Arsenal win ugly vs. Chelsea; Bayern close in on Bundesliga title; more

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Another weekend passes, like sand through the hourglass, and we have a ton of stuff to dissect following the action in Europe’s top five leagues! Where should we begin? Ah yes, how about the big Premier League game of the round as Arsenal muscled their way past Chelsea 2-1 to keep their five-point lead at the top of the table despite an encounter that felt more like wrestling than soccer. Regardless, we learned a lot about both teams as we hit the “10 games to go” mark in England‘s top division.

In Germany, we arguably saw the Bundesliga title race come to an end as Bayern Munich thumped rivals and nearest challenges Borussia Dortmund to open a double-digit points lead at the top with single-digit games remaining. That was fun while it lasted, eh? Meanwhile in Italy, Juventus made an epic comeback against AS Roma to keep their top-four hopes alive in Serie A this season, which will feel good following their UEFA Champions League exit in midweek.

– VAR review: Did Chelsea deserve a penalty in loss to Arsenal?
– Arsenal riding corners to Premier League title; Chelsea red cards continue
– Dawson: Man Utd up to third thanks to Sesko’s hot streak of crucial goals

Elsewhere, we have talking points galore around Liverpool (who now rule at set pieces, weirdly), Manchester United (who are getting a tune out of Benjamin Sesko), Paris Saint-Germain (who keep flirting with disaster in Ligue 1), Barcelona (Lamine Yamal‘s on the G.O.A.T. trajectory if he can continue like this), Federico Dimarco (who deserves much more praise than he gets considering what he does for Inter Milan), Manchester City (who are winning with grit right now, which feels weird) and much, much more.

It’s Monday morning, so what better time for some musings? Let’s get into it.

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Arsenal beat Chelsea to keep five-point gap atop Premier League, but win raises more questions than answers

Like whether stuff like this — 41% possession at home, including 20-plus minutes against 10 men — is sustainable. Or where they’d be without David Raya between the posts. Or, indeed, what would happen without set pieces: they’ve already scored more winning goals from corner kicks than any side in Premier League history … and March has barely started.

I’m not blaming manager Mikel Arteta here. Without Martin Odegaard (who hasn’t been great of late, in any case) the Arsenal boss opted for a certain approach, and bar the last 20 minutes — when they failed to kill the game with the extra man, after Pedro Neto‘s silly sending off — it worked. Arteta’s players do what the referee allows them to do on the pitch. I’m just not particularly entertained by it (regular readers are well aware), and I’d rather see Eberechi Eze, Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice do the stuff they’re paid a lot of money to do rather than win free kicks and hit dead balls.

The problem with turning every set piece into a Royal Rumble — and by the way, it’s not just Arsenal — is that you’re at the mercy of the match officials. Another ref and another VAR on another day, and Rice is getting punished for the ball coming off his arm and/or committing a foul for his bear hug on Jorrel Hato. (Instead, PGMOL gave him a pass on the handball since he was “involved in physical contact” with a Chelsea player — never mind the fact that the “physical contact” wasn’t a cuddle, but a foul.)

The same also applies for William Saliba on João Pedro, which could easily have been a penalty. You’re banking on referees calling things consistently and that’s risky: just ask new Tottenham Hotspur boss Igor Tudor (more on that later).

Raya also made some huge saves against a Chelsea side who, despite not being particularly good, had the upper hand when it came to open play. (Unlucky for them that it wasn’t a big part of this game.) That should be a warning. We know Arsenal can outplay opponents too and if they don’t want the run-in to be a nervy, anxiety-inducing mess with the finest of margins, they need to get back to doing that.

As for Chelsea, we saw the usual issues. If shoehorning the extra central midfielder (Andrey Santos, who seems to be untouchable in Liam Rosenior’s eyes) means shifting Cole Palmer wide, I’m not sure the juice is worth the squeeze. Hato for Marc Cucurella (who was unavailable) is a hefty downgrade against a physical side such as Arsenal. And then there’s the disciplinary issue. Every sending off is its own story so you need to allow for that, but seven red cards in the league — when the top five have just three combined — is far, far too many.

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Bayern win Klassiker, league feels in the bag, but plenty of room to grow

The headline is that it’s pretty much “game over” for the Bundesliga title. Joshua Kimmich — who sometimes gets more criticism than he deserves — struck within four minutes of Daniel Svensson‘s late equalizer, making it 3-2 Bayern and creating a statement for the 80,000-strong crowd in Dortmund. The win puts the gap at 11 with 10 games to go, which makes me ready to apply the old rule thumb: “When the points lead is greater than the number of remaining games, you ain’t turning it around.”

The thing is, even if the game had remained 2-2, the race was probably over, given that making up eight points with less than a third of the campaign left and no more head-to-heads would have been a Herculean feat for anyone, let alone this star-crossed Borussia Dortmund team. But Bayern wanted to make sure and properly shut the door. That’s the Bayern way. It’s also not insignificant given their recent outings, and it would have pleased Vincent Kompany.

Only a week ago, against Eintracht Frankfurt, they nearly threw away two points after dominating the game. Against Hamburg SV a month ago, they did just that. Kompany’s side is just so man-for-man dominant domestically that the biggest danger often comes when it ends up hurting itself, either through complacency or distraction. Or, as happened to some degree against Dortmund, by letting the game get away from the team and turning it into a sloppy, end-to-end affair.

That shouldn’t have happened because, lest we forget, Dortmund were coming off UEFA Champions League elimination midweek, whereas Bayern had seven days to prepare. Not to mention the fact that this was Dortmund’s eighth game in February to Bayern’s fifth. And yet, physically, it was a wash and very much the sort of game that suited Nico Kovac’s crew more than Bayern: turn it into a sloppy mess and Bayern’s technical advantage is blunted.

It’s not clear that, right now, Bayern can control games in the same way. Not when there are defensive issues, not when the midfield doesn’t impose itself as it should, not when they squander chances at the attacking end.

Am I nitpicking? Sure, maybe a little bit. Michael Olise, Luis Díaz and Harry Kane are as fearsome a trio as you can face in the European game, and that’s before you factor in one of Serge Gnabry, Jamal Musiala or Lennart Karl as a fourth musketeer. Kimmich is hitting his stride again, and for all the stick the back line gets, when things are clicking up the pitch, matters will get a whole lot easier for them.

But the fact is that Bayern are legitimately pursuing a treble in a season in which they’re in the German Cup semifinal and where most observers have them among the top three Champions League contenders (alongside Arsenal and Manchester City). And of those contenders, they now have the luxury of not being involved in a title race. It means more opportunities to rest and rotate, more time to prepare and no need to rush Musiala (or Alphonso Davies) back into starting roles. Opportunities like this don’t come up every year. That’s the bar the club has set.

As for Dortmund, they showed fight and spirit to a degree that maybe the Dortmund of old wouldn’t have shown. That said, Nico Schlotterbeck opened the scoring and then gave away the silliest of penalties, in keeping with the club’s age-old narrative. Kovac’s game plan was the correct one: They just faced a far better side and he’s right when he says he was proud of his players and what they showed on the day. The challenge now is what to do with the rest of the season, given they have nothing left to play for.

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This time, Juventus pull off the comeback in a wild draw at Roma

They weren’t dead after the horror shows in Istanbul and at home to Como. And the near-turnaround against Galatasaray in the Champions League — however insufficient, and with far-reaching consequences — wasn’t a blip.

On Sunday night, in a pulsating game against Roma, Juventus were again staring down the barrel. They were 3-1 down with 12 minutes to go, with the real prospect of finding themselves two places and seven points away from a Champions League place next season (with all the implications that carries). Somehow they found a way, and with two highly improbable game changers.

Jérémie Boga — who arrived in January, having nearly walked away from his previous club Nice in November after being attacked by supporters — pulled one back. Then, Federico Gatti, the unglamorous center back sent on late as a de facto center forward, popped up in the box for the equalizer. Narrative matters and Luciano Spalletti rightly milked it for all he could postgame, talking about Juve’s “never-say-die” attitude and how this would be a platform for a top-four finish.

To be fair to Spalletti, we’ve seen comebacks that are products of errors and luck and happenstance. This wasn’t one of them. It was fully deserved, and after 120 minutes of energy-sapping (mental and physical) midweek football, away from home, against a Roma side that know how to be relentless. Juve paid a steep price for some goalkeeping uncertainty (Mattia Perin channelling his inner Michele Di Gregorio), pushed on with quality and were rewarded.

As for Roma, blowing a two-goal lead this late at home is going to hurt. There’s no way it can’t. But they showed, once more, that football-wise, they can hang with anyone and the midfield combo of Niccolo Pisilli (if Rino Gattuso doesn’t call him up for the World Cup playoffs, he needs his head examined) and Manu Koné (his assist for Donyell Malen was simply delightful) offers a legitimate platform to aim high, both domestically and in the Europa League.

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Quick hits

10. Lamine Yamal has one of ‘those’ games: You know, the ones that leave you pretty sure that he’ll be in the GOAT conversation one day. He scored a hat trick in Barcelona’s 4-1 win over Villarreal on Saturday that saw them put the pressure back on Real Madrid (who play Monday night). But more than the scoring, it’s the movement, the ease, the calm confidence and the technique that leaves its mark.

My favorite goal? His second, which saw him cut in from the right, beat one defender, beat another defender and deliver a vicious diagonal swallowed up by the goalmouth just inside the far post. But hey, pick your poison.

As ever, it was a day of highs and lows for Hansi Flick’s Barça. The high line gives up chances that Joan García has to snuff out. Set-piece defending leaves a lot to be desired (as evidenced by Pape Gueye‘s goal), and Ferran Torres needs to finish better if he’s going to keep taking Robert Lewandowski‘s minutes. But you can’t argue with the results, can you?

9. Federico Dimarco’s numbers are elite and his goal is special as Internazionale lick their wounds: Inter bounced back from their Champions League humiliation at the hands of Bodo/Glimt with a fairly straightforward 2-0 win on Saturday over Genoa, who aren’t particularly good. If there’s a silver lining to being out of Europe this early, it’s that we won’t see a rerun of last year, when they went down to the wire in the Champions Legue, Serie A and Coppa Italia only to end up empty-handed on every front.

Dimarco opened the scoring with a ridiculous strike that reminded you how positions and roles are somewhat subverted in the modern game. He has six goals (all from open play) and a Serie A-leading 14 assists this season. His 20 goal involvements — excluding penalties — make him sixth overall in Europe’s big five leagues. Ahead of him are Kane, Erling Haaland and Olise (all with 26), Diaz (23) and Yamal 21. Kylian Mbappé is just behind at 19. That’s pretty good company to keep.

8. Manchester City more about grit than quality at Leeds United: In the end, if City win the title, or even just finish a strong second, it will still be a point of pride. For now, however, the fact that they need to rely on grit and savvy and muscle in games like Saturday’s win at Leeds tells you that this is not what Pep Guardiola imagined.

City were the epitome of sterile possession in a first half that saw them enjoy 76% of the ball, but only take their first shot in the 40th minute, when the xG was 1.27 to 0.00 in Leeds’ favor. Rayan Cherki‘s threaded ball found Rayan Aït-Nouri, who set up Antoine Semenyo for the only goal deep in first-half injury time. (How Cherki isn’t a fixture on this team — he has had one league start in the past 30 days — is baffling.) They did have chances on the counter after the break, but there was no sign of the “control” and “creativity” that are supposed Guardiola hallmarks. And no, Haaland’s absence isn’t enough of an alibi.

7. Julián Álvarez improbably comes to the rescue for Atlético Madrid: The stats are frankly terrifying. Alvarez, the FIFA World Cup winner and €85 million signing, had seen his goals dry up in the most frustrating way. While you’re never going to judge an all-rounder like him by goals alone, this had to be worrying. Alvarez hadn’t scored a league goal in four months. In LaLiga, he hadn’t scored in open play since September, and his last away goal was on opening day. Yet it was his scrambled finish that gave Atleti a 1-0 win away to cellar-dwelling Oviedo, saving Diego Simeone from having to explain a frankly embarrassing performance in which they managed a single shot on target and, again, needed a standout performance from goalkeeper Jan Oblak.

With an eye toward the Copa del Rey return leg in midweek against Barcelona (they’re 4-0 up, but hey, you never know), Simeone made seven changes, including the entire back four. Too much? On paper, no: We know how deep his squad is. In practice, however, you have to wonder whether rotation is part of his skill set.

6. Benjamin Sesko is turning the corner for Manchester United: Believe it. He has seven goals in his past eight games. For the third straight match, he scored the second-half goal that got Manchester United the points. On Sunday, his first start under Michael Carrick, it was the winner in their 2-1 home victory against Crystal Palace. Sesko was always going to be a bit of a slow burn in terms of development. His physical and technical skills are evident, but he’s also just 22, had always played with a strike partner and found that moving to Old Trafford in the chaos of late-stage Ruben Amorim is not the ideal circumstances in which to grow.

You can see why Carrick has used him sparingly thus far. Deploying Sesko with Bryan Mbeumo, Matias Cunha and Bruno Fernandes makes for a top-heavy side, especially with Casemiro and Kobbie Mainoo asked to hold down the fort in midfield. But Sesko is clearly United’s future, not least because of what they spent on him. And it’s not going to be easy to keep him out of the starting lineup the way things are going. United were fairly ho-hum against Palace, going a goal down early and turning things around midway through the second half after Maxence Lacroix‘s red card and penalty that so incensed Oliver Glasner. (He was wrong to question the call, by the way, just as he has been wrong about a number of things of late.)

5. Napoli all about emotion, from Romelu Lukaku‘s winner to his postgame tears: Talk about pent-up feelings. Lukaku, one of the heroes of last year’s title-winning romp, still hasn’t started a game in the 2025-26 season (he only made his return just over a month ago) and the fact that he scored the winner deep in injury time in Napoli’s 2-1 win over Hellas Verona was moving enough. That he followed it up postgame by saying he was “a dead man” before arriving in Naples, and being reunited with Antonio Conte, before breaking down in tears talking about his recently passed father, only ratcheted things up further.

Moments like those remind us these footballers we watch are people, not AI-powered robots. And it’s on the human front that Conte is going to succeed or fail this season, given the way injuries have ravaged his club. Napoli were poor, again, at Verona — you can’t keep spotting the opposition half a dozen regulars — but the three points were both huge and deserved.

4. Liverpool put five past West Ham United, but is it really all down to the set-piece coach? Or, more accurately, the fact that he’s no longer there? I’ve never met Aaron Briggs, the set-piece coach who left Anfield just before New Year’s Eve. But the stats doing the rounds after Liverpool’s 5-2 win Saturday make for rough reading and suggest he’s about as popular on Merseyside as Christian Purslow and Tom Hicks.

In the first half of the campaign, Liverpool was tied for the most set-piece goals conceded in the league and scored just three. Since then, they haven’t given up any and scored seven. Statistical variance, sample size and all that, it’s still impressive, especially as Briggs wasn’t replaced by some other set-piece guru (Arne Slot’s assistants now sort things out). Liverpool’s newfound dead-ball prowess shouldn’t obscure the fact that they were hardly impressive: As Alexis Mac Allister put it, they “need to improve defensively.” West Ham actually won the xG battle, and this game could have taken a very different turn.

3. AC Milan create plenty in 2-0 win, but also waste plenty: Don’t get too excited by the whopping 3.64 xG. When you don’t actually score your first goal until the 89th minute, and when your top scorer only finds the net deep in injury time, you still have a problem. Especially when — even against a side like Cremonese — you still play at a plodding pace and rely on counterattacks and individuals to create chances.

Rafael Leão did get his goal, and the stats tell you he’s Serie A’s second-leading star. Sure, that was after he missed a hat trick of chances (as his personal xG of 2.27 shows), and he has been criticized in the past for not being clinical. I still think he’s a threat even when his finishing is off, but he simply can’t be your main terminus, especially when Christian Pulisic is having an off day. If you want to drink the Max Allegri Kool-Aid: everything is great, they have 16 points more than last season at this stage and the exact same number of points that Napoli had last year, when they went on to win the title. (Sure, except Napoli were one point off the top; Milan are 10 back.) The uncomfortable reality is that too much of their attacking output still hinges on 40-year-old Luka Modric, and it still doesn’t feel as if they’re building toward anything worthwhile.

2. Frustrated (and frustrating) Paris Saint-Germain nearly throw it away: “Nearly” being the operative word here. Lens‘ draw at Strasbourg, coupled with PSG’s 1-0 win at Le Havre, means they stretch their lead in Ligue 1 to four points, avoiding too much blowback after their ugly performance against AS Monaco in the Champions League.

The issue against Le Havre wasn’t so much how PSG played — they took 22 shots for a cumulative xG of 3.82 — but the fact that their finishing was so poor, from Lee Kang-in, to Nuno Mendes, to Désiré Doué, who won a somewhat dubious penalty and then had it saved. Throw in an outrageously good performance from Le Havre keeper Mory Diaw, and some dubious defending at the back, and this was far dicier than Luis Enrique would have liked.

1. More disappointment for Tottenham, and now Igor Tudor is heading toward a ban: The best news to have come out of Tottenham’s weekend might be that the three teams above them and the three teams below them all lost, so it’s “as you were” following Sunday’s 2-1 defeat at Fulham. You’re still four points from the relegation zone, but now there are only 10 games to go and the clubs around you aren’t pulling away. There’s nothing to celebrate in terms of performance, and while they still have a dozen or so players unavailable, it has been this way all season, and rarely have they been this bad. Most disappointing was that their 4-4-2 formation — wasn’t Igor Tudor meant to be “Mr. Back Three”? — looked as if it hadn’t been practiced at all, which is troubling when you consider that (A) it’s not rocket science and (B) they had one match in 17 days prior to this one, which means plenty of time on the training pitch.

Tudor, incidentally, will need to get his messaging straight. It’s hard to see how he won’t be sanctioned following his comments about the officiating, and in particular, Raúl Jiménez on Radu Dragusin ahead of Fulham’s opening goal, when he accused referee Thomas Bramall of being biased toward the home side. He’s 100% correct that it was an inconsistent decision, particularly in light of the Randal Kolo Muani on Gabriel incident in the North London Derby, but accusations of incompetence or mistakes are one thing, accusations of bias another.

This post was originally published at ESPN