Arsenal Controlled the Ball, Betis Controlled the Scoreline in Dublin Defeat

Arsenal held 56.3% of the ball against Real Betis on Wednesday night and still went in at half-time three goals down. That gap between control and outcome is the story of a 1-3 pre-season defeat at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, one that left Mikel Arteta's players, in his own words, "fuming" - and left the manager trying to explain why a side that dominated territory looked so exposed at the back.

A friendly decided before half-time

Every goal in this match arrived before the break. Rodrigo Riquelme opened the scoring in the ninth minute, converting after second-choice goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga misjudged the flight of a Pablo Fornals corner and got stuck underneath the cross, leaving Riquelme unmarked at the back post. Nelson Deossa doubled the lead in the 26th minute with what BBC Sport described as "a superb strike", firing into the top corner from roughly 25 yards after a poor clearance from Kepa. Piero Hincapié pulled one back for Arsenal in the 32nd minute, heading in a Christos Tzolis corner after Betis keeper Alvaro Valles failed to deal with the set piece. In the 43rd minute, Fornals restored the two-goal cushion, rolling the ball into the corner after Kai Havertz misplaced a pass around the edge of the Arsenal box. Four goals, four separate breakdowns, all crammed into the first 43 minutes.

Nothing changed on the scoreboard after that. Arsenal made seven changes at the interval, the game lost its rhythm as substitutions piled up, and Betis - who made far fewer changes and kept most of their starting XI on the pitch - continued to look the more threatening side without adding to their tally.

The numbers Arteta will actually study

Arsenal finished with 593 passes to Betis's 462, and a pass accuracy of 91.7% against 88.1%. On any conventional reading of a match, that is a dominant performance. But shots on target tell a different story: Arsenal managed just two, Betis had seven. Arsenal's goalkeepers made four saves between them; Betis's kept only once. Betis also attempted more tackles than Arsenal (20 to 15) and made more clearances (19 to 11), even though Arsenal won a higher percentage of the tackles they made (66.7% to 40%) - a sign of a side repeatedly defending its own box rather than a side under siege.

Possession without penetration is a familiar pre-season pattern, but the shots-on-target gap is the clearer signal here. Arsenal moved the ball well enough to rack up a passing total, yet couldn't turn it into pressure that mattered, while Betis needed far fewer touches to create seven attempts on goal.

A starting XI missing its spine

Context matters, and Arsenal had plenty working against them. Declan Rice, Eberechi Eze, Noni Madueke and Bukayo Saka had still not rejoined the squad following England's World Cup campaign. Spain's World Cup winners Mikel Merino, David Raya and Martin Zubimendi were also still absent, while captain Martin Odegaard had only resumed individual training after playing for Norway in the tournament.

Even so, the side that started against Betis was not short of quality. Arteta named the same XI that had beaten Girona 4-1 the previous week in Spain: four international defenders, Ethan Nwaneri, Kai Havertz, summer signing Christos Tzolis and Max Dowman in midfield roles, with Viktor Gyokeres leading the line. It was a mistake-prone evening rather than a threadbare one.

Arteta's response: anger as a tool

Asked about the mood in the dressing room after a first half that produced three goals against his side, Arteta didn't dress it up. "Very upset, given a hard time," he said. "They are fuming, but this is good. That's what we need."

He also pointed to the scale of squad rotation as context for the result: "It's true we used 25 players, so you need to give a bit of context to the game." Arsenal's second-half changes included the first minutes of pre-season for Gabriel Martinelli and Gabriel Magalhães, both back in full training only the previous week after representing Brazil at the World Cup, plus appearances for 16-year-old Marli Salmon and 19-year-old Louie Copley - the latter withdrawn just seven minutes after coming on when he suffered a knee injury landing awkwardly.

Arteta's broader diagnosis focused on the first half specifically, when most of his first-choice players were still on the pitch, drawing a distinction between "how we played" and "how we competed". "The way we competed, especially in and around our box, in a number of standards that we are used to" fell short, he said, adding that a defeat "sometimes it's good to create even more fire in the belly."

What a friendly can and can't tell you

Pre-season results are not meant to carry weight, and Arsenal's manager is right that using 25 players against a Betis side that made far fewer changes skews any reading of the scoreline. But the individual errors behind each goal - a misjudged flight on a corner, a loose clearance, a misplaced pass under no obvious pressure - are the kind of moments Arsenal have spent recent seasons largely eliminating from their own box. Three of them arriving before half-time, against a Betis side returning to the Champions League after a 20-year absence under Manuel Pellegrini, is the detail Arteta will want gone before games start to count.

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Research: This article uses the archived evidence supplied for this story. Story inspiration: BBC Sport's original report.