Football is a team game and having a squad of players that will fight for each other and have the right blend of attacking and creative flair with a solidity in defence is hugely important to achieving success. That is even more true when you are looking at what it takes to win the long haul that is the race for the Premier League title.
Having said that, the ability and influence of individual players can be crucial as well, as can be clearly seen with even the biggest clubs in the world like Barcelona and Real Madrid, neither of which does half as well when they are missing their star men Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
After years of struggling financially and losing our best players to rival clubs, Arsenal are now building a very strong team and we have some exceptional players as well. Looking at the EPL stats on the Squawka.com website, you can see that the Gunners have three of the best players in the league in the key categories of scoring, assisting and tackling.
Alexis Sanchez is the joint second scorer in the league behind Leicester City´s Jamie Vardy and when you consider that the Arsenal forward only got going in recent weeks after looking jaded from his Copa America heroics and with Giroud, Walcott and others getting among the goals as well, Arsenal are looking super strong in this part of the game.
Then you have Mesut Ozil as the joint top assist maker with David Silva and a Metro report goes further by adding the amount of key passes and chances created to show the German is out on his own as the best number 10 in the Premier League right now.
The third category is called top tacklers and there is no Arsenal player on that front page, but when you look at the full ranking you will see Francis Coquelin at number nine. However, this is mainly because it is only the tackles that are used and it is a cumulative score with Coquelin having played a lot fewer minutes than the players above him.
When you add in the other factors like take ons and aerial duels to get the total, only the defenders Amavi of Aston Villa and Pieters of Stoke have more than the Gunners midfielder. And when you look at the success rate you see that Coquelin is winning a higher percentage of his tackles and take ons than any other.
The fourth category which does not have a chart on the website but is just as important is the goalkeeper so for good measure I used the Squawka stats comparison tool to compare the Arsenal number one with the other top performing keepers in the EPL; Boaz Myhill, Joe Hart, Hugo Lloris and Heurelho Gomes.
Guess what Gooners? That´s right, Cech comes out on top with a total score almost three times that of the West Brom player and almost twice that of the Man City man. He also makes more saves per goal than any of the others, so do these four stats show that Arsenal have the individuals as well as the whole team blend to power on and lift the Premier League trophy next May?