both flanks, central pockets, late runs from midfield. Ben White surged forward from right-back, Tzolis and others probed between the lines, and Napoli’s back line kept retreating, dragged around by constant movement and rotation.
Odegaard, though, provided the cutting edge when it mattered. Again.
“That’s what we need,” said Arteta. “The players with the mindset to decide a game and play with personality. To keep taking chances and risks.
“He’s getting into those positions much more in recent games and now you feel he has the emotional state that he knows the ball can go in, and he scored an incredible goal tonight.”
That “emotional state” is crucial. The captain looks like a man who expects to score, not hopes to.
Everything runs through him
From the first minutes in Naples, Odegaard played like a footballer in complete control of his game. He demanded the ball in tight spaces, turned into traffic, then slipped passes through gaps that barely seemed to exist. Napoli’s midfielders chased shadows; their defenders never quite knew whether to step out or hold the line.
His goal was the headline, but the rest of the performance backed it up. Odegaard finished the night with more touches, more passes and more chances created than any other player on the pitch. Napoli simply could not get close enough to disrupt him.
One moment summed up his vision. Spotting Ben White’s run, he scooped an audacious pass over the top, carving open a packed defence. White squared, Piero Hincapie somehow failed to convert. The chance went begging, but the idea, the execution, belonged to a playmaker operating at full confidence.
That was only one example. There were disguised reverse balls, switches of play, clipped passes into the box. Odegaard played with a freedom and flair that had been missing during last season’s stop-start, injury-hit slog.
“Martin is contributing goals,” Arteta added. “That is obviously impacting results which is what we want from our attacking players, to be decisive, and certainly he was that today.”
Arsenal are feeling the benefits already. If this is the version of Odegaard they have unlocked – fitter, braver, higher up the pitch and surrounded by teammates who can carry him there – the question is no longer whether he can decide big games.
It’s how far that version of their captain can drag this team in Europe and at home.
