Martin Odegaard's Transformation: Arsenal's New Star
Martin Odegaard is not just back. He looks reborn.
At the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona on Wednesday night, the Arsenal captain again carried his side, smashing in the only goal of the game to beat Napoli and keep their Champions League campaign on full throttle. Four goals in five matches now. The same player who found the net just once in an injury-ravaged 2025/26 season is suddenly Arsenal’s sharpest finisher.
This isn’t a hot streak. It’s a redesign.
Arteta’s new Odegaard
Mikel Arteta didn’t dress it up. Asked afterwards what had changed, he went straight to the basics: availability and position.
“First of all he needs to be available and last year he missed so many games through injuries,” Arteta said. The numbers back him up. Odegaard’s body has allowed him to play, and Arteta has pushed him into areas where he can hurt teams.
The shift is clear in the data. His touches in the opposition box have leapt from 2.5 per 90 minutes last season to 4.3 per 90 this term. That’s not a tweak, that’s a new map of the pitch.
Arteta pointed to the cast around him as a key part of that change. “He’s got that edge and different relationships around him as well and that helps,” the Arsenal boss explained. With more players able to carry and progress the ball, Odegaard can step higher, find new angles, and attack different “heights” in the team.
“We have a lot of players that can take the ball there and progress the ball much better than we did in the past,” Arteta said. When that happens, Odegaard is freed to float into the spaces that unsettle defences. “He needs to take different heights and angles and positions in order to disorganise the opponent and he’s done that really well.”
Christos Tzolis is at the heart of that new structure. The summer signing already has four assists, three of them for Odegaard goals, including the decisive pass in Naples. Tzolis drops, drives and feeds; Odegaard arrives to finish.
Arsenal’s attack on the front foot
The scoreline in Italy was tight. The performance was anything but.
Arsenal rained shots on Napoli. Twenty-six in total – their most on record in the Champions League since data collection began in 2003/04. The expected goals figure of 4.05 underlined the dominance. This should have been a rout.
They came from everywhere: both flanks, the half-spaces, the edge of the box. Ben White burst through for one gilt-edged chance created by a scooped Odegaard pass, only for Piero Hincapie to somehow fail to convert. Napoli were stretched, then pinned, then simply hanging on.
In the middle of it all, Odegaard ran the game.
He had more touches than anyone on the pitch. More passes. More chances created. Napoli’s midfield and back line tried to close him down; he simply moved again, found another pocket, demanded the ball once more.
His goal summed up the new version of Arsenal under him. A 29-pass move, patient but purposeful, Napoli shuffled from side to side, then suddenly exposed. Odegaard took over on the edge of the box and thumped in a finish that screamed confidence.
Arteta loved the mentality as much as the technique.
“That’s what we need,” he said. “The players with the mindset to decide a game and play with personality. To keep taking chances and risks. He’s getting into those positions much more in recent games and now you feel he has the emotional state that he knows the ball can go in, and he scored an incredible goal tonight.”
Playing with freedom and bite
From the opening minutes in Naples, Odegaard looked like a player who knew he was the best footballer on the pitch.
He demanded every pass. He slipped balls between Napoli shirts, threaded runners through gaps that barely existed, then appeared himself in the box to finish off moves. As Sky Sports’ Nick Wright observed, everything went through him.
This is the contrast with last season. Then, injuries clipped his rhythm and dulled his edge. One goal in 36 games told its own story. Now, free of those setbacks, he is playing with a looseness and authority that Arsenal have been desperate to see from their captain.
The ingenuity that released White with that scooped pass was just one moment. There were others: disguised through-balls, quick give-and-goes, little body feints to escape pressure. Napoli “couldn’t really get near him,” as Wright put it, and they knew it.
“Martin is contributing goals,” Arteta added. “That is obviously impacting results which is what we want from our attacking players, to be decisive, and certainly he was that today.”
Arsenal are feeling the benefits in every competition. The question now is simple: if this is the level Odegaard can sustain, how far can he drag them?
