Set pieces alone are not the problem. Anyone pretending they are anti-football is unserious. The problem is what happens when set pieces stop being an edge and start becoming an identity.
Arsenal have leaned heavily into set-piece optimisation, blocking, second balls, crowding zones, exploiting margins. It is smart. It is legal. It is repeatable. It is also emotionally blunt. A goal from a corner does not land the same way as a move carved open from open play, and everyone knows this, even if they pretend not to.
The “dark arts” conversation follows naturally. Time management, slowing games down, disrupting rhythm, manipulating restarts. Again, these are not sins. They are tools. But when they dominate perception, they reshape how a team is experienced.
The efficiency trap is this: the more you optimise for control, the more you narrow your margin for emotional error. When the plan works, it looks intelligent. When it does not, it looks empty. Arsenal are now close to that edge.
When you rely on controlled chaos, and that chaos does not produce enough goals, there is nothing expressive to fall back on. No improviser to change the tone. No gambler to tilt the table. Just more structure.
Pragmatism is often described as neutral or defensive, but in practice, it is an active shaping of the game. It determines what players are allowed to attempt, which risks are acceptable, and which instincts are suppressed. Arsenal’s current style is a textbook case.
Their possession often feels like risk management, their transitions cautious, and their passing patterns designed to avoid danger rather than create it. Over time, this produces predictability. Opponents can anticipate every trigger, every channel, and every method of attack. Arsenal become readable, and that readability is deadly to the perception of threat.
This is where the “anti-football” label, however lazy, gains traction. Arsenal are not attacking like an unpredictable force of nature. They do not unsettle opponents through improvisation or emotional weight. They rely heavily on set pieces, repetition, and control. It is efficient, yes. But efficiency without unpredictability breeds familiarity. It breeds complacency. Opponents don’t fear Arsenal, they prepare for them.
From my perspective watching these games, the danger of over-structured pragmatism is subtle but profound. Players are sanded down into roles where deviation is punished, instincts are trained out, and spontaneity is minimized. Tactical safety replaces creativity.
When this ceiling is reached, even dominant performances feel hollow. Arsenal can control, but they no longer threaten. They can dominate territory, but they rarely dominate emotionally. And when a match requires adaptation beyond rehearsed patterns, they struggle.
The United loss showed exactly this. Arsenal were disciplined, but the match required something beyond discipline. The opponent broke the expected rhythms. Arsenal responded with the same control mechanisms that rarely fail in normal circumstances, and they were punished for their predictability.
This was always the likeliest risk of pragmatism taken too far, it makes teams technically proficient but strategically rigid in chaos, and emotionally unfulfilling to the audience watching.
In the modern context, where matches are scrutinized frame by frame on social media, the inability to generate unpredictability or excitement becomes a glaring flaw. Arsenal are not hated for losing; they are noted for not even feeling dangerous while doing so.
Football now exists in two economies at once. One is trophies and tables. The other is attention and emotion. Social media, highlights culture, and constant comparison have made this split unavoidable.
A team can be respected without being loved and that’s assuming that Arsenal actually has anyone’s respect at the moment. Arsenal risk becoming that team. Efficient, admired, tactically praised, but emotionally distant. That is not a neutral outcome for a club built on identity.
Winning football satisfies logic. Felt football satisfies memory. The greatest teams usually manage both. When they do not, debate follows. That debate is not noise. It is feedback.
The danger is dismissing it as ignorance. Fans are not wrong for wanting to feel something. Football, at its core, is not a spreadsheet exercise. It is an experience.
Arsenal are not broken. They are not regressing. They are not playing “bad” football in any simplistic sense. But they are approaching a philosophical ceiling.
Control is not conviction. Efficiency is not identity. When supporters start talking less about patterns and more about emptiness, that is a signal worth listening to.
Football can survive without beauty. Clubs, especially clubs with history, rarely can. Arsenal’s challenge now is not to abandon control, but to remember why expression mattered in the first place.
If they do not, they may keep winning games. They may even win titles. But something quieter will be lost along the way, and once that goes, it is very hard to get back.
