Christos Tzolis: Arsenal's New Left Flank Solution

Amid the noise around a marquee forward, Arsenal may already have found one answer on the training pitches of London Colney.

Christos Tzolis, once a quiet, ineffective teenager on Premier League debut for Norwich, has returned to north London as something entirely different: a 24-year-old who looks determined to grab Arsenal’s left flank for himself.

From footnote to turning point

Roll back to September 2021. Arsenal were bottom of the League, goalless, and under real strain. Norwich came to the Emirates. Tzolis, then 19, started on the left and barely laid a glove on a team supposedly in crisis. He did not manage a shot. Arsenal scraped a 1-0 win, Mikel Arteta clung on, and the club’s modern era took a sharp turn.

Almost five years on, the same player is now part of the machine that almost suffocated him.

After spells away and a rebuild of his game and confidence, Tzolis faced Arsenal again last season with Club Brugge. This time, he saw the full evolution up close.

"I can say it was the most difficult team to attack against that I’ve played so far," he admitted this summer. "We played against other big teams, but against Arsenal, we had the most difficulties to make clear chances."

Now he no longer has to solve that problem on a matchday. Only in training.

A numbers winger with edge

Arsenal moved for Tzolis in a £34million deal after a season in Belgium that was impossible to ignore: 22 goals and 29 assists in all competitions for Club Brugge. The caveat is obvious — those numbers came in a league Opta ranks as the seventh strongest in the world — but volume at that level still turns heads.

Inside Arsenal, it was not just the output. They liked his ability to play across the front line, his comfort off either foot, the way he echoes Leandro Trossard in how he can pop up in different zones and still look natural. They liked his personality too. Staff believed he would raise the technical ceiling of the forward unit.

Above all, they wanted his end product.

Tzolis has now either scored or assisted in each of his last 15 competitive club appearances, stacking up 25 goal involvements in that run. That kind of relentlessness was missing at Arsenal last season, even in a title-winning campaign.

Gabriel Martinelli finished with just one Premier League goal. Only Viktor Gyokeres reached more than seven League strikes. Martin Odegaard topped the assist charts with six. The system functioned, but the forwards did not deliver consistently enough on their own.

Arsenal’s front line has felt streaky: devastating for three or four games, then quiet for the next month. Injuries have not helped. Key attackers have repeatedly lost rhythm and sharpness.

Tzolis, by contrast, barely missed a beat in Belgium. Across two seasons, he sat out only five matches, three of those through illness. Availability is a skill, and he has shown it.

Hitting the ground running

The early Arsenal evidence is brief but bright.

Helped by a full two weeks of pre-season and a friendly with Club Brugge before he even joined up with Arteta’s squad, Tzolis has looked like a player already up to speed rather than one chasing fitness. He created goals against Borussia Dortmund and Real Betis, then opened his account in red and white with a curling finish into the far corner against Girona.

The Community Shield offered a far sterner test. Tzolis responded again.

His clever, cushioned header set up Kai Havertz for Arsenal’s second goal. Later, he picked out Odegaard in the box with the kind of calm, delayed pass that separates good attacking play from great.

Wearing the No17 shirt, gliding forward with tight touches before darting inside to make the decisive action, he inevitably drew comparisons. There were flashes, just flashes, of Alexis Sanchez in that sequence.

Arteta did not hold back in his assessment.

"He's fitting, he's a really intelligent boy and he has a massive quality which is when he's in the last 20-30 metres," the manager said. "He's so composed to pick people out around the box or to finish actions. I'm really impressed with him."

Tzolis himself has long been aware of the shadow of Sanchez.

“Actually, I knew that he wore the number 17. I watched a lot of football and he was a top player for Arsenal, as a left winger always," he said after signing. “He’s one of the players I looked up to when I was younger. And also, I see some similarities with him. But it’s not the reason I took the number 17.

“It’s nice (though). Alexis Sanchez had number 17 - so I hope I will have the same success.”

A changing of the guard on the left?

Arsenal’s stance on Gabriel Martinelli underlines how quickly the landscape has shifted.

The club are open to selling the Brazilian, who did not make Arteta’s squad at all for the Community Shield. That decision alone is a clear indication of how strongly they believe Tzolis can operate as first-choice on the left, at least for now.

That flank has been an unresolved issue for several seasons. Most of Arsenal’s threat has come from the right, where Bukayo Saka and Odegaard combine and dictate. The left, by comparison, has flickered rather than burned.

Now there is the prospect of Riccardo Calafiori stepping out from left-back, breaking lines, and Tzolis ahead of him, drifting inside and attacking the half-spaces. Suddenly, the pitch looks more balanced.

Arsenal still want another attacking addition. They are not pretending otherwise. Eberechi Eze, for instance, can operate from the left and would offer a different profile.

If no sale materialises before the window shuts, Martinelli remains in the mix and can push Tzolis for minutes. A more progressive passer in midfield — someone like his Brazil team-mate Bruno Guimaraes — could yet help unlock Martinelli again.

But right now, the shirt is Tzolis’s to lose.

Not the marquee, but maybe the missing piece

This is not a rebuild centred around him. When Arsenal signed Tzolis, the plan was always to bring in a bigger, more headline-grabbing attacker alongside him. That ambition has not disappeared. It might still happen this month. It might be one for a future window.

If and when that arrives, Tzolis could find his role trimmed back. That is the reality at a club aiming to live permanently at the very top.

For the moment, though, he has turned a problem position into an opportunity.

Arsenal need almost all of their forwards to raise their levels if they are to defend their title. Tzolis is the exception. For him, simply repeating what he has done for the past year might be exactly what pushes them over the line again.