Renee Slegers rarely deals in blunt assessments, but there was no dressing up Arsenal’s afternoon at the Etihad Stadium. Beaten 4-2 by a rampant Manchester City on Sunday, the Arsenal head coach was asked the question every supporter already knew the answer to: are her side still in the Women’s Super League title race. “At the moment we’re not in the title conversation, no,” she said. It was an honest answer, and also an alarming one for a club that spent the summer being talked about as City’s closest challenger.
Arsenal now sit tenth in the table, ten points adrift of a Manchester City side who have won all five of their league matches this season. One win, two draws and two defeats from five games is Arsenal’s worst start to a WSL campaign since 2014, a run that has turned what should have been a routine early season fixture at the home of the champions into the latest evidence of something more deeply wrong.
Two Leads Thrown Away at the Etihad
The scoreline flattered neither side’s defending, but it was Arsenal who will feel the greater pain, because this was not a game they were ever out of. Nineteen year old Lisa Baum, fast becoming one of the few bright spots in a difficult Arsenal season, fired the visitors ahead in the 43rd minute with a finish that replays suggested might have been marginally offside, though the goal was allowed to stand. City hit back almost immediately, Lauren Hemp converting in first half stoppage time after the ball deflected in off Emily Fox, with City controversially playing on through a passage of play in which Mariona Caldentey appeared to be down injured.
Arsenal responded again. Alessia Russo pounced four minutes into the second half after a mistake from City goalkeeper Ayaka Yamashita trying to play out from the back, restoring the lead and giving Arsenal every reason to believe they could see the game out. They could not. Kerstin Casparij, on the pitch for little more than a minute as a substitute, scored with her first touch in the 63rd minute to level the match again, and Hemp added her second with a fine finish in the 72nd. Bunny Shaw completed the rout in the 84th minute, turning a contest Arsenal had led twice into a comfortable away win for the champions.
It was, in other words, exactly the kind of collapse that has defined Arsenal’s start to the season. Slegers put it simply afterwards. “It’s been a lot of games where we feel like we have it and then we don’t,” she said. “We can’t concede four goals.”
Slegers Calls Time on the Excuses
What made Sunday notable was not just the result but the scale of the response it provoked from Slegers. Rather than pointing to fine margins, as she had after a 2-2 draw with Paris FC in the Champions League in midweek, in which Arsenal also surrendered a winning position, the head coach promised a thorough examination of how the club is operating behind the scenes. “There’s a lot to review,” she said. “How we’ve been doing things, from all aspects. Training programme, bigger things in the background.” It is not the language of a manager hunting for minor tactical tweaks. It is the language of someone who accepts the problem runs deeper than one bad afternoon at the Etihad.
The pattern she is trying to address is now unmistakable. Arsenal have shown repeatedly this season that they can produce the moments needed to win matches, through Baum’s emergence, Russo’s movement in behind, and spells of their old attacking fluency, but cannot protect those advantages once established. City’s own head coach, Andree Jeglertz, was generous in victory, saying he was “pretty sure in spring they will definitely be fighting about the title,” and praising Arsenal as “a great football team.” It was the kind of compliment that will have offered Slegers little comfort given how far back her side already are, and how little margin for error now exists if that spring prediction is to come true.
Board Support Does Not Erase the Scrutiny
Slegers has been careful not to frame this as a crisis of confidence in her own position, even as scrutiny has intensified around her. She has spoken of close and regular contact with senior figures at the club throughout the difficult start, describing a sense of “togetherness” and insisting she has “really felt their support.” Asked directly about the pressure on her job, she turned the question back on herself rather than the club. “I’m always putting pressure on myself,” she said, adding that her motivation comes from those closest to her and her own determination to see the team improve, not from any sense that her position is under immediate threat.
Whether that backing survives if results do not improve quickly is the question now hanging over Emirates Stadium. Arsenal’s next league fixtures after the international break will offer little room for further slippage given how far they already trail City, and Slegers has effectively staked her own credibility on the review she has promised producing visible change. For a club that ended last season talking about closing the gap on Manchester City, the task now is simply proving they still belong in the conversation at all.
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