UEFA have put dates and times to the eight, and it starts with the trip to Naples on Wednesday 9 September, 8pm.
The names were known last Thursday. What’s new is where they land, and the pinch points are ugly. Napoli falls three days after Chelsea at the Emirates and three days before Sunderland away, inside a stretch of five matches in fourteen days that also takes in the Carabao Cup tie at Ipswich and a trip to Brighton, all before the international break. Arteta will be rotating whether he wants to or not.
The other squeeze is late autumn. Lille at the Emirates on 13 October, then Bayern eight days after that, then Prague three weeks later. Dortmund come to north London on 24 November, and Real Madrid follow on 9 December, four days after Arsenal have been to Tottenham. Two of the four hardest fixtures sit inside a fortnight in the middle of the busiest month of the domestic season.
So it isn’t front-loaded, whatever the Napoli opener suggests. The genuinely difficult games are spread from matchday one to matchday six, with the heaviest concentration at the end of the calendar year rather than the start of it. What does fall kindly is the finish: Betis away on 20 January, where Héctor Bellerín awaits, and Sabah at home a week later to close it out. If Arsenal need points late to reach the top eight and skip the play-off round, those are the two you’d want. Whether two games is enough of a run to fix anything is another matter — better not to need it.
Quiet otherwise. Álvarez is where Friday left him, with Atlético’s Sunday deadline sitting over the weekend and nothing moving in either direction. Villa Park on Monday night is the next thing that counts.
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