Cycles in modern football move faster than ever. In May 2022, Mikel Arteta brought his young, brave but slightly callow Arsenal team up the road to Tottenham. Fourth place and Champions League qualification was on the line.
Up against Antonio Conte’s grizzled, experienced Spurs, it was a mismatch. Arsenal looked good in spells but Harry Kane scored a penalty and a second from a corner. Son Heung-min encouraged Rob Holding to get himself sent off and then scored the third. Conte crowed afterwards that while Arteta was a good coach, “He has just started this job and he has to be more focused on his team, and not keep complaining.” Spurs ended up finishing fourth.
It felt like a momentous result, ensuring Spurs’ continued supremacy in north London. They had peak-age stars, a winning coach and now Champions League football. But with two years of hindsight, we can say that it was not the start of a new era but rather the end of one.
That was the last time Tottenham beat Arsenal (they have played four times since). The last season when Spurs finished ahead of their local rivals was 2021-22, the end of a six-year streak. And while Spurs’ ageing team went into fast decline the following season, Arteta’s bet on youth paid off. The following year, Arsenal finished 24 points ahead of Spurs, the biggest gap between the teams since 2007-08. Last season it was 23.
A gulf that big still feels unusual. These clubs share a similar place in the football ecosystem. Both have been regulars in the Champions League — Spurs in six of the last 15 seasons, Arsenal nine from 15 — without ever winning it. They play in similar-sized stadiums and neither has a billionaire benefactor, although Arsenal have gone further in the transfer market in recent years, spending £105million ($137m) on Declan Rice last summer.
The story of this rivalry over the last 10 years has been one of timing and cycles, which are fundamental questions for any football club.
When do you start again with a new manager, new ideas and new young players? How do you back that manager and his improving side? When should the team peak, and how long for? And once it has peaked, how do you dismantle it and start again?
Go back 10 years to the 2014-15 season. Mauricio Pochettino arrived at Tottenham with a new style of play. He needed fit, young and hungry players to make it work. He quickly built a team around Christian Eriksen, Erik Lamela, Ryan Mason, Harry Kane, Nabil Bentaleb and Eric Dier, all in their early twenties.
It was one of the youngest sides in the country and while they were not as good as Arsenal, who were full of peak-age players, the way they out-ran Arsene Wenger’s team to win 2-1 at White Hart Lane in February 2015 was a sign of things to come.
You can see from the graph that the following season, 2015-16, Spurs were still a very young team — they now had a 19-year-old Dele, too — and far younger than Wenger’s Arsenal. Spurs led Arsenal for most of the second half of the season but faded at the end and finished one point behind. It was the last time Arsenal would finish ahead of Spurs until 2022-23.
The third and fourth Pochettino seasons were this team’s peak, with their best players in their mid-twenties. While Wenger’s tired Arsenal team drifted, Spurs finished 11 points ahead of them in 2016-17 — when Spurs racked up 86 points — and 14 points ahead the following year. Tottenham looked hungrier, fitter and far more modern than their rivals. The process started in 2014 was being vindicated.
That season was Wenger’s last at Arsenal, as he was replaced by Unai Emery in summer 2018. With 19-year-old Matteo Guendouzi and 22-year-old Lucas Torreira in midfield, Arsenal’s average age was starting to come down and 2018-19 was the first of six straight years in which Arsenal were younger than Spurs. But while Emery was struggling to come to terms with the post-Wenger rebuild, Pochettino’s Spurs could still run on muscle memory, which took them all the way to the Champions League final.
Looking back, the striking thing about the four years from 2018-22 is that neither Spurs nor Arsenal were ever that good. Neither finished in the top three. The highest points total either recorded was 71, which Spurs hit twice.
And yet Spurs always had the know-how to stay marginally ahead of Arsenal. They were an ageing team at this point, reliant on Pochettino-era veterans. You can see from the chart Spurs were generally older during the Jose Mourinho/Nuno Espirito Santo/Conte eras even than Arsenal at the end of Wenger.
The problem for Spurs was two-fold. The first was that their old team had run out of road. The failure to refresh it during the second half of the 2010s had caught up with them. Conte had given them one last push in the spring of 2022 but those players had nothing left to give.
The second was Mikel Arteta. He knew the Arsenal team he took over in December 2019 was too old. He spent his first year stuck with some of those Wenger veterans — Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alexandre Lacazette, Mesut Ozil and so on — but he knew this could not last. One year into his tenure, with the team having gone seven without a win, Arteta had a crucial game against Chelsea on Boxing Day. He brought in 19-year-old Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli and 20-year-old Emile Smith Rowe. Arsenal won 3-1 and never looked back.
That 2020-21 season was still a transitional year and that Arsenal squad was, on average, slightly older than it was the previous season. But the emphasis had changed. Arteta had found his new players who would form the basis of his team, with Gabriel and Martin Odegaard also emerging.
What was so striking about Arsenal as they started to take shape was how much they resembled the Tottenham team of the early Pochettino era: young and hungry, desperate to enact their manager’s clear ideas, moulded in his image. Arsenal in 2021-22 were one of the youngest teams in Premier League history, even younger as a group than Pochettino’s early Spurs. Aside from Granit Xhaka and Thomas Party, every first-team player was in their early twenties.
The similarities between the two sides are not accidental. Pochettino and Arteta have been very close since they were team-mates at Paris Saint-Germain. When Arteta was coming to the end of his playing career at Arsenal, he would make frequent secret visits to Tottenham to speak to Pochettino about coaching. He could have joined Pochettino’s staff at Spurs but the optics of going from Arsenal to Spurs would have been tough, so he went to work for Pep Guardiola at Manchester City.
Arteta’s Arsenal have followed a similar path to Pochettino’s Spurs: steady growth in the first season (if we start counting with Arteta in 2020-21), moving up towards the 70-point mark in the second then exploding into the mid-80s in the third. The fact that Arsenal’s young team was not quite ready to finish ahead of Spurs in 2021-22 was irrelevant. Their progress has been inexorable.
While Pochettino’s fourth season at Spurs was a slight backwards step, Arteta’s fourth full season was even better than his third. Arsenal won 28 league games last season, more than they did in any league season under Wenger. They had more wins and points than even Spurs’ best under Pochettino. This goes to show the difference between a Spurs team who were never fully backed in the market and an Arsenal team who went out and bought world-class players.
But as Arsenal’s players approach their peak age, the reward for their years of hard work, Tottenham are starting to play catch-up. Ange Postecoglou’s arrival in the summer of 2023 saw them start dismantling the team and building a new one. Kane was sold to Bayern Munich. Hugo Lloris and Eric Dier were sidelined and then sold in January.
A new generation of players in their early twenties came in: Micky van de Ven and Brennan Johnson were bought last summer. Destiny Udogie and Pape Matar Sarr became first-choice players. Spurs’ squad last year was the youngest it had been since Pochettino’s second season and suffered the problems teams at the start of a cycle tend to: when they hosted a more experienced Arsenal side last season, they played fairly well but were picked off and lost 3-2.
In the market this summer, Spurs have continued to push for youth. Aside from Dominic Solanke, they have signed three teenagers, Archie Gray, Lucas Bergvall and Wilson Odobert, and have given them all Premier League minutes already.
Postecoglou said at a press conference last month this is precisely the change he was looking for. “It was part of my plan,” he said. “I’ve always tried to build teams that will last over a cycle of three, four, five years. You’re looking at a younger demographic, a team that will grow, that will improve, that will adapt to the challenges ahead. When I got here, it was a team that… looked like it was at the end of a cycle.”
While Son and Ben Davies, the last two veterans of the Pochettino era, are hugely important at Spurs, the overall feel at the club is young and fresh. Just how Postecoglou wants it.
“Young people bring an energy to it, and they’re excited to be here,” he said. “It allows them to grow together. You know that they’re all in that similar part of their careers, which invariably means you’re going to have challenges individually and collectively. And if they experience them together, it allows them to overcome those in a better way.”
Postecoglou believes that younger players can be “a little bit more open to doing things a different way”, but adds that 32-year-old Son is as much of a “willing learner” as any of his teenagers. But the idea is that this new generation can be moulded by Postecolgou, learn his style of play, and build towards a peak a few years from now. Just as Arteta’s new generation was three years ago.
This will be the first derby when Spurs come in as the younger team since Pochettino was facing Wenger in the dugout. Perhaps Tottenham will still be too inexperienced but the lessons of the recent past tell us that their time will come.
(Top photo: David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
