The most boring thing about Arsenal is clear after Arteta follows Klopp blueprint | OneFootball

It was Jurgen Klopp who foresaw football’s shift towards defensive solidity back in 2018.

Possibly wishing for his head to reside somewhere other than his hands, Klopp brought in Alisson and Virgil van Dijk to rectify Liverpool’s frequent lapses at the back.

With hindsight, he had spotted an opportunity. Football in the mid-2010s frequently resembled high-scoring basketball matches, reckless to the point of cheapening goals.

Big games often resembled cavalry charges. Klopp calculated that tightening Liverpool’s defence would lead to massive gains.

Winning both the Premier League and Champions League proved this to be an astute decision, typical of somebody who is both European and (formerly) bespectacled.

Eight years later, Arsenal have taken Klopp’s logic to the nth degree and the moral panic is almost universal.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to see The Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy replacing Gary Neville in the Sky commentary box, or the ghost of Mary Whitehouse appear on Match of the Day.

The Gunners are seven points clear at the Premier League summit, playing a style of football that is defensively sound but hard on the eye.

Mikel Arteta tried to win the Premier League playing Pepball, falling just short in 2023 and 2024. A switch towards physicality and set-pieces was an attempt to gain an edge on their rivals.

Seeing corners celebrated like the birth of a first child remains unsettling. And some of Arsenal’s gamesmanship is being rightly lambasted.

But the scrum of fans, pundits and managers trying to one-up each other with doomsday declarations for The Beautiful Game is becoming tedious.

Ruud Gullit doesn’t watch football anymore. Yaya Toure is ‘disappointed’. Paul Scholes thinks the Premier League trophy should remain in storage until David Raya channels his inner Rene Higuita.

It was the same when Greece won Euro 2004, with nobody capable of understanding how man-marking and set-pieces were enough to beat France, the Czechs and Portugal.

It was the same during Euro 2012, when the debate over whether Spain’s Tiki Taka was tremendous or tedious reached unprecedented levels of pretension.

And, whisper it quietly, it was the same in 1966. Several observers claimed England’s no-frills success set the domestic game back 20 years.

In all these cases, as well as Arteta’s Arsenal, the fault lies less with the victors than with the inability of their opponents to stop them.

It’s one thing for fans, partisan and impotent in equal measure, to cry foul. Which, of course, leads Arsenal supporters to defend their club in an unpaid 24/7 ambassadorial role.

Arne Slot, Fabian Hurzeler and the rest have the power to stop Arsenal. Alas, too many teams chose to follow their lead and bemoan the results.

It’s not unlike buying clothes from ASOS and complaining that you don’t look like the model advertising them.

Imitation is a dead-end to happiness. If everybody is playing the same way, all loading the six-yard box and prioritising players for their athleticism, the real opportunity lies elsewhere.

PSG and Spain’s Euro 2024 winners have already mapped the future for us. Both teams took risks, encouraged their wingers to run at defenders and were less rigid in their overall set-up.

But the Premier League pressure-cooker discourages such imagination. It’s much easier to set up a low block than commit to something more proactive and risk losing your job.

History shows the limitations of this method. Greece may have been a flash in the pan, but Spain were thrillingly dethroned in 2014 when Chile squeezed them like a lemon and Arjen Robben ran at their exposed defence.

England’s 1966 winners were supplanted by Brazil four years later, but also by the thrilling Dutch and West German teams of the early 1970s.

All three were famed for their technique and feted for their movement. English football suddenly looked one-dimensional, playing stone-age football in a futuristic world.

This is all relevant because Arsenal aren’t unbeatable. Their reliance on set-pieces and mediocre attacking patterns narrows their margin of error.