Ranking the 22 Arsenal bottlejobs from Kai Havertz to Mikel Arteta | OneFootball

We’re all agreed that Arsenal are bottling the Premier League title again, but who are the big Gunners bottlers and which players are the powerless non-bottling bystanders?

Here we rank the bottlejobs from least to largest, and dare we say it might be worth checking back in for updates in the not-too-distant future. Shortly after the North London derby, if we had to guess.

22) Kai Havertz

There was more than a whiff of a desperate scramble for an explanation after the draw with Wolves from Martin Keown as he hailed Havertz as an “all too important match-winner” they desperately need back given Arsenal have done without him for pretty much the whole season and seeing as his only match-winning turns came in the Champions League dead rubber against Kairat Almaty and in the Carabao Cup semi-final second leg against Chelsea when they were heading for the final in any case.

But the Gunners have won all five games the German has featured in this term, including their only two Premier League wins – comfortable 4-0 and 3-0 victories over Leeds and Sunderland respectively – in their last seven. He’s been the only consistent factor in non-bottling.

21) Myles Lewis-Skelly

He’s not played in any of their last six games and has featured for just 310 minutes in the Premier League this season. Probably worth giving the breakout star of 2024/25 a go at this point.

20) Declan Rice

One of our absolute favourite campaigns from the now entirely panic-stricken Arsenal fanbase is their bid to make Declan Rice captain as if handing him the armband would magically make the rest of the Arsenal team play with as much dynamism and quality as he has continues to exhibit.

We are instead voting for the revival of Player Cam so we can enjoy Rice’s increasingly exasperated expressions as he tries to carry the entire Gunners team on his back to the Premier League title.

19) Mikel Merino

Came off the bench against Manchester United to equalise but ultimately fail to prevent defeat having played no part in the limp draw against Liverpool (what many believe to be the bottling inception) a couple of weeks before, with foot surgery keeping him out of the recriminations firing line since.

18) Cristhian Mosquera

Played the full 90 against Brentford and got a bit of a duffing up by Igor Thiago, but he’s not the first nor will he be the last, and he’s not featured in any other Premier League game since the start of December.

17) Viktor Gyokeres

The benefit of being mostly useless for the majority of the season is that you can’t really be blamed for bottling the Premier League title by continuing to be useless.

Gyokeres had no shots against Wolves, touched the ball 12 times and most incredibly neither won nor lost an aerial duel in the 65 minutes he was on the pitch. Still, not his fault.

16) William Saliba

Missed the draw with Brentford through illness but returned for Wolves and basically looked fine. Can’t pin the blame for either goal on him and a very solid defence in general has remained as such through most of this bottling run, with Saliba key to the four clean sheets they’ve kept in the last seven games.

15) Eberechi Eze

Did next to nothing before being hooked at half-time against Brentford but Eze has masterfully managed to make himself being quite bad in his debut season entirely Arteta’s fault as the Arsenal manager should just let him do whatever the f*** he wants, goddamnit.

14) Noni Madueke

It won’t be long before Madueke is made a scapegoat again by an Arsenal fanbase that begrudgingly accepted he might not be entirely terrible having initially petitioned against his transfer, before insisting he is actually quite sh*t and more recently dubbing him fine.

Madueke has performed precisely as well as we would have expected a mercurial winger like him to, has been consistently inconsistent since his arrival and thus not one of the bottle.

13) Ben White

Barely been playing and is presumably blissfully unaware of Arsenal’s involvement in a title race as a footballer famous for his football apathy.

12) Martin Odegaard

Anyone who had not seen Martin Odegaard play this season would have looked at the draw with Wolves, the lack of creative spark and attacking fluency, and insisted that the captain’s absence was keenly felt by the inert Gunners. The positive impact he made from the bench against Brentford would support that narrative.

But Odegaard has been playing in plenty of games this term in which Arsenal’s attack has looked similarly blunt. Hard to pin a bottling badge on him though and his displays in 2022/23 when others slumped around him would suggest he’s a guy Arteta should get back on the pitch as soon as possible.

11) Piero Hincapie

He was probably also quite surprised to see Hugo Bueno channel the forces of Arjen Robben as he cut inside and curled a left-footed shot into the top corner of David Raya’s net, but Hincapie can’t really use that as an excuse for just watching and allowing him to do it.

Such lame defending after scoring such a lovely goal is in essence a small-scale bottling.

10) Gabriel Magalhaes

A wonderful defender, maybe the very best in the Premier League, which for the purposes of this ranking puts him in very real danger owing to the height of the pedestal Gabriel can bottle it from.

Didn’t cover himself in glory for Wolves’ equaliser on Wednesday but the second protagonist in that particular blunder takes the bottling biscuit.

9) Martin Zubimendi

He’s evidently an improvement on the predecessor who shall not be named, has scored some lovely goals and looks very comfortable at the base of Arsenal’s midfield. But is Zubimendi not too comfortable?

No doubt with his manager’s caution-related buzzwords ringing in his ears we’ve see increasing numbers of forward passing opportunities snubbed in favour of the safe option and having marvelled at his style and elegance in the early part of the season we now find ourselves more frustrated by the shackles that restrict him.

8) Gabriel Jesus

Came on as a late substitute at Molineux and did nothing at all of note in his 25 minutes on the pitch before pushing shoving Yerson Mosquera over like a big baby just before the full-time whistle. Rattled.

7) Gabriel Martinelli

Arguably the paradigm of a bottlejob, Martinelli would be far higher on this list if he had been of more use to Arteta before the downturn.

He looks perfectly capable when the going’s good but when you really want him to step up he shrinks pathetically into a lone furrow on Arsenal’s left wing, colloquially known as the zone of possession loss when he’s on the pitch. The Brazilian gave up the ball a whopping eight times on Wednesday; it’s a wonder he remained on the pitch for the full 90.

6) Leandro Trossard

Often billed as a player who ‘makes things happen’ Trossard has made just one assist and no goals happen in his last eight Premier League appearances after four goals and three assists in his previous ten.

5) Riccardo Calafiori

Scoring his only goal in the very first game of the season and his only assists in game two begs the question as to whether Calafiori has in fact been bottling it since mid-August before reaching his bottlejob nadir on Wednesday by scoring an own goal with his second touch against Wolves in stoppage time after he blocked Tom Edozie’s shot onto the post with his first.

4) Jurrien Timber

William Saliba has hailed him as “the best right-back in the world” and he’s been oustanding all season, which made his performance against Wolves, and one moment in particular which arguably illustrated Arsenal’s collective sh*tting of the bed more than any other, all the more shocking.

Late in the game, with Wolves coming back into it and preying on the obvious neuroses of the visitors, Timber picked the ball up in defence under no pressure whatsoever, with no few passing options – long or short – available to him, and kicked the ball roughly in the direction of the Wolves goal but very clearly not to anyone in particular, like a 5-year-old who’s been taught the most basic principles of football that morning might have done.

3) David Raya

Being quite comfortably the best goalkeeper in the Premier League while remaining a guy ‘who’s got a rick in him’ throughout that time made Raya a standout bottlejob candidate, and he duly delivered in stoppage-time on Wednesday.

We don’t and probably won’t ever know if he called for the ball before clattering into Gabriel but it doesn’t really matter – just catch the ball, mate. He was also far from convincing and looked at one point as though he might cry under the high balls of Brentford.

2) Bukayo Saka

Not Starboy?! Yeah, sorry. We love him and don’t in any way begrudge him being made Arsenal’s highest-paid player. He deserves a ludicrous wage as much as any professional football does.

He also opened the scoring against Wolves. But what did he do after that? Surely your best forward – and by quite a distance at that – should be taking a game against the worst team in the Premier League, one of the worst in history, by the scruff of the neck, particularly on a night when’s he’s captain.

Where’s the Saka who’s ripped some of the best defenders in the world apart? When was the last time he cut inside and curled one into the top corner? It felt like he used to do that on a bi-weekly basis.

Having been the guy Arsenal would get the ball to turn a game on its head or put it out of sight, Saka now looks as meek as any of them, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that the two games Arsenal have won in the last seven games he played no part in through injury.

1) Mikel Arteta

Articles being written about his sacking and fans suggesting his time at Arsenal is up while they remain five points clear at the top of the table with the title still in their hands offers a very clear insight into past misdemeanours re title bottlings and widely held opinions on Arteta’s ability to avoid another one.

He resembled a cold and lonely child on the touchline against Brentford and genuinely scared pretty much throughout the draw with Wolves. Even at 2-0 up he looked as though he would need at least two hours in a dark room on his own to recover and another hour of therapy after that.

We have absolutely no faith in him picking Arsenal up off the floor having proven time and again that he’s all talk with regard to fighting when backs are against the wall, instead shrinking like his team when they’re up against it.

The vow he made less than a month ago that “we’re going to live and play with enjoyment” is as laughable as his insistence that they would show “courage and conviction” in the process.

They look cowardly and miserable, and we can only hope that the Arsenal fans refused Arteta’s offer “to jump on the fun boat” that’s now full of holes and sinking into the abyss.