How Arsenal might use pre-season to tighten their grip on the Premier League trophy

Arsenal's title-winning 2025-26 campaign ended 68 days ago. It is almost time to welcome them back to the pitch, as they officially begin their pre-season preparations by facing Spanish side Girona away on Saturday.

Mikel Arteta's side have already played a behind-closed-doors friendly at their training ground, a 3-0 win over Milton Keynes Dons of third-tier League One, but tomorrow's game will be the first public glimpse of the players in action ahead of the new season.

Here, The Athletic looks at a few areas Arsenal could focus on to tighten their grip on the Premier League trophy in the weeks and months ahead.

Midfield dynamics/positional tweaks

Midfield is possibly the most intriguing area of the pitch for Arsenal coming into the new season. Arteta's options are well known for the most part, but how he uses them could change compared to 2025-26.

The first reason is the need to preserve those who were depended upon heavily en route to winning the title, namely Declan Rice and Martin Zubimendi. The pair ranked first and second respectively in minutes played at Arsenal last season. Looking at the distribution of minutes played in midfield, Arteta can afford to share that game time out more equally across his group of midfielders.

For example, the majority of Myles Lewis-Skelly's 461 minutes in midfield only came in May, and those performances suggest he should feature more prominently in those areas in the campaign ahead. Arteta's use of Ethan Nwaneri in the coming weeks will also be interesting, given the staggered return of Arsenal's World Cup midfield representatives.

A major contributing factor throughout 2026-27 will be the availability of these players. Martin Odegaard, Mikel Merino and Kai Havertz ranked 16th, 18th and 21st respectively for minutes played at Arsenal last season due to injuries.

Will Lewis-Skelly's midfield performances provide him more minutes? (Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images)

One such injury to Odegaard (knee) half an hour into a home win against West Ham in October halted Arteta's experimentation with a more creative midfield setup of him and Eberechi Eze ahead of Rice. Odegaard, Arsenal's captain, had free rein to roam the pitch that day, dropping deep in build-up while still having a presence in the final third.

From a tactical perspective, using the Norway international like that more this season against teams Arsenal expect to dominate could allow for Eze or Nwaneri to feature more centrally.

As for Merino, his qualities further up the field have been clear for a while. Could this be the time to view the 2026 World Cup winner mostly as an attacker rather than as a midfielder?

Adding pace to their attacks

In some respects, this point harks back to discussions people were having last summer. You may remember the pleasant surprise of Arsenal's play being drastically more direct during that pre-season.

Rice and new signing Zubimendi were quick to play long passes in behind for their forwards in a way they rarely had previously. After a 3-0 friendly win against Bilbao's Athletic Club, when this was particularly prevalent, Arteta said: “Having threat from all areas of the pitch into the last line is a weapon we need to continue to develop.

“Today, we had from many situations a feeling of, ‘Yeah, at any moment we can attack their backs and be very dangerous', and that will create a lot of space for other players inside.â€

It was refreshing, but short-lived.

Within a few months, Arsenal had reverted to type and were less effective at attacking with pace. Similar to their midfield dynamics, the volume of injuries may have hindered them in this regard, but Arteta's men had a very similar number of fast breaks per 90 minutes to Manchester City (6.70 compared to 6.93) last season but scored just four goals from those situations to City's nine.

For context, those four goals from fast breaks were Rice making it 2-0 away to Burnley in November, Bukayo Saka doing the same at home against Brentford a month later, Viktor Gyokeres scoring to put Arsenal 3-0 up on visitors Sunderland in February and Max Dowman's stoppage-time goal in March to make it 2-0 against Everton at the Emirates Stadium.

City scoring more than double their tally in these situations could be down to the elite finishing of Erling Haaland, but it was also not uncommon to see Arsenal counter-attacking opportunities spurned by slow advances forward.

Christos Tzolis' arrival from Club Brugge this summer could remedy that somewhat, with people who previously worked with the Greece international, who asked to be kept anonymous to protect relationships, highlighting the aggression in his running. This desire for more speed cannot solely be solved by one man, however.

Arsenal are still in the market for another left-winger, and should that player end up being Vinicius Junior of Real Madrid, there would be an immediate improvement in speed of thought as well as movement in those areas.

While Arsenal's directness from last summer's friendlies did not stick, the Rice-Zubimendi partnership did, showing how important these warm-up matches can be. At the time, Arteta said: “We saw another evolution today.â€

Let's see whether there is a further one this pre-season.

The centre-forward/front-three situation

Arteta will hope to start this season with a luxury he only had for one league game in the earlier part of 2025-26: Gyokeres and Havertz being fit at the same time.

Havertz suffered a knee injury in the opening game against Manchester United that kept him out until January, putting almost all the burden of leading the line on new signing Gyokeres. With both available for this first official pre-season match against Girona, there will be a focus on how Arteta uses them in the coming weeks.

Will he see one as his starting centre-forward, or will he take a ‘horses for courses' approach and start one or the other depending on who the opponents are in a given match?

Another aspect to this dilemma that may play a critical role is the identities of the teammates deployed around each option up top.

Arteta has often stressed the importance of on-pitch relationships to help players thrive, and last season, the front three of Gyokeres, Gabriel Martinelli and Noni Madueke struggled to gel. The wingers available in preseason this time could spark better chemistry with the Sweden striker, while Havertz tends to act as a connector with most players who surround him.

An interesting subplot to their individual 2025-26 seasons was that Havertz and Gyokeres often brought the best out of each other. So there could be a world where Arteta decides to start them as a pair again. If not, how each performs could give an insight into what the manager is looking for from them and whether those demands differ according to their respective skill sets.

As things stand, Havertz starting up front in the Community Shield against Manchester City on Aug. 16 and Gyokeres getting the nod on the opening night of the Premier League at home to promoted Coventry City five days later feels like the most likely outcome.

Havertz and Gyokeres could prove a promising partnership this season (Michael Regan/Getty Images For Premier League)

That should change during the season though, which could help Arsenal add more variation to their attack than they had at points last season.

Arsenal scored 71 league goals in the 38 games as title winners but the 2023-24 season was their most potent of the 34-year Premier League era, when they posted 91. While it will not be easy to reach that tally, let alone surpass it, there is definitely room for this side to increase its firepower and create even more separation between the rest of the league.

They left opponents with opportunities to get back into games where they held one-goal leads a little too often last season. The ability to freshen things up more from an early stage of the coming campaign could help make life a bit more comfortable as they try to retain the title and break new ground in Europe.