Three Things We Learned From Arsenals season 

Here's Ian Mills with his 2024-25 season overview of Mikel Arteta's Arsenal 

Despite reaching the semi-finals of both the Champions League and Carabao Cup it was ultimately another season without silverware, a fifth in succession.

Here are three things that cost us silverware, writes Ian Mills

1 - A lack of a clinical finisher in attack

– we finished 10 points adrift of Champions Liverpool despite losing the same number of games (4). The 14 draws we suffered were a major contributing factor, as we led in nine of those games.

We scored just 69 goals way below our previous two title challenging seasons – 91 in 2023-24 and 88 in 2022-23.

For the first time in a century, we had no player register league goals in double figures – Kai Havertz top scored on 9.

Our Champions League run was the undoubted highlight of an indifferent season and whilst we came up against an inspired goalkeeper in Gianglugi Donnarumma in the Semi Finals – would a top quality centre forward have failed to score with the efforts that Gabi Martinelli and Leandro Trossard had in the first leg, or Gabi Martinelli again, Declan Rice, Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka had in Paris?

Could our FA Cup campaign had gone deep into the competition if a proven goalscorer had taken our second half penalty? Could we have secured safe passage past Newcastle to reach the Carobao Cup Final had Aleksander Isak and Anthony Gordon been playing in red and white instead of black and white stripes?

The need for an out and our goalscorer has been obvious for the last 3 seasons and must be addressed this summer – current rumours suggest Benjamin Sesko is more likely than Viktor Gykores right now.

My preference would be the latter purely based on a need to ‘win now’ situation. Sesko may well be one of the best strikers in the world within the next few years however we do not have the time to wait for him to come good. A quality left winger is also high on the transfer ‘to do list’ to provide stiffer competition to Martinelli and Trossard. I would retain both the Brazilian and the Belgian as we need a bigger squad to properly challenge on four fronts next season.

2 - Injuries and VAR

– one table we did top in 2024-25 was for the most injuries incurred – 27 in total amongst them several serious hamstring problems. Almost our entire spine of the team was affected with Gabriel, Odegaard, Havertz and Jesus all missing a significant number of games. The back four also saw numerous changes with Ben White absent long term, Takehiro Tomiyasu playing hardly any minutes at all and Riccardo Calafiori enduring an injury hit first term in an Arsenal shirt.

Add to that the regular absence of Oleksander Zinchenko. William Saliba ended up playing the most outfield minutes yet even he succumbed to a hamstring issue in May.

In attack we missed Saka for an extended period with Martinelli also absent leaving us with Ethan Nwaneri, Raheem Sterling and Trossard as our only forward options for a crucial period of time.

The club’s decision not to bolster our attacking personnel last summer always looked a huge mistake last summer and to fail to do again in January was nothing short of negligent.

3 - As for VAR...

– without VAR our final points tally would have been 82, just 2 points behind Liverpool. There were some highly controversial decisions that went against us and can be filed neatly under the heading – ‘this would only happen to Arsenal’  including Rice’s sending off versus Brighton, Trossard’s red card at Manchester City, Jesus’ injury time goal disallowed against Liverpool, the penalty decision against Saliba away to Brighton, Lewis-Skelly’s red card (later rescinded on appeal at Wolves) and the penalty against Lewis-Skelly versus Everton.

Away from the Premier League Inter were awarded a highly debatable spot kick in our sole defeat in the League stage of the Champions League.

See gooneronline.com later this week for Ian Mills' Top Three Arsenal Players