Mikel Arteta applauded Arsenal’s resilience after their hard-fought victory over Brighton secured top spot in the Premier League at the end of 2025, despite a growing injury crisis threatening to derail their title push.
Arsenal’s preparations were disrupted when Dutch defender Jurrien Timber suffered an injury during Friday’s training session. The situation worsened shortly before kick-off as Italian full-back Riccardo Calafiori was forced out after picking up a knock in the warm-up. With Ben White and Cristhian Mosquera already unavailable, Arteta reshuffled his defence, handing Myles Lewis-Skelly a start at left-back while Declan Rice was deployed at right-back.
Arteta hailed his players’ response to adversity, saying:
“What I like is that we are having a lot of issues and we are dealing with it in an incredible way.
“Yesterday we lost Jurrien and today we lost Calafiori in the warm-up. Declan had to play right-back and you see the performance that he put in. That is the spirit and that is how much our players want it.”
The Arsenal boss also praised Rice’s attitude after being asked to play out of position:
“You speak to Declan and tell him he has to play there and he said, ‘Ok. I’m up for the challenge. I’m going to do my best’. That attitude is great to witness.”
Injuries have been a recurring issue for Arsenal over the past 18 months, though Gabriel Jesus has recently returned after almost a year out. Kai Havertz remains unavailable, but Gabriel Magalhães made his first appearance since early November when he came on as a second-half substitute.
Reflecting on the squad’s situation, Arteta said:
“At the moment we survive six months, so let’s see. There is another five and a half to go. Hopefully things will get better. We got Gabby back today earlier than expected.
“We can only control what we do, and we are doing a lot of good things. We need to do better to have a bigger margin and we need players back to make sure we can keep everyone fresh. Every three days is going to be a challenge.”
On the pitch, Arsenal dominated large spells of the match. Martin Ødegaard opened the scoring with his first goal of the season before Georginio Rutter’s own goal doubled the lead after the break. Brighton pulled one back through Diego Gomez, and David Raya was forced into a crucial late save from Yankuba Minteh to secure the win.
Arteta admitted the scoreline was tighter than it should have been:
“Very happy with the performance. We were so dominant, individually and collectively. We were a big threat but the margin of victory should have been much bigger.
“With the amount of situations and open chances that we generated, it should never have been 2-1. But that’s the Premier League.
“They scored with their first shot and then David has to make a great save. We all want to win so badly. We should have scored the third one and then it would have been different. We didn’t, so we had to suffer a little bit more.”
